How to report on the impact of digital communication activity

Our downloadable template for reporting on your social and digital KPIs aims to make it easy to pull together a dashboard that answers the questions senior leaders have about digital communication effectiveness.

Analysing and reporting on your digital communications activity is important: it helps you focus your effort, keep colleagues informed and encourages them to ask the right questions. But if you’re a busy, small team, it can feel like an extra commitment.

How should I report on our social media KPIs?

Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook offer lots of statistics about the engagement with your content posted there. But these easily-accessible numbers don’t tell the whole story. Sure, you might have X followers or Y engagements, but what does it mean? Have you achieved something purposeful and aligned to your organisation’s strategic objectives?

The best approach is to balance easily-accessible data, honest reflection and learning, and clear objectives. So, don’t just share raw numbers from your social media management tools or try to paint a purely positive picture of your work. A good template blends:

  1. Summary context: what’s been going on recently and which aspects are most important
  2. Trend data: how things are changing
  3. Comparison data: how we’re doing vs other organisations or teams
  4. Reflection: what we’ve learned and how we’re adapting

How can I keep management informed about digital activity?

We’ve shared an example of a simple template here designed around an organisation’s core objectives. This template is designed to give senior colleagues around the organisation confidence that:

  • digital activity is aligned with communications objectives, and that those objectives are aligned to the strategic goals of the organisation
  • the team is maintaining momentum, sharing highlights of useful recent outputs
  • the team is learning from and applying feedback to future activity, so it gets better over time

How to start reporting on your social media effectiveness

  1. Click on the example below to download a simple reporting template.
  2. Adjust the labels on the boxes to reflect your communications priorities
  3. Think about the data sources you have easy access to
  4. Drop in screenshots or highlights from those sources, along with a brief summary sentence to give context

Download template in PPTX format (1.2MB)

Find out more about developing a practical digital communication strategy in your organisation.