In order to achieve your business’s main goals, you have to constantly measure your progress using the metrics that are most relevant to your mission.
I spoke with Jim Thie, CIO of Year Up at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Year Up is a non-profit organization that focuses on workforce development for young adults from 18 to 24. The company provides training and internship opportunities to young people for a year to help them gain valuable knowledge and experience and to prepare them for the workforce.
Which Business Performance Metrics are Important?
To accomplish the company’s main goal of helping young people, the team has to measure a number of different variables. It uses the acronym RADIO to measure for retention, admissions, development and fundraising, internship opportunities and outcomes.
This has helped the company track every single part of the process essential to its overarching goal. And Thie credits all of that information with helping the company keep a pretty impressive streak going.
He said, “We’ve held ourselves accountable to this for 17 years and never have failed on it. Eight-six percent of the young adults graduating from the program will have a job within four months earning $17 or more an hour. And we’ve made it. Not measuring any of those variables we know would have a detrimental effect on the business.”
Thie uses Salesforce analytics for managing much of this information. He likes the platform because it offers organizations the ability to not only measure results, but also to drill down into those results to find actionable ways to improve.
So whether you use Salesforce or another tool, the important thing is that your business finds the metrics essential to supporting your mission. These can look different for every business. But you have to track those specific metrics and use them to find ways to get even better.
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