Set Up Your Website for Success: How to Create a Performance Framework

In other words, you might be so busy getting content out there, that you don’t have a lot of time to think about the actual performance of your content…

Not to worry! In this guide I’m going to show you some simple steps that are followed by leaders in public sector web performance…

Steps that you can follow to track the performance of your web content, to ensure it’s meeting the needs of visitors and moving your organization closer to its objectives.

Here's what we’ll be covering:

Let’s get this party started (right)...

So you’ve got a website that provides a service to the public (and/or some content on social media)...

Tell me if these questions have ever popped into your head:

That’s where a performance framework comes in – it can help you answer ALL of those questions. 

The following points are probably obvious to you, but humour me for a minute 😉 

So let’s quickly summarize how to create a performance framework.

But first, here’s my definition of what a performance framework is, in the context of web content:

There are two key parts of my definition:

Here’s a (somewhat condescending) quote from legendary engineer, statistician, and management consultant W. Edwards Deming summarizing this sentiment:

With the definitional stuff out of the way, now we can get into the steps to create a performance framework.

Flowing from those frameworks, here are the steps for creating your own performance framework (which I describe in detail below).

Answer these questions, in the order below, to gather the information you need to create a performance framework:

And below is my fancy diagram capturing all of this. As you can see, I’ve shamelessly stolen borrowed from the U.K. GDS’s diagram.

Note: the arrows indicate that performance measurement is an iterative process. In other words, you don’t just do it once and stop - you constantly keep working your way around the loop.

In the sections below I describe each of the steps in detail, and I provide a hypothetical example using one department (i.e. ministry) of the Canadian federal government.

Question #1: What’s the Purpose of My Digital Presence?

Your first – crucial - step is to answer the question “What’s the purpose of my digital presence?”

I use the term “digital presence” here for a placeholder, because you might be creating a performance framework for your:

Another way to word the question is: “Why does my [digital content] exist?”

The answers to this question should be tied to organizational objectives (or “business objectives”, as they’re called in the first step of the Digital Marketing and Measurement Model.)

Brainstorming Components of a Performance Framework for the U.K.'s Parliamentary Website

Now that we’ve covered why and how to create a purpose statement for digital content, let’s turn to the next step…

“Content goals” are what needs to happen to achieve your digital purpose.

In the previous step we asked the question “What’s the purpose of my digital presence?” Content goals are what needs to happen in order for that purpose to be achieved.

In other words: it’s easy to just say “I want my website to be quick and easy to use”, but what actually needs to happen on the site for clients to experience “quick” and “easy”?

That’s where content goals come in…

Here are some categories of content goals you may want to consider:

This should really be the first step in the process of creating a performance framework, because in the public sector (and private sector, for that matter) our digital content exists only to serve our audiences.

After all, without an audience to serve, there would be no need for corporations or public services.

But having worked in the public sector, I understand the reality: the mandate of a department/ministry is often the first thing on a public servant’s mind, and user needs are second. So here we are.

The first step here is to define who your audience is.  

Now, if you’re tempted to say “I work in the public sector, my target audience is the general population”, please take a moment to slap yourself in the face…

Because “general population” is a population, not a target audience!

A good way to start defining our target audience is by brainstorming audience personas.

What exactly is an audience persona?

Tony Zambito, one of the top authorities in “buyer” personas has an excellent definition:

(Note: even though Tony’s definition is focused on the private sector, it’s the best definition I’ve found and is still relevant to the public sector. Just replace the word “buyer” with “client”, and the word “buy” with the most-important action you want your visitors to take, e.g. “register online”):

So a persona is basically a fictitious character that is based on real-life clients.

Personas are created using real-life data, in order to visualize and make more tangible who our target audience is. Whenever we’re creating/designing content, we keep this person in mind - like we’re creating that content just for him or her.

Learning how to create audience personas could be an entire guide unto itself, but you can start by gathering data that you probably already have. This data will give you an idea of who is currently visiting your digital content:

That’s obviously the bare minimum you should start with in creating audience personas. To create a more fulsome picture of who is (or should be) target audiences for your digital content, you ideally should gather data from as many of these sources as possible:

If you’re interested in learning more about how to create personas, check out The Complete, Actionable Guide to Marketing Personas as well as Tony Zambito’s interesting concept of “buyer persona stories”

Remember that people don’t browse websites just “because” – they always have a reason for doing so, whether that reason is to accomplish a task (e.g. visit their bank website to pay a bill), make a purchase, find information, or simply be entertained.

So it’s crucial that we understand as clearly as possible what our audience wants to accomplish – whether they’re visiting our website, content grouping, social media account, web app, etc. Simply put, we need to understand their needs.

There are many questions you could ask to zero in on your audience’s needs, but there are three questions that I find most useful:

Allow me to demonstrate this by continuing to use the Government of Canada’s Employment Insurance (EI) program as a guinea pig an example…

From surveying our site visitors and talking to our call centres, we should be able to answer the three questions above.

At the same time, we can look at our web analytics data to obtain demographic information on our visitors.

Putting the data from these sources together, we might come up with the following as one of our (hypothetical) audience personas:

Ethan’s needs are a great reference point for creating and structuring our content. But to satisfy both Ethan’s needs and our organizational objectives, we need to do a bit of a “mash-up”…

Our hypothetical persona named Ethan probably has a lot of needs, but even governments don’t have infinite resources, so we need to figure out which audience needs overlap with our organization’s content goals.

So, turning to our sample persona of Ethan again, we know that Ethan’s needs include wanting to sign up for Employment Insurance as quickly and easily as possible, without having to know how government works.

Comparing Ethan’s needs to the content goals for our Employment Insurance content, we can see (for example) that there are two comparable content goals:

The audience is able to navigate content easily, and the audience is able to complete their task during their first session.

In the images below you can see the overlap between Ethan’s needs and those two content goals for our Employment Insurance content:

Once we have a tight fit between the two, we can move forward confidently knowing that our work is contributing to both our organizational objectives AND the needs of our target audience.

As mentioned earlier in this guide, the U.K.’s GDS conducts workshops with the web teams of ministries to quickly create performance frameworks.

During the workshop, they cover many of the questions outlined in this article, and at the end of the workshop they have a whiteboard covered in sticky notes, organized by question.

The image above shows the results of a brainstorming session for the U.K.’s Parliamentary Digital Service.

Pretty cool, eh? I’ll bet other governments would improve their digital performance significantly if they followed this process.

Wondering how you can get started creating your own performance framework?

Here’s what you can do:

Questions or comments? 

Please fire away in the comments section below!