dana p

Building at work 

Dec 2021 

Challenge


In Aug 2021, I was asked to provide an update to management about social media performance since the last update, which was exactly a year before. Like a good archivist, I dug back and found the deck, complete with graphs and charts, and an excel file for post data in 2020 — from way before I started. A few things surprised and confused me:

  1. Messy data and documentation: Data downloaded from Meta Business Suite was all over the place in a Gdrive.  
  2. Statistical confusion: Legacy documentation that combined mean with percentile data
  3. Poor documentation and inability to make comparisons across years and hard to get information from before I joined
  4. Reliance on Google Docs, without taking advantage of other GSuite tools

Besides being administrative headaches, these problems and pain points made remote collaboration and hand-overs more difficult. I was determined to take the time to build a more efficient system so that all the data will be put into one place, and so that it would be transparent and clear to the entire team, and to new members, what everything refers to. This will improve onboarding for new members and hand-offs when existing members leave the team. Over the next few months I:
  • Advocated for new performance benchmarks.
  • Built a repository for social media data.

Solution: Data dashboard and new performance benchmarks

The dashboard took me several iterations (hence the 2.0 in the title) to pull together. I had to:

  1. Program a default setting for downloading Facebook’s Insights that matched the benchmarks were wanted to use, namely Total Reach, Paid Reach, Organic Reach, and Engagements (likes, shares, comments … the lot … as well as clicks).
  2. Spend time downloading the .csv files all the way from 2018, and clean the data, before importing them into the data dashboard In the earlier years there is a lot of missing data, but I’m not sure why.
  3. Build a wayfinder for other team members to use the dashboard.
  4. Build individual year-specific sheets, as well as a dashboard that gives an overview of the data and benchmarks — namely best performing, worst performing, and the mean.


Outcomes!


This made monthly post-performance reports so much easier — what took at least a few hours to pull together manually could now be done in thirty minutes, tops.



Feedback from my team 


I could now benchmark monthly post statistics against an average from the previous year 🙂


More problems to solve 😀


After that, I looked around for more projects to work on to improve efficiency. That’s when I decided to work on building a new content calendar for my team. I originally thought of using Notion, but I wanted to set constraints to use a system that everyone was already familiar with — hence I went with seeing what I could do with Google Sheets.

The existing format of our content calendar (a set of tables on Google Docs) didn’t promote collaboration, and team members found it hard to move things around and track responsibilities and timelines. But nobody had done anything about it.



Original content calendars built using Google Docs. The line breaks made it hard to follow and users had to scroll a lot. The colour-coding system also was quite nebulous.

Solution: Content Calendar




‘Features’ I included:
  • Calendar templates that could be easily populated in under a minute, with colour-coded rows for each platform — this is important as one major pain point that team members and our editorial consultant mentioned about our previous content calendar was that it was hard to see what’s meant for Facebook and what’s meant for Instagram.
  • Conditional formatting to change the colour of the cells — typing “done” will turn a cell green, and “drafting” will turn a cell yellow — to allow easier tracking of posts and delegation of responsibilities amongst writers.

Iterating


Things I realised from watching my team members collaborate on this content calendar
  • Comments were really useful in helping us communicate with one another



‘Features’ I included:
  • Notetaking template for editorial meetings, which allows anyone on the team to record key points of discussion, as well as add onto the existing content ideas.

Reflections several months on:


I started this project to improve efficiency on the side. But this was also where I started to realise how much I like solving real problems and building things that people can use, and to see people using them. And most of all to make their lives easier and their work a little bit simpler. 🙂 I also loved the process of getting feedback from my team. And it was really gratifying to see people collaborate much better with the new content calendar and the data dashboard. I could see us working much faster, and it was clear to everyone who was doing what, and our content roadmap.

It’s also clear to be though that as users interact with the product, you start to see ways that it can be better. The process of designing something is endlessly iterative, and there is a humility in that — to recognise that things are never finished. For instance, on the data dashboard, I’m currently working on putting Instagram data into the dashboard.