Tying Website Evaluation to Mission Achievement

Measuring how your website helps achieve your agency’s mission is critical for securing ongoing support for your site. Unfortunately, measures that tie website performance to achieving an agency’s mission are often difficult to identify, let alone collect and evaluate.

Often, executives request financial measures such as return on investment or various cost-benefit analyses (such as internal-rate-of-return or net-present-value) to assess how a website provides value to an organization. However, financial metrics alone may not be sufficient for assessing your website’s value to your organization, particularly if your agency’s mission is focused on providing public support, contributing to economic development, or supporting the national infrastructure.

So, how should we, as government web managers, tie in the specific services that we offer through our websites back to our agency mission?

Specific Guidance Coming Soon

We think the best way to do this is to provide guidance and examples to help you develop these kinds of metrics. We’re working on new content for Webcontent.gov, which will help you:

Review the standard methods for calculating relevant financial and non-financial performance metrics;
Select and apply these metrics to the website strategies that support your agency’s mission; and
Identify and use market research and data collection methods to develop new metrics that are customized to your agency’s website strategy and mission.

The foundation for this guidance will be a combination of research review, industry best practices, and case studies. We hope to have this content posted during the summer of 2006.

Looking for Good Examples

In the meantime, please let us know if you have a good example or success story of how to tie website performance measures to achieving agency mission. Send us an email and we’ll share it with the Performance Measures & Mission Achievement Task Group, part of the Federal Web Managers Council.

Page Updated or Reviewed: February 17, 2005