Can You Really Measure Soft Fluffy Engagement?
Metrics sometimes worry me.🧐 There’s the adage that we start optimizing for whatever we measure. If weight loss is the measure for being more healthy, we can calorie restrict our way to a slim waistline and inadvertently lose a ton of muscle mass.
There is a similar dynamic in organizations. Chasing profits often means cost-cutting, which eventually, over the years, degrades the quality. (If some of your favorite brands don’t seem as good as they were a decade ago—you are right. They are not. Each year there’s a cost-cutting effort resulting in an infinitesimal change in the quality year to year, but 5 or 10 years of nearly unnoticeable changes add up to a significant overall decline.) Sales is another big measurement, but aggressively chasing sales can result in slimy tactics which make customers feel had.
How, then, should we measure engagement?
Overall, strong engagement does mean more purchases of all kinds (membership, products, events, etc.), which we can easily measure. Engaged people also want to get involved, so they participate, attend, and volunteer. But we could also use anti-engaging tactics to increase any of these metrics in the short term. Perhaps quantitative measurements are best used as indirect indicators of engagement.
The more I talk to members about engagement, the more I realize engagement is in the eye of the beholder. It’s a feeling our members have. The buying, participating, and leading are a result of the feeling of engagement.
So how do we measure engagement? Or how do we measure the strategies and tactics likely to increase engagement?
Questions like these will help us get closer:
Are we creating an environment where people want to participate?
Do first-timers wish to become involved?
Is the sense of belonging increasing?
Are people making friends?
Is community energy high?
I suspect that the engagement measurements of the future may be more similar to a happiness index rather than our usual dollars and cents metrics.
