Problem Solving: The Statistics Database
As Communication Manager (Would you like to see the resumé?) for an online financial literacy program, our audiences were colleges, universities, and businesses. Colleges would ideally use the program to alleviate the financial pressures of their debt-ridden students as well as offer a lifelong lesson in personal finance. (A lesson that is largely not covered in our contemporary school system.) Businesses offered the program to their employees as a perk – again hoping to alleviate any financial pressures (without giving the employee more money, of course…) and provide guidance and resources to navigate personal finance.
My job involved writing blog posts and white papers, maintaining all social media channels and customer engagement, editing copy from freelancers, offering webinars, creating presentations and in general managing brand communication. The program, which they put me through when I started, was a useful, proactive tool. It was helpful, user friendly, and no matter your financial situation, you were bound to find out new information.
The Problem
While digging for content inspiration, I often found reading studies and reports to be the most helpful and entertaining. The statistics offered insight into our audience and provided immense foundational work for the development and writing of blog post content. It was a time for excitement when the PWC Employee Financial Survey report was released!
Over time, I’d gathered a number of reports, both digital and paper. As the number of reports grew, the number of statistics skyrocketed. It became challenging to remember specific statistics and their source. My productivity and creative flow was repeatedly blocked by the timely effort of locating and properly citing statistics.
The Solution
I decided the most streamlined and effective solution would be a Statistics Database. There had to be one source of statistics, from multiple reports, and a search function to allow for easy retrieval. I had my new project.
Gathering the reports was easy. Meticulously, I went through them entering relevant statistics into a Google Sheet. In the interest of efficiency, I cited the report with a link to an online version. Next to each entry, I wrote a series of tags to enable searching.
Finally, I created a separate tab listing different reports, with links, noting which reports were finished, and which needed to be done. In this way, I eliminated the clutter of reports, maintaining a streamlined goal.
Conclusions
When I had compiled a large amount of the Statistics Database, I emailed my manager and shared it with him. I assumed that access to the statistics would be useful for him as well. In response, he emailed the entire company alerting them to the new tool at their disposal and publicly thanking me for my diligence and ingenuity.
Doing the extra work is a crapshoot. It’s difficult to know whether people will appreciate or recognize the effort you invested. In the case of the Statistics Database, I knew this tool would help streamline and organize my workflow and felt it was worth the time. I lucked out that the company appreciated it. (That hasn’t always been the case.) Regardless of how it turned out though, I was proud of the work I did and the result. Sometimes that’s the best, and only, reward.