All Data and No Insight

As marketers, fundraisers and product managers, we are inundated with a torrent of data. Every platform has its own set of metrics, each stressing their importance. It’s overwhelming. Cutting through this noise to find meaningful insights has become one of our greatest challenges. Trying to make sense of it all can be exhausting and confusing.

The trouble with wanting to be an evidence-based data-driven marketer is that you must transform raw data into strategic insights that will drive the business forward.

However, in a time where we are the richest in data we’ve ever been, we tend to be poor in insights that actually matter.

Most metrics presented by platforms are just noise—a distraction. Sure likes, shares, views, impressions, and engagement rates, and bounce rates are interesting. But when considered in isolation are they useful? Is knowing them impactful? Does knowing that LinkedIn views increased by 5% this month really change your overall strategy? Probably not.

Here are five of my rules for uncovering more valuable insights.

Rule 1: Define What Matters—Focus on That

What is critical to your organisation? What keeps the lights on? Identify the core metrics that truly matter to your mission. These things should be common knowledge within your team, yet often they’re not.

I've encountered marketing teams who mistakenly view donations as solely the fundraising team's responsibility. That attitude baffles me. In reality, every team should understand how their work contributes to critical organisational goals.

For a charity, donations are everything. Without them, nothing else happens. Everybody communicating with potential donors should understand how their efforts influence donations.

Of course, this becomes more complex when the charity’s program is in the same market it’s fundraising in. But raising money isn’t just a fundraising team’s responsibility—it’s a core part of what drives the entire organisation.

So, what is critical to your organisation? What metrics reflect how your team contributes to that?

Take email marketing as an example. Open rates and click through rates are commonly used to measure the success of an email, but who cares if someone opens your email? Great open rates don’t necessarily lead to better outcomes.

Open rate is easily gamed and often disconnected from the purpose of the email. You can have great open rates and no donations/conversions/traffic. Focusing on improving open rates will not necessarily improve outcomes.

Instead, focus on what really matters: how many people donated after opening that email or how many users engaged with the content you promoted. Optimise for your end goal, not for your platform's vanity metrics.

Rule 2: Less is More—Report by Exception

We’ve become addicted to platform metrics. We see them go up slightly and it's validating. “Our reach on Bluesky increased by 5% this month!”. We constantly report on them but at the end of the day most don’t matter.

There is a common misconception that more metrics mean more sophistication. But a wall of figures with obscure labels is not an effective communication tool.

In my experience working with clients on dashboard reports, I always have to convince them to cut back. Too many numbers can overwhelm, and they rarely add value. More noise = less insight.

The Simpsons has a scene where Homer invents the ‘Everything’s Okay Alarm’. It sounds every couple of seconds whilst everything is ok—the family hates it. It’s funny because it’s ridiculous, but it is the perfect analogy for a lot of reports I’ve seen in organisations. The "Everything's Okay Alarm" perfectly illustrates our metrics obsession—constant notifications that provide no real value.

The Everything's Okay Alarm - The Simpsons

Reports should focus on what’s changed or what’s of interest. We don’t need to know that everything’s ok. We need to know if things are great or concerning—and why. Scrap the normal. Report by exception—interrogate it and discover the insight.

Rule 3: Keep Metrics at the Right Level

Many moons ago I worked with a client where the executive team received reports detailing the stats for every individual social post. Whilst this data is useful for the person managing the account, it’s a waste of time for these executives to get stuck at this level of detail. They don’t have the necessary context or platform knowledge for it to be insightful to them.

Metrics lose their context the further removed they are from the platform generating them. Context is critical to making sense of metrics and drawing insight.

Social is a great example, the algorithms are constantly changing, without that contextual knowledge you can’t deeply interpret a report of social posts and draw insight.

As individual contributors, we need to focus on reporting by exception, highlighting what is interesting. As managers and leaders we need to empower and trust those closest to the platform to provide the insight—not all the numbers. We need to be ok with that.

Rule 4: Ask Questions. Always Be Curious

Insights aren’t just waiting for you in a dashboard—they need to be discovered. You need to ask questions and bring in your organisation context. Despite all of the AI enhancement happening at the moment, no platform is going to be able to give you the nuanced and specific insight you need.

A report of tables and graphs will not deliver insights—it points you towards clues. Ask why. Why did that number decrease so much? Why is that so high?

For instance, a client I was working with saw a dramatic decrease in their involuntary churn (cancellations). The team couldn’t explain it at first. But after asking around, we discovered a new feature was added to the customer portal where catching up on missed payments and updating credit cards was made dramatically easier. This was an important insight.

However, it would have been even more valuable if we’d asked why church was so high in the first place—before it dropped.

When reviewing a report, compare metrics to the previous year or month (or both!). Comparison provides a great opening to ask questions. Why is this so much lower/higher than last year? What did we do differently? Why do you think this is like this?

When things have decreased don’t explain it away or blame external factors. Genuinely try to understand the cause. Inversely, when numbers increase don’t attribute to your brilliance—understand what about the difference caused the change.

Rule 5: Make Data Accessible, Clear and Actionable

Data is only as valuable as the ability to access, interpret and act on it. Not all platforms provide the reports or metrics that teams need. Sometimes, the right information isn’t recorded or stored in a way that makes it able to be connected to other organisational activities. Insights are locked behind technical barriers.

This is easily the most frustrating place to be as an insight hungry individual. However all is not lost, and change is possible!

Here is where collaboration is essential. Work with technical experts who understand your organisation's data and are open to your needs.

Be clear about your goals—define what matters most (Rule 1) and work from there. Avoid overwhelming technicians with a wishlist of unrealistic or vague requests.

Collaborate with the technician and focus on achievable solutions that tie directly to outcomes.

Non-financial outcomes, such as petition signatures or letters sent to MPs, often require bespoke solutions to make the data useful. Simply put, most tooling just supports financial outcomes. Success depends on connecting the right dots—activities to users, users to campaigns, and campaigns to outcomes. Often you are just one link away from unlocking transformative insight.

For those managing data, resist the temptation to flood stakeholders with a plethora of metrics, or overly complex ones. If the insights aren’t clear or actionable, they lose their value. Simplicity and clarity are far more powerful than complexity masked as sophistication.

In Summary

Discovering insight takes time, curiosity and strategic thinking. By focusing on what truly matters, asking probing questions, and resisting data noise, you'll transform metrics from mere numbers into powerful strategic tools.

You need to know what is critical to your organisation in order to really cut through the noise. More is not better.

Fight the urge to know everything and trust those around you to find insight within their own work. If you follow these rules, you’ll uncover more valuable insights in your work—and make data truly work for you.

This article originally appeared on beech.agency