From the Nominator

"The NYU Alumni Communications team set out to develop an infrastructure or tool to automatically and effectively measure original, repurposed, and shared content across several non-numeric KPIs, including themes, schools, decades, and other strategic indicators. Their goal was to inform Alumni Relations' content marketing; global identity, diversity, equity, belonging, and accessibility strategy; and overall engagement efforts through communications.

With the support of the Smartsheet platform, we created a dashboard that is fed directly from our existing content calendar in the same tool to measure the content we are producing and posting across these areas. The content calendar is where we plan and schedule all content that will be posted on our @NYUAlumni social channels and in our newsletters. For each piece of content, we note the content source, type, and channel; theme(s); schools and class years of alumni, students, and faculty represented; and demographic indicators from location to identity, if explicitly provided to us.   

By translating these indicators directly into a simple, easy-to-understand dashboard, we are able to measure alumni content to ensure it is representative of the NYU alumni community, can be used to better tell alumni stories, and can be used to align with other NYU alumni relations and annual giving initiatives. These insights have allowed us to set goals around our content strategy to reach alumni where they are, best utilizing our resources, and accurately represent and tell the stories of our diverse community."

From the Judges

This nomination really caught the panel's attention. It's impressive to see the efforts made by the NYU Alumni Communications team to build a system and tool for evaluating material according to different KPIs, using the Smartsheet platform to build a dashboard that receives data straight from their current content calendar. It matters what you measure! A novel strategy for assuring diversity in communications and encouraging content reuse. Excellent communications team insights and a very affordable pricing for help constructing this using an existing solution. A nice and innovative method of user behavior analysis. Good supporting material.