Want to become a school PR Einstein? Watch your math. – SCN Encourager

Experts say you get what you measure.

It’s true.

Even my wife Cindy’s a believer.

She’ll tell you without hesitation she wished she took time to measure all kinds of things many moons ago.

But she didn’t.

So she got what she failed to measure.

Me.

School leaders and communicators should try to avoid a similar mistake by establishing preferred benchmarks from the very beginning and then regularly measuring and monitoring all of the progress (or lack thereof) toward them.

One of the big time measures valued by marketing pros today is the NPS.

NPS = Net Promoter Score

You’re likely to be familiar with this… even if the terminology is new.

A Net Promoter Score is the % of people who say they’d “recommend” your product or service to a friend.

In a sense, every NPS is the back half of Seth Godin’s double-whammy definition of marketing.

Be remarkable.
Be recommendable.

Both are fairly easy to do, right?

(Thanks a bunch, Seth!)

But as both you and I know, life can be funny, and things CAN always take a turn for the worse.

And that’s what’s happening to the standard Net Promoter Score.

(Which figures… now that I know what it is.)

Marketers are now pursuing other measurements far beyond just asking someone if they’d willing recommend a particular business or organization to a friend.

They’re starting to measure other “measurables.”

Things like –
•  frowns,
•  smiles,
•  ease,
•  kind words,
•  harsh words,
•  and brevity.

They say knowing your NPS  – while useful for comparing and benchmarking – often is calculated way too late in the game.

Tracking frowns and smiles at regular intervals is what you should do if you’re truly interested in responding effectively and quickly to the people you serve.

These are the trends to watch.

I think it’s strange one of the quibbles marketers have with the NPS is that they don’t know how to interpret a respondent’s “silence” when they’re asked if they would make a positive recommendation.

They’ve got to be kidding!

When I asked Cindy if she’d recommend me to one of her friends –

I had no trouble at all interpreting her silence.

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