Hunt Adkins
Evaluation of Digital Presence
April 2017
Methods Used
Research Design, Data Analysis, Content Auditing, Competitive Analysis, Key Insights/Recommendations
Sample of final report
The director of the digital strategy at Hunt Adkins had been wanting to find a way to encourage agency directors to increase their digital presence. As an intern within digital strategy and research, I was asked to design and perform an evaluation that would act as a tool for discussion and encouragement.
The evaluation first and foremost needed to gauge the digital presence/engagement of the directors in an objective way. This required identifying and translating standards that provided criteria. To provide further encouragement and inspiration, each director had three counterparts, local, national, international, with which their presence/engagement was compared to.
The parameters for evaluating social engagement were modeled after the Six 'C's of Community Engagement, basic principles for community engagement introduced in 1994 by Juanita Brown and David Issacs. I translated each principle of community engagement to social media engagement. Each principle was then given five sub-criteria, scored 0-2. Each of the seven directors had three competitive counterparts that were analyzed (one local, one from another comparable agency, and one from a large agency). The director and I decided on three primary social accounts to analyze (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) as well as considered a higher engagement for any other industry relevant accounts that were present.
Once both the criteria and full list of people to be evaluated were formalized, the remaining steps were to perform the evaluation, do rough analysis, and construct a presentation that would be able to be both presented as well as easily referenced by the director later.
Example Evaluation Translation and Criteria from the 6 'C' Principles
Capability
Brown and Issacs Definition: Members are capable of dialogue.
Translated: Displays capability of establishing and maintain a digital and social fluency through dialogue choices.
Sample of Sub Criteria: Social profiles unlocked and viewable, Engages with personal and professional industry dialogue, Content shared is strategically relevant and optimized for chosen platform.
While this evaluation is furthest of all my examples from work in user and design research, I include it because it was a project that taught me research design, instrumentation, and the ability to handle large amounts of complex and confusing data on my own.
Additionally, the deliverables of this project, as well as most I experienced during my time in digital strategy, taught me invaluable skills in presentation and communication. I had come from a design and communications background but this project was the first that taught me the ability to formally and beautifully present the research process, findings, and actionable steps and strategy.