If you’ve ever managed a Facebook page you will be familiar with Facebook Insights. Facebook insights provides a source of data that can help drive communication and marketing strategies. It has features that tell you about the largest demographic of your audience including information about when they are online, what posts had the largest reach and received the most engagement and you can compare some of your statistics with your competitors. All in all, a lot of information is available to you (and for free!) but what you do with this information depends on your page goals. For example, image based posts generally receive the highest reach and engagement, but that doesn’t mean that images have to make up the bulk of your content if virality isn’t the aim of your strategy.
Similarities between Facebook and M&E: relevance, effectiveness and impact
So what does this have to do with M&E? I admit that this is an area I am new to, however, since joining Trust I have learnt more about this area of our work and I am more and more inclined to believe that communication strategies and M&E have more in common than some might believe.
First, Monitoring and Evaluation is a process to help improve performance and achieve results, much like Facebook insights but with very different results in mind.
Secondly, its goal is to improve current and future outputs, outcomes and impact. Facebook Insights also informs the content I post; what, when and (most importantly) why.
M&E can determine the relevance of a project as well as the effectiveness, and impact of a project. This leads me back to a point I made earlier, ok maybe my posts are receiving a lot of engagement but is it relevant? Is virality my goal? Maybe Facebook is the wrong tool for my goal.
Although the contexts are different the goal is the same; to better understand your work and those it is reaching. Organizations use many different M&E frameworks to measure whether the success of a project, Facebook Insights can be considered another framework albeit monitoring and evaluating a very different type of project.
