During my tenure as Director of Marketing for Charlotte Mecklenburg Library (2008-2018), we began gathering and tracking data about public perception as part of a larger survey of community residents conducted by one of our partners, Mecklenburg County.
We began asking residents to respond (on a scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree) to the following statements:
- The library is a top institution in the community.
- The library is a community champion for pre-K to 3rd grade literacy.
- The library is a community champion for equal access to digital resources and skills.
- The library is a community champion for equal access to resources citizens need to improve their lives.
These statements were crafted to measure public perceptions of the relevancy of the library as well as our role in addressing community challenges.
Once we received results from the first year, our Marketing & Communications team began aligning our communications plan with these measures. We created a measurable objective to increase the percentages, and began tailoring our strategies and tactics accordingly.
Since we could only repeat the survey once a year, it served as a “lagging indicator” of public perception, so we also began tracking “leading indicators” to inform our progress during the year. These included social media metrics, email open and click rates, web click-throughs and other means of measuring communication effectiveness. Our logic was that if we could increase the leading indicators, the lagging indicators would follow suit.
Four years after we began tracking responded to these statements, we saw a significant increase in positive perceptions. The most dramatic increase was the percentage of people who agreed with the statement “the library is a top institution in the community,” which grew from 85% in 2015 to 95% in 2018.
This increase was predicted by many of our leading indicators. For example, the publicity value of media coverage about the library increased from about $1 million in 2015 to $2.8 million in 2017 – in large part due to a partnership with a local TV station. Similarly, social media followership increased 75% during that same time period; and email clicks increased from an average of 78,000 per month to 88,000 per month from 2017 to 2018.
As part of my consulting work, I always encourage my clients to develop a list of leading and lagging indicators that they can use to evaluate their marketing and communications efforts. Even if you aren’t lucky enough to have a survey partner like we did, you can always conduct your own surveys. And you can certainly track leading indicators such as the ones I mentioned above.
Once you have your list, you can create a simple dashboard to track your key metrics. From there, you need to build in time to review your dashboard on a monthly basis to see how you’re doing. If you are not seeing an upward trend, you might need to try some different things. After all, a wise person once said to me, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
If you’re interested in learning more, please contact me or check out my website! I offer on-demand training on this topic, and I also cover it in my book. And, if you’re too busy to do this work yourself, I can do it for you! I’ve built marketing dashboards for a multitude of clients.
Cordelia Anderson Consulting 
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