Build a Constituent-Centric Data Strategy

Learning Objectives:

After completing this unit you will be able to:

• Outline a constituent-centric data strategy plan for your institution.
• Understand the best practices for maintaining a constituent-centric data strategy.

If you’ve followed along with the pre-work in the past two units, you’ve made great strides in planning your constituent-centric data strategy. Here’s a recap of some of the foundational tasks you’ve completed so far.

• Applied the data security model to your current data processes
• Identified your data sources and prepared for integrations
• Assessed your data quality
• Defined personas for constituents at all stages of the constituent lifecycle
• Mapped constituent journeys to existing business processes

This is amazing work! The insights you gain from doing this intentional discovery and documentation about your institution’s data and constituents will be very valuable as you move forward to build your data strategy. Let’s keep going and explore your institution’s unique goals for data strategy.

Identify Your Data Strategy Goals

It’s important to make sure your data strategy is anchored to specific, overarching goals for your institution. During a data strategy planning meeting at (fictional) Cloudy College, each department rep shared their team’s number one priority. 

• Recruitment and Admissions wants to increase awareness of Cloudy College among prospective students.
• Student Experience wants to improve student and parent engagement with the institution’s existing resources.
• Advancement wants to create better alignment between the institution’s mission and their corporate relationships in order to increase engagement with their alumni base.
• Institution Operations wants to standardize processes and streamline the flow of information.

If you’re having trouble identifying your goals, consider looking at your institution’s overall mission statement and values. You can also refer to your department’s metrics — what are you required to do each semester or academic year? How is your job evaluated? 

Remember that Cloudy College has committed to implementing a constituent-centric data strategy, so their goals focus on the constituent experience. We highly recommend this approach.

One other tip: make sure to choose goals that are feasible! In just a moment we explain that iteration is a key part of data strategy. You can always add complexity to your goals in the future. Build momentum by selecting initial goals that are achievable in order to set up yourself and your collaborators for success.

Choose a Starting Point

Once you’ve established your goals, choose a starting point to begin working towards each one. Ask yourself these questions:

• What’s most important?
• What tasks are “low-hanging fruit” and could provide a quick win?

You don’t want to avoid the difficult or complex issues, but sometimes you can make surprising progress with something simple like eliminating a couple of duplicative spreadsheets. Try to identify these small, lower effort tasks and prioritize them to create momentum.

The Cloudy College student experience team has a great example of a quick win. Their goal is to increase student engagement with existing campus resources. One of the reasons the team set this goal is because appointment scheduling issues came up consistently in student interviews, and staff found the process surprisingly confusing when they tested this constituent touchpoint. They noticed that it was difficult to find the button to schedule an appointment with an advisor.

To address this constituent need, the team wants to move the button to feature it more prominently on the student community page. When they discuss this in a planning meeting with Nina, Cloudy College’s Salesforce Admin, she confirms that this is a simple thing to do in Experience Builder. It’s a small change that will have a big impact.

Measure Your Success

Data strategy is a journey, not a destination. As you continue along the path, you will need to measure your success to see what’s working and what you might need to tweak. Identify metrics at the beginning of your strategy building to get an accurate progress report later.

What are these metrics we speak of? Metrics are specific targets to help you measure whether you are achieving your overarching goal. When setting your metrics, prioritize feasibility and specificity. Start by identifying the two or three most important metrics for each goal. Then, get as specific as possible about what you want to measure. This will make it easier to determine if you’re getting where you want to be. Here are the metrics Cloudy College settled on for each of their team’s goals.

Check in on your metrics regularly (perhaps once a semester, once a quarter, or once a year). You may have metrics that require you to check in more or less frequently so don’t feel like it has to be one-size-fits-all.

Iterate and Refresh

Like we mentioned just a moment ago, this data strategy thing is a journey! You will continue to adjust your metrics as needed to make sure you’re capturing worthwhile information.

If upon check-in you find your metrics are appropriate, but the results aren’t what you hoped, re-evaluate your methods and adjust accordingly. Keep track of individual efforts as well as larger metrics so that you are able to identify what is and isn’t working on a smaller scale. That way you won’t have to start from scratch every time your goal isn’t met.

The Cloudy College advancement team did a lot of outreach to address its key metrics: the number of alums belonging to the Alumni Association and the number of alums volunteering on campus. The team sent emails, hosted events, sent out brochures, and had alumni affairs team members personally call some alums. In assessing the impact of these efforts, the team noted that the emails got very little response, with the exception of one or two that performed well. Alumni did not respond positively to one-on-one calls. On the other hand, event attendance was consistently strong. As a result, next year the Cloudy advancement team will adjust their strategy to host more events, discontinue the phone calls, and send fewer, more targeted emails. These are data-driven decisions that help streamline staff efforts and improve the constituent experience for Cloudy alums. That’s data strategy in action, folks!

Stakeholders like Salesforce Admin Nina are thrilled with the progress they’re seeing as a thoughtful, constituent-centric data strategy is implemented on campus. In addition to helping the institution accomplish its goals, Cloudy’s data strategy is also bringing to light areas for improvement.

Keep going to the next unit to learn how to use insights from your data strategy to address constituent pain points and better predict and overcome roadblocks.

Resources

• Trailhead: Customer-Centric Data Strategies
• Trailhead: User Adoption Metrics