Grassroots Activism has Transformed my View on Data
If you asked everyone I’ve worked with recently they would probably all say one thing about me — I love data.
I love data so much I have a mug about it from my early career as an economist.
So you can understand the identity crisis I had last year when my whole worldview of data changed.
Data and Analytics in an Agency World
For those that don’t know, my second career was as a marketer. Between 2013 and 2019 I worked in a predominantly agency world, culminating in co-founding an ethical marketing agency myself.
My data and analytics model was a steadily improved version of the same thing.
- Every month, download all the data from all clients’ social media account, website and newsletters onto a mammoth spreadsheet. This sounds like it might take ages but as already covered my mug gives me superpowers and the payoff was worth it anyway.
- Every 3, 6 or 12 months, depending on the project, analyse this data based on targets set.
- Produce a report for the client, usually with graphs that auto-filled themselves whenever a new month was entered into the spreadsheet. Cool huh?
These spreadsheets and presentations really were all bells and whistles because I love working with data — there is a certain comfort in knowing “for a fact” how you’ve performed.
What’s more, clients lapped it up. There is nothing more satisfying than a chart in your brand’s colours that goes in the right direction.
Perhaps you spotted an issue with the graph above (if not, check the left hand axis). We all know data can be manipulated and this is a very visible example, but in the world of marketing — whether to sell cars, get bitcoin investors, or stop climate change — most versions of this manipulation are far less subtle. The most frequent tend to be around the targets you set in the first place.
For example, I would see many agencies proposing that a brand only reached 300,000 accounts last year, but they could raise this to 1.5 million this year. Sounds very impressive until we realise that 50–75% of this strategy involves social media or display advertising, which in 2021 is of questionable real value. These days, in most contexts, social media impressions are as much of a vanity metric as social media followers. If not targeted properly, reach of your idea or product does not results in conversion (sales, sign ups, donations, whatever you’re actually looking for).
Because digital marketing is ever shifting it’s very easy to appear to deliver value but not, in actuality, deliver that much at all. As a marketer it was my responsibility to build trust with clients steer away from this kind of behaviour. But to be honest, I found myself doing it sometimes. In the agency world there is this motto “the client knows best”, i.e. “just do what they say, even if it’s not good for them”. And it’s true, if the person paying you is too vain to recognise their targets are unhelpful, you have a choice to lose the work, or do the best you can under those conditions. This created a world where your reports were sometimes all bells and whistles spreadsheets, graphs that go weee!, sexy brand colours and impressive sounding jargon. To be honest I loved it, and I did my best to ignore the implications.
Data and Analytics in a Grassroots World
In late 2019 I made a very tough decision; I walked away from the agency I co-founded. It’s a story for another post, but in brief, I wanted to pursue more grassroots activism.
What do I mean by grassroots activism. In this context I’m referring to projects where the supporter base their willingness to get involved massively outstrips the financial resource available for the cause. This doesn’t mean low to no financial resource, just that strategically you want to focus on that base of people as a way to achieve your goals.
Two campaigns I currently work on are great examples: Make Votes Matter, the campaign to get a fairer voting system for UK General Elections and Stop Funding Heat — the campaign to de-fund climate denial in the media. While there is some money flowing around these campaigns, they both punch way above their financial clout. Their successes are mainly thanks to the passion of the people that run or support them.
Working in this people-first style of environment has totally transformed my view of data. General strategic chat tends to be “how many volunteers are currently active?”, “do we have any big interventions that will make us impossible to ignore?”, and “what are our supporters saying about us online?” Note that none of these metrics ever appeared on my agency spreadsheets.
Because these organisations are single-issue campaigns their best case scenario is when they no longer need to exist. So work is laser-focused on the ultimate goal, not vanity metrics along the way. And because they rely so much on people power, they are necessarily human-centric.
My data sheets — which I still selectively produce — can and have really helped strategic discussions. My interventions offer genuine insight as to what is and isn’t working. But throughout 2020 I was forced to truly inspect the value of the data I’m collecting and analysing. Who really cares how many net new followers we have on Twitter when the algorithms will spread high quality content regardless? What good is a rate of engagement on Instagram when the majority of our activist reach occurs on Stories, a medium that you cannot measure engagement on?
This need to focus really came as a shock to me, because I had been trained around this idea of “what looks impressive is impressive” and “more is more”. But on the other hand, I felt like my contributions were steadily becoming more valuable than ever before.
The Data Epiphany — My Mental Health Represented In A Humble Retweet
This all culminated at the start of this month, January 2021, when I looked back at my own social media activity from 2020. (It’s not my fault I swear, the mug makes me do it).
I was anticipating a sad couple of hours because I had already noticed my Twitter followers flatlined in 2020; nobody seemed to engage with my tweets; and the reach of my average LinkedIn post steadily decreased month by month.
Turns out … 2020 was my best year yet.
When I looked past the vanity metrics — likes, retweets, impressions, etc. — I noticed my click rate to articles I posted on both Twitter and LinkedIn was higher than ever before. My Twitter followers may have flatlined, but I ended the year with more verified accounts following me, and far more relevant accounts following me than the previous year.
And when I thought about it, why do I need thousands of people to see my LinkedIn posts anyway? Isn’t it more important that the right people see it so I can continue building my network? And then there’s my articles — I hadn’t published anything for 6 years; surely getting back into writing deserved a pat on the back, even if there’s no visualisation that makes it look satisfying?
Turns out I had fallen foul of the same thing my agency clients often did. I was focusing on the things that would make me feel justified in my work, make me feel better. I guess this is so much easier to do when it’s your own love and labour at stake.
Do Data, But Do It Properly
So, some advice on how to do your data collection and analysis this year — whether you’re in a grassroots organisation, an agency or otherwise:
- It’s still worth collecting data, but as always set clear targets first.
- I find it’s best to set fewer but more meaningful targets. It’s better to spend 2 hours analysing the change in the sentiment on your channels than 2 hours analysing 10 different vanity metrics that mean nothing at all.
- Do some emotional work around the targets you set. That’s right, I said the word emotional during an article on data. Seriously, ask yourself or your team, is this target really for the aims of the project, or is it there to satisfy a human that needs placating (whether that’s you, your team, your client, etc)
- As my father always says, shift happens. Don’t be afraid to change targets, but don’t change them all the time either. I find 6–12 month targets with a flexibility to change them after 3 months is acceptable.
As for me, I still and probably always will identify with my love of data. That identity has helped me realise how happy I am working on these single-issue, grassroots campaigns. They have a kind of focus that’s good for my motivation and gives me a feeling of joy. It’s helping me discover a more humane way of doing work. I find myself asking, why can’t more of the world’s projects be like this?
