Working Backwards to Move Forward

Now back to my report. It was great! — for me. For my audience, not so much. The data was unorganized and conclusions couldn’t be made without asking me for assistance. After a few days of back and forth we came up with a good starter template to make the data easier to read. Here are three things I learned in the process:

Looking back, I realized I didn’t think about what my audience (in this case my boss) would want to know most about the campaign. Since most of my day involves managing the CodeNewbie social media accounts, that’s where I naturally focused the majority of my attention. A lot of the report consisted of stats for post engagement and how many people joined after seeing those posts, but it lacked underlying information she wanted to see such as the reach of the posts compared to how many people joined. This went for email as well. I focused more on clicks instead of signups and, for email, had to search through the data when asked how the open rates compared to sign ups.

Once I had a good idea of what information was important to the report’s audience, I needed to find a way to organize it so that she could easily form her own conclusions. To do this I needed to simplify the data and figure out what I was truly comparing on a high level. It sounds easy enough, but several times I found myself trying to compare things that weren’t apples to apples or duplicated similar concepts. In the end, I started with the high level concept of #CNC2018 Round 2 Participants, split them into two groups, those from Round 1 and those not from Round 1, then by challenge (Start Coding, Code More, Blog More, and Get A Job), and so on. For every level, I made sure that it could relate to all Round 2 participants, and not just a segment of them.

This was my biggest takeaway from revising my report. After I knew what information my audience wanted and figured out a way to better organize the data, more questions popped up! I realized that I couldn’t accurately come to certain conclusions about the campaign because the tools I used to prepare for the campaign, weren’t setup to collect the right data. One of the questions we wanted to answer was, “How many people signed up for each challenge through Twitter?” While I knew how many people were sent to the #CNC2018 homepage as well as what percentage of those people actually signed up, I had no idea what they signed up for. My system wasn’t setup to collect that information. In the process of organizing the data, other issues in how I setup the data revealed themselves. When constructing a marketing campaign I know now to start with creating a template to structure the data we’ll collect in order to catch things I might have missed in the initial planning phase.

Creating this report and then trying to improve it was quite a challenge. I had many moments of frustration and I questioned my intelligence a few times more than I’d like to admit. But my boss Saron reminded me of a very important thing that allowed me to push forward. I’m learning. I am a Data Science CodeNewbie, I don’t know everything, and that’s okay. I’m sure I’ll look at the new report I made months from now, maybe even a few weeks, and see all the things I could have done better. In order to get to that point though, I have to keep trying and keep improving. And if you’re a fellow CodeNewbie, I hope that you’ll do the same.

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