Data Analytics: A Diagnostic Checklist

A healthy set of data analytics can help you gain insight and draw conclusions from your audience, as well as give you valuable information about your organisation’s own performance across its digital offering. Ask yourself the following diagnostic questions to understand how your organisation is approaching data analytics.

Systems and Platforms

• What systems/platforms do you currently use to collect data? For example
  • Google Analytics for website data
  • Facebook insights for social engagement
  • Mailchimp for email newsletters
  • Ticketing systems for event sales
  • Online surveys
• Who has access to these accounts?
  • Who is the administrator of each account and is your organisation the account owner? If the account belongs to you, rather than an agency or freelancer, you should have complete control over who has access to this data.
  • Do you regularly review who has access? e.g. When staff leave the organisation
• Are your systems interlinked? For example:
  • Can you report on the effectiveness and return on investment of an email campaign?
  • Can you identify what a user did on your website after clicking a specific post on social media?

Data Accuracy

• What do you do to ensure the accuracy of collected data?
  • Do you have a process for auditing this?
  • How often do you do it?
  • Are your staff aware of the consequences that inaccurate data can have on them, the organisation, and your clients?
  • How do you ensure that collected data can be as accurate as possible from the start of the process?

Reporting

• How do you report on the collected data?
  • Who do you share this with?
  • Who are the internal and external stakeholders?
  •  Are there different reporting requirements for different audiences?
• How regularly do you review collected data?
• Have you defined specific digital objectives?
  • How are these tracked?
  • Have you set targets against these objectives?
  • What is the timeline for these?
• Do you survey your audience on and offline?
  • Surveys are useful to understand your users, their behaviours and identify any pressure points:
  • Why did they choose to come to your event?
  • Did they have any difficulties using your website?
  • What could be improved?
  • You may also be using survey data to understand your audiences. What tools do you use for this? e.g. HotJar, SurveyMonkey
• How do you use reporting to inform your future activity and your wider strategy?
  • Does this insight change the marketing channels you use, help plan and focus website developments, and identify other opportunities?
  • How do you feed the reporting back into your ongoing feedback loop and strategy development?

Legislation

• Are you aware of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements?
  • Is this awareness shared across the organisation or just with key individuals? Why is it useful to have an organisational-wide understanding?
  • Are you aware of and do you have a process to deal with data breaches?
• Do you have a Privacy Policy?
  • A Privacy Policy is not only the legally required document to disclose your practices on protecting personal information, but it’s also a great way to show users that you can be trusted, and that you have procedures in place to handle their personal information with care.
• Do you have a Cookie Policy?
  • A Cookie Policy outlines what information you are collecting about your users and why. It should also contain clear instructions on how they can opt out and manage their preferences.

What next?

This checklist should help you start to think about the systems and processes you have in place for data collection in your organisation. If you are unfamiliar with GDPR and Cookie Law, we suggest some further reading. To learn more, you can read one of the articles linked below.

The Digital Culture Network is here to support you and your organisation. Our Tech Champions can provide free 1-2-1 support to all arts and cultural organisations who are in receipt of, or eligible for, Arts Council England funding. If you need help or would like to chat with us about any of the advice we have covered above, please get in touch. Sign up to our newsletter below and follow us on Twitter @ace_dcn for the latest updates.