NRECA: Unlocking the power of data
What we created
The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) is a service organization that provides a unified voice for cooperatives and represents their interests in Washington, DC. Through two collaborative workshops, we provided NRECA support, intended to help unblock progress surrounding content performance reporting. In our first workshop, we helped NRECA determine what they wanted in regard to potential dashboard features and best practices. We also highlighted the key performance indicators that NRECA stakeholders want easy access to viewing, based on key metrics for their strategic goals.
Then in our second workshop, we got into the “nuts and bolts” of how to best make data available to Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager and the role that it would need to play in data processing and cleansing. We closed the workshop with a dashboard engineering playground that explored analytics reporting features and their strengths and weaknesses.
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The challenge
User Experience Documentation
Documenting user experience is a useful way to intentionally set, pursue, and evaluate outcomes desired by NRECA and their audiences.
Defining Audience Goals
Learning more about the audiences coming to NRECA’s website will increase audience engagement and traffic.
Audience Taxonomy
Grouping audience engagement data by taxonomy helps NRECA understand member intent and their interests.
Context vs. Interaction
Understanding the difference between context and interaction and developing a strategy of knowing when to implement them.
Our approach
Micro Data Strategy Workshops
We provided NRECA with live consultation on analytics system configuration and reporting. Our consultations reoriented their team to establish goals, explored current blockers, and necessary changes in regards to data collection and data reporting systems. Our data capture approach enabled NRECA’s content management system to push values and the Google Tag Manager elements manage and process.
Unlocking the value
dataLayer
The dataLayer allows the developer to avoid unreliable methods of extracting data from a webpage by directly specifying the data that the analyst wants to gather on the page being viewed by the user.
Social Media Intelligence Dashboard
We introduced a new reporting platform with tips and techniques for curating data. This reporting platform will define the relationship between social media channels and traffic to their website.
Analytics Framework
A prescription for data collection and reporting needs that prescribes changes and additions to data collection practices, a report design plan that describes the reports NRECA needs, and a backlog of tasks needed to implement these recommendations.
Audience Segments
Audience segments allow NRECA to compare performance between groups and identify how certain groups arrive on their website and see if the information is available.