August 2021 Manager Meeting: Annual Planning

This month’s topic was annual planning. We had an open conversation about what communities want to accomplish in FY22, how to go about setting goals, monitoring and measuring progress, and achieving success.

During the meeting, we looked at how the Digital.gov team sets specific goals with data to back them up. Examples such as quality over quantity of events, YouTube data returns, and community membership.

Ask yourself these key questions when you start to thinking about setting goals for next year:

• What do you want to accomplish in FY22? What are your goals / desired outcomes?
• How will you monitor and measure success? What are your metrics?
• How will you monitor and measure success? What are your targets?
• How will you achieve your goals? What are your tactics or strategies?

Example goals and metrics:

Digital.gov Goal	Metric	FY21 Current Actuals	FY22 Target	FY22 Strategies
Increase % of federal community membership	% of listserv members with a .gov or .mil email address	83%	90% or more	Focus outreach and social media on federal networks and listservs. Review membership quarterly and remove members that don’t meet CoP criteria.
Increase the quality of events	Average customer satisfaction rating on event surveys	4.54	4.6 or above	Determine event topics using qualtrics survey data. Conduct retrospectives and apply lessons learned.
Increase percentage watch time of event videos	Average percentage watch time of Digital.gov videos	12.2%	50% or more	Post fewer videos and make them shorter.

With the new fiscal year around the corner, try setting achievable goals for your communities in a similar format to the above. What do you want to achieve? Do you want to...

• Increase #/% of federal members in your community
• Publish a guide on best practices and get x number of people to click on it
• Obtain at least one positive mention by outside media
• Write to the listserv once a week to demonstrate consistent communication
• Produce a form of written content once a month
• Check-in on the impact of their activities on membership or engagement

Remember: What do you want the community to accomplish in FY22? How will you measure success? How will you achieve it? How can we all help each other?