How do I conduct strategic performance assessments?

There are multiple ways you can use the Zencity platform to help you evaluate initiatives over time, measure and compare outcomes, and reach conclusions about how to direct your next steps.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

Zoom in and define parameters

Whenever evaluating an initiative, use these Zencity tools to define what interests you most and the time period under consideration:

Create a project

Because projects are built to collect data about whatever keywords you define, they force you to get specific about what kind of data you want to see and which angles of the conversation you're interested in. You can browse templates for commonly-created projects, create your own, or reach out to your Customer Success Manager to set one up together.

Set a time period

When browsing your dashboard, you can always select the dates you are most interested in by filtering by time period at the top of your screen. Whether you're located within your main dashboard, project dashboard, or search results, this capability lets you focus on gathering data before, during, and after the initiative you're measuring.

Mark events on your timeline

Annotate your data to mark dates related to the initiative you're measuring occurred in your community (or nationwide), so you can evaluate the data in the context of real life events. To do so, click on the 3-dot menu in the upper right hand corner of the volume of interactions widget, and then on 'Events management.' From there, enter the date and a descriptive title to add a label to your interactions graph.

Collect your key metrics

To get a sense of how your initiative performed or how it was perceived among your residents, you can reference the widgets below. When you're done, transform what you find into a report and share with key stakeholders.

Sentiment analysis

Zencity’s sophisticated artificial intelligence knows how to ascribe sentiment to all interactions, and automatically displays the overall sentiment found across all interactions within any topic or project dashboard. Hover over each color on the graph to see the exact percentage breakdown of sentiment. Use the filters at the top of your screen to compare and contrast the sentiment before and after your initiative.

Volume of interactions

One way to assess the impact of an initiative is to note the number of interactions were generated around that topic. In other words, what was the level of engagement? You can also get a sense of how long this engagement lasted within the same widget, and by adjusting the time period filters or interval display (top right hand corner of the widget), as needed.

Set benchmarks for comparison

Comparison is an essential component of any evaluation. Whether you want to assess your initiative in comparison to similar efforts in the past, or to similar efforts in communities like your own, here's how Zencity can help:

Using the benchmarking tool

Available as a premium feature, Zencity's benchmarking tool allows you to compare your community's performance on a specific topic or project to the matching data in other communities. Cohorts are formed by population size and by geographical region, so you can switch between those two views and add an additional layer of information with each one.

Placing projects side-by-side

Create two projects on similar topics of interest to notice where they align and where they diverge. If you'd like assistance setting up multiple projects for this purpose, your Customer Success Manager would be happy to help. Alternatively, you can compare a single project to itself by toggling the time period view and noting the sentiment analysis and volume of interactions data over time.

Tip: Subscribe to custom project digests for each one to get an overview of key stats for each one delivered to your inbox at the frequency you'd like.

Adding engagement context

If your initiative is centered around a certain topic, head to the most popular topics widget to check out how that topic compares to other current topics in your community in terms of the size of the conversation and resident sentiment.

Marking events

Once you’ve added events to your volume of interactions graph, you can compare the data you gather from each one, or filter your dashboard over time to compare the data month over month, or year over year, and accurately contextualize rises and drops in the data you're seeing.