Category: Data Strategy

May 22, 2026

When should a business error trigger an operational change? (diagnostic error logs)

So, you F’d up. Or someone on your team did. What’s your next step, the one that helps you figure out if this should trigger an operational change?

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

May 5, 2024

Organize Your Digital Notes: The PARA Method (plus one thing Forte missed)

Are you a digital note taker? Can you easily find – and use – those notes, or are they a jumbled and ever-growing collection of things you promise you’ll organize some day? If that sounds like you, you might want to try the PARA method. If this ends up working for you, go ahead and start sorting your old notes...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

May 5, 2024

Maximize the SEO Value of Your Calls-to-Action

If you’ve used a template to design a landing page or other marketing/sales materials, you’re probably familiar with the format that has you list a catchy sentence that perfectly entices your audience, followed by a button that reads something like “Learn More”, “Download Now”, “Enroll”, or “Buy”. That button is called a Call to Action (CTA), and, when it’s generic...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

May 5, 2024

Asking & Listening: The Problem with Qualitative Data … and what to do about it

When it comes to quantitative data (i.e., number data), we’ve come up with a lot of “scientific” standards for assessing quality of the data and how confident we should feel about the conclusions we draw from that data. At its most basic level, that’s things like having a sufficiently large sample size (i.e., a minimum of 30, but more is...

Categories Data Strategy/Strategic Alignment

January 9, 2023

Client Intake Forms

One of the primary tools of the client intake process is the intake form. In this post, I talk about how to set up tools like your client intake forms to help make your client intake processes as simple and efficient as they need to be. What is a client intake form? Client intake forms go beyond the formality of collecting names...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

April 4, 2022

How to write multi-select checkbox questions and analyze the results

No one is just one thing. And that matters when you’re writing things like those client personas that we’re all supposed to have. But how do you capture that nuance in a survey? One way is to use the multi-select checkbox question, e.g., check all that apply. But how do you write a checkbox question that gives you information instead...

Categories Data Strategy

March 1, 2022

How to write open-ended questions and analyze the results

There are so many good use cases for open-ended questions, and including them as part of your surveys can really increase the insight you can glean from your respondents. But: (1) How do you write questions that get the type of answers you need? (2) How do you reduce all of that free-flowing text into something that’s manageable and usable?

Categories Data Strategy

November 1, 2021

Analysis paralysis and the myths of being data driven and successful

Do you ever overthink or overanalyze to the point where you stop making decisions and taking action? Where you’re afraid that the choice you’re about to make isn’t the “best choice“, so you wait it out a little more, and maybe research a little more, and maybe gather together more data … just so you can be “sure“? That’s called analysis paralysis....

Categories Data Strategy

July 1, 2021

Analyzing time spent: Time management with box and whisker plots

We all know that there are only so many minutes in a day, and that goals like being more productive and effective hinge on things like better time management, that is, working smarter not harder. This is particularly true if you think you’ve got a pretty standard process in place. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate a visualization tool called a box and...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

June 21, 2021

Using big data to generate content ideas | A SOP Story

TL;DR? Big data knows what questions people have, and you can capitalize on that to generate an endless list of answer-focused content ideas that draw from and showcase your experience, knowledge, and expertise. Scroll down to the section titled ‘Bringing it together’ for a quick list of the steps. Scroll back up for the nuance. There’s nothing new under the sun,...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity