What is thought-leadership for a mission-driven organization?

In corporate sales and marketing, moving from "selling your product/service to someone" to being a "thought-leader in your customer's eyes" is the holy grail.

Being a thought-leader means you are more to your customer than the company that supplied a service. You were the respected source of wisdom that your customer relied upon for what they would do next. As far as sales were concerned, being in the thought leadership position meant you introduced the idea to the custom, and, of course, you were their #1 choice of supplier. Sales was the final objective!

But what does thought leadership mean when you aren't selling widgets or services? When you are just "selling" the idea. How do we know it's working?

What is thought-leadership for a mission-driven organization?

Are we just creating reports and articles and hoping someone reads them? Maybe changes what they, their team, their company, or their government does?

The indirect relationship and lack of consistent, easy measurement between thought leadership and action often mean people take linear approaches, primarily one-on-one influence and hands-on facilitation. This approach works great for convincing one person or one team. For creating systemic change, the resources to talk to everyone individually would be beyond most organizations' resources.

Applying thought leadership measurement concepts to influence systems means we can be more effective and quicker in creating the change we want to see in the system around us.

Longitude, a consultancy associated with the Financial Times, works with major brands to develop thought leadership campaigns. They've outlined a three-tier model for measuring thought leadership effectiveness.

We have adapted these to three phases for organizations that don't have sales to track, but want to know why, how, and if they are having an impact on their audience with their thought-leadership efforts.

• Foundation of internal alignment
• Amplification
• Influencing and Change

For each phase, you want to measure both quantitative and qualitative metrics. Even as Longitude discovered with their clients, "There are plenty of quantitative metrics and analytics which can demonstrate the value of thought leadership but relying too heavily on these can be problematic without factoring in the context or narrative which drives them. Combining both quantitative measurements with qualitative feedback can help provide much deeper insight."

We incorporate quantitative and qualitative metrics under each phase into our AMPLIFY dashboard seen here.

For tracking your own success here are some metrics to consider in each phase:

FOUNDATION OF INTERNAL ALIGNMENT

• Internal shares of content
• Social engagement (likes, comments, shares)
• E-mails sent with the content
• Anecdotes

AMPLIFICATION

• Paid
• Impressions, CTR, Downloads (Costs for Each)
• Earned
• Influencers: Engaged, Responded, Acted, Reach, Impressions, Click-throughs, Downloads (total and by content piece for each)
• Platforms: Engaged, Responded, Acted, Reach, Impressions, Click-throughs, Downloads (total and by content piece for each)
• Shared (your own social) (total and by content piece for each)
• Posts
• Engagements
• Owned
• Web traffic to content sites (total and by country)
• SEO Rankings
• Anecdotes

INFLUENCING CHANGE

• Influence
• Global & Country-level media attention (# of mentions and reach)
• Share of mentions and share of reach coming from the organization's materials
• Meetings set up
• Keyword Search Traffic
• Anecdotes: Feedback from organizations