I often retell a story about a hike I took in my twenties with my girlfriend and her father to illustrate the importance and value of planning for outcomes.
We were in Sydney Australia at the height of their summer and the three of us set out a route to hike to the Northern Beaches. At about 4 hours the route promised to be quite beautiful, much of it through parkland trails and around hidden ocean coves.
My girlfriend's father (at the time I knew he would likely be my father-in-law one day) was a home-grown Australian who hedonistically roamed the outback as a young lad and had the mindset that frivolities and comforts of life made one, lets just say, 'weak'. So despite this wisdom, I mistakenly suggested, as we were about to depart, that bringing water may be a good idea. Even with his back turned walking down the drive I could see the scowl on his lips and prognosticated the thoughts racing through his mind that his one-day son-in-law would enlighten his grandkids with things like glamping and Yogen-fruz.
You can probably guess that we didn't leave with any hydration, but nonetheless, we set out. The hike was indeed beautiful, but before too long, the hot summer sun was taking its toll. The thought of suggesting we find a store to buy water (even though there were none around), or saying, for pure gratification of course, "We should have brought some water", I realized would have clear negative impact on my future. So, I trudged on.
After a few hours we reached the Northern Beaches. We made it, but it wasn't pretty. We were fully exhausted, very very dehydrated and could barely stand up to enjoy the beauty. Yes, we completed the hike, but not how we wanted.
The reason I tell this story is that it demonstrates that we didn't plan the outcome. Some would say that what we did was actually poor planning, but that is really not the case. We chose the activity, hiking, carefully planned the route and had a good sense of completion time. But what we failed to do is plan how we wanted to feel when we got there, which is all a part of the outcome.
Far too often we tend to focus on 'the doing' of the task or activity, and make the mistake that the completion of that task, a tangible milestone, is the outcome. For the hike, the outcome that we should have planned for is fully enjoying the hike in it's entirety, for the hours that we walked through beautiful scenery and when we arrived at our final destination. So while water would have certainly made the hike more enjoyable, it also would have saved us from being so exhausted that we missed out on planned evening activities. I guess if that were the outcome we wanted, all would be ok.
Our ingrained philosophy and practice at Shift_better is to plan for outcomes. But it is important that a distinction be made at this point that KPI's, metrics, or the like, are an important part of outcomes, but they are only part of the story. Unlike metrics and KPI's, that tend capture tangible raw number results, which may be compared with past performance or industry benchmarks, outcomes work to capture and provide insight on a broader perspective of overall success, or lack thereof.
When we talk about outcomes in the context of experiential marketing and impacting social good, we are talking about gaining insight into the depth of the engagement experience and trying understand if we are impacting attitudes and behaviours. While metrics may report on, for example, the number of engagements delivered, reporting on outcome would incorporate a qualitative assessment of such qualitities as strength of audience, relevance and receptivity of messaging. All of these are critical to understanding the broader picture of the campaign and resulting impact.
There is another important distinction worth noting regarding metrics and outcomes. Metrics and KPI's tend to be seen as outputs, meaning they are not often directly and strategically correlated with inputs. This is where the benefit of 'planning for outcomes' comes into focus. Back to my hiking story, if we had planned that we wanted the outcome that we felt accomplished and strong at completion and ready to enjoy the next activity, we would have then taken steps to either take water with us, or ensure there were sources readily available on our route.
From over 15 years of creating and producing experiential marketing programs for pre-eminent brands across North America, we have created a model for planning and evaluating the outcome of a campaign. Shift_impact is the tool we developed to help plan a 'social good' experiential campaign and then use the same tool to measure our success, based on objectives we set at the outset. In using Shift_impact, we are able to gain a better understanding of the campaign as a whole, both quantitatively and qualitatively. From this we can speak to what we would do more of, what we would do different and why, working to continually refine the campaign.
As I think about the hiking story years later, I sometimes wonder why I didn't just bring my own water, and how I could have been so smitten that I was pretty much asking permission to stay alive. So I guess at the time my desired outcome was to show flex like an outback adventurer, someone so tough they didn't need water to survive. I got the girl, so guess it worked. But it's also possible that's the outcome girlfriend's father actually wanted all along.
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