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20
Posted by nnlmneo on January 20th, 2017
Posted in: Blog
In my last post, I wrote about how to create social media outcomes for your organization. This week, we will take a look at writing objectives for your outcomes using the SMART method.
Though objectives and outcomes sound like the same thing, they are two different concepts in your evaluation plan – outcomes are the big ideas, while objectives relate to the specifics. Read Karen’s post to find out more about what outcomes and objectives are.
In the book Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, by Beth Kanter and Katie Delahaye Paine, they talk a lot about SMART objectives. We have not covered these types of objectives on the blog, so I thought this would be a good time to introduce this type of objective building. According to the book, a SMART objective is “specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely” (Kanter and Paine 47). There are many variations on this definition, so we will use my favorite: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
Specific: Leave the big picture for your outcomes. Use the 5 W’s (who, what, when, where, and why) to help craft this portion
Measurable: If you can’t measure it, how will you know you’ve actually achieved what you set out to do?
Attainable: Don’t make you objectives impossible. It’s not productive (or fun) to create objectives that you know you cannot reach. Understand what your community needs, and involve stakeholders.
Relevant: Is your community on Twitter? Create a Twitter account. Do they avoid Twitter? Don’t make a Twitter account. Use the tools that are relevant to the community that you serve.
Timely: Set a time frame for your objectives and outcomes, or your project might take too long for it to be relevant to your community. Time is also money, so create a deadline for your project so that you do not waste resources on a lackluster project.
As an example, let’s return to NEO’s favorite hypothetical town of Sunnydale to see how they added social media objectives into their Dusk to Dawn program. To refresh your memory, read this post from last September about Sunnydale’s Evaluation Plan.
Sunnydale librarians know that their vampire population uses Twitter on a daily basis for many reasons – meeting new vampires, suggesting favorite vampire friendly night clubs, and even engaging the library with general reference questions. Librarians came up with the idea to use the hashtag #dusk2dawn in all of their promotional materials about the health program Dusk to Dawn. Their thinking was it would help increase awareness of their objectives of 4 evening classes on MedlinePlus and PubMed, which in turn would support the outcomes “Increased ability of the Internet-using Sunnydale vampires to research needed health information” and “These vampires will use their increased skills to research health information for their brood.”
With that in mind, let’s make a SMART objective for this hashtag’s usage:
Specific
We will plug in what we have so far into the Specific section:
Vampires (who) in Sunnydale (where) will show an increase in awareness of health-related events hosted by the library (what) by retweeting the hashtag #dusk2dawn (why) for the duration of the Dusk to Dawn program (when).
Measurable
Measurable is probably the hardest part. What kind of metrics will Sunnydale librarians use to measure hashtag usage? How will they do it?
The social media librarian will manually monitor the hashtag’s usage by setting up an alert for its usage on TweetDeck. Each time the hashtag is used by a non-librarian in reference to the Sunnydale Library, the librarian will copy the tweet’s content to a spreadsheet, adding signifiers if it is a positive or negative tweet.
Attainable
Can our objective be reached? What is it about vampires in Sunnydale that makes this hashtag monitoring possible?
We know from polling and experience that our community likes using Twitter – specifically, they regularly engage with us on this platform. Having a dedicated hashtag for our overall program is a natural progression for us and our community.
Relevant
How does the hashtag #dusk2dawn contribute to the overall Dusk to Dawn mission?
An increase in usage of the hashtag #dusk2dawn will show that our community is actively talking about, hopefully in a positive way. This should increase awareness of our program’s objectives of 4 evening classes on MedlinePlus and PubMed, which in turn would support the outcomes “Increased ability of the Internet-using Sunnydale vampires to research needed health information” and “These vampires will use their increased skills to research health information for their brood.”
Timely
How long should it take for the vampires to increase their awareness of our program’s objectives?
There should be an upward trend in awareness over the course of the program. We have 7 months before we are reevaluating the whole Dusk to Dawn program, so we will set 7 months as our deadline for increased hashtag usage.
SMART!
Now, we put it all together to get:
Vampires in Sunnyvale will show an increase in awareness of health-related events hosted by the library, indicated by a 15% increase of the hashtag #dusk2dawn by Sunnydale vampires for the duration of the Dusk to Dawn program.
Though this objective is SMART, it is certainly will not work in every library. Perhaps the community your library serves does not use Twitter to connect with the library, or you do not have enough people on staff to monitor the hashtag’s usage. If you make a SMART objective that will be relevant to your community, it will have a better chance to succeed.
Here at NEO, we usually do not use SMART objectives method, but rather Measurable Outcome Objectives. Step 3 on the Evaluation Resources page points to many different resources on our website that talk about Measurable Objectives. Try both out, and see what works for your organization.
We will be taking a break from social media evaluation and goal setting for a few weeks. Next time we talk about social media, we will show our very own social media evaluation plan!
Find more information about SMART objectives here:
Let me know if you have any questions or comments about this post! Comment on Facebook and Twitter, or email me at kalyna@uw.edu.
Image credits: Christopher Walken Fever Meme made by Kalyna Durbak on ImgFlip.com. Success Kid meme is from Know Your Meme.
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