A beginner’s guide to Benchmarking
It’s impossible to know if you’re succeeding in reaching and engaging with audiences and visitors unless you measure and track progress. This resource — A beginner’s guide to Benchmarking — will help you consider the key questions when benchmarking your work.
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Why do I need benchmarks?
What does ‘good’ look like? How does what you’re doing compare with everyone else? How close are you to ‘good’?
The answers to these questions can be found by benchmarking yourself (or your organisation) against others in a similar position. You can measure against yourself, but often it’s useful to have the wider sector or industry context.
Benchmarks can be used as evidence of what’s working well, what’s working not so well, and to make a case for change. If you want to measure progress and continually improve what you do, benchmarks are important.
One of the reasons the AMA exists is to help people share learning and best practice, so that individuals and organisations can continuously improve so that they can reach more and more diverse audiences, using an audience-focused approach to ensure a resilient and sustainable sector.
As part of this, we help members to connect and share experiences with other people in similar roles and organisations. This can be a great way to get new ideas but it’s also hugely helpful to get a feel for how you’re doing. Is a 40% open rate for emails good, bad, or indifferent? Do your benchmarks look like everyone else’s?
What should I be benchmarking?
We know that working in the cultural sector generally means you’ve not got enough time in the day and not enough budget to do half of what you want. There’s a lot you could measure, but prioritising benchmarks generally boils down to two things:
What can you measure, relatively easily?
What’s important to you to measure? Anything that’s not important, forget it.
To read the full resource download A beginner’s guide to Benchmarking
Thumbnail image courtesy of Tower Bridge Guildhall School of Music & Drama © Paul Cochrane — Terra Incognita, Here Be Dragons at Tower Bridge by Guildhall School of Music & Drama.