Quick! Show Me Your Value

Let ‚ s Review:

• Delivering your intervention changes your audience ‚ s expectations of the value you communicate. Prior to delivery, you could communicate in terms of future expectations. After delivery of your intervention, you need to prove that you have delivered what you promised .

• Levels of evaluation data were presented as level 1 (reaction), level 2 (learning), level 3 (behavior), level 4 (results), and level 5 (ROI).

• Each level of your audience needs to hear different types of evaluation data. Individuals need to hear reaction and learning data to find value. The 1st/Ops level needs to hear behavior data. The Mid level needs to hear results and ROI data. The data needed for one type of audience is a given for the next level up of your audience.

• For Senior management, the initial proof of ROI and learning how to reliably measure and control ROI from WLP interventions creates delight. Once this ability is proven, however, results and ROI become givens. Senior management needs optimization data in terms of ever-increasing effectiveness and efficiency.

• Effectiveness was further defined in terms of penetration (how much of the total number of participants in an intervention actually provided financial return), sustainability (whether those participants were able to continue to provide financial return indefinitely or for a long enough period of time), and speed (how fast the organization was able to obtain financial benefit).

• It is important to always be selling the idea that the organization needs good evaluation data.

• If you are having trouble getting enough evaluation data, some ways to make your task easier are to focus your efforts, start with a rough guess, start small and build up, arrange for a continuous flow of feedback, position your data gathering as an experiment, or ask how your client will prove the intervention ‚ s value to managers.

Now that you understand how you should approach and align the worth of what you do to the organizational level you are trying to reach, the next section of the book will show you how to put all of your research and data gathering into successful communication. In the next chapter, you ‚ ll learn how to put together a quarterly communication plan on a rolling three-month basis. Not only does periodic communication continuously remind those financial types of your worth today, but it creates a cycle that increasingly improves your ability to communicate in the future.