Measuring to Know Your Audience

In Chapter 14 of Katie Paine's Measure What Matters, she talks about the importance and steps to take when measuring in higher education. She told the story of a college paying high stakes simply for not understanding their audience and measuring their reactions. The town surrounding a university overtime became hostile toward the school, so when a new soccer field was proposed, the townspeople let everyone know how they felt. Because of this, the soccer field wasn't built, the $6 million was turned down from a generous alumni and the president of the university resigned. Seems a bit much for a soccer field, don't you think?

To these people, it wasn't just about the soccer field. It was the way the university proposed the soccer field. Rewind a couple years, and the homes in this town would be filled with faculty and staff from the university plus families with students enrolled in the college. What was the need to publicize and weigh in on opinions that were already involved in the planning process. Overtime, these staff and family members had to sell their homes, bringing in an entirely different audience. This is what the university failed to understand. They could no longer say something was going to be built in town. The citizens wanted a vote. They didn't want to be told what was going to happen.

That's completely understandable. It's almost equivalent to the ever popular parents' reasoning of "because I said so." No one likes being told what to do. Because the university didn't measure, they didn't realize that's how they sounded to their townspeople. They were simply thinking in the best interest of the college. If they had presented it that way, I'm sure the town would have agreed. Instead, they had no soccer field or president, and that seems like a bigger mess than just trying to measure at the start.