How do you measure the impact of your training communication strategy?

1 Define your objectives

Before you can measure the impact of your training communication strategy, you need to define what you want to achieve with it. What are the specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals of your training program? How do they align with your organizational vision and values? How do they support your staff's performance and development? Your objectives will guide your communication plan and help you select the appropriate indicators and methods to assess your results.

2 Choose your metrics

When measuring the impact of your training communication strategy, you can choose from various metrics. Reach indicates how many people received your training messages and how often. Engagement looks at how many people opened, clicked, or responded to your training messages, and how they interacted with them. Satisfaction measures the quality, relevance, and timeliness of your training messages, as well as how they were rated. Learning outlines how much staff learned from your training messages and how they demonstrated their knowledge and skills. Behavior looks at how staff changed their behavior or actions as a result of your training messages. Lastly, Impact evaluates how your training messages contributed to business outcomes and affected key performance indicators.

3 Collect your data

Collecting data for your training communication strategy requires a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods that are tailored to your metrics and audience. For example, surveys can be used to gain feedback from staff on their preferences, opinions, satisfaction, and learning outcomes. Analytics tools and platforms can be used to track the performance of your training messages and channels, measuring metrics such as reach, engagement, completion, retention, and conversion. Interviews with staff can explore their experiences, perceptions, and expectations of your training communication strategy. Additionally, observations of staff in their work environment can be used to see how they apply what they learned from your training messages. Checklists, rubrics, or ratings can be employed to record and evaluate their performance and outcomes.

4 Analyze your data

Once you have collected your data, you need to analyze it to identify patterns, trends, gaps, and opportunities. To do this, you can use various techniques and tools such as charts, graphs, tables, dashboards, or reports. Additionally, descriptive, inferential, or predictive statistics can be used to summarize, compare, or forecast the data. When analyzing your data, you should investigate questions such as what worked well and what didn't in your training communication strategy; the strengths and weaknesses of your training messages and channels; the main drivers and barriers of staff engagement, satisfaction, learning, behavior, and impact; how did the strategy vary across different segments, groups or time periods; and if it aligned with objectives and goals.

5 Improve your strategy

Based on your data analysis, you can draw conclusions and recommendations to improve your training communication strategy. To do so, you can leverage the SMART framework to set new or revised objectives and action plans, as well as the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle to implement, monitor, evaluate, and adjust your strategy. You should also consider factors such as how to enhance the quality, relevance, and timeliness of your training messages and channels; increase the reach, engagement, and satisfaction of your staff with your training messages and channels; improve the learning, behavior, and impact of your staff; optimize the resources, tools, and platforms that support your training communication strategy; and communicate the results and benefits of your strategy to stakeholders and partners.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?