By: Eric Althoff and Justin Wender
As the calendar year turns another page, firms are well into planning for the next 12 months. While preparing for the future is undoubtedly necessary, you should not underestimate the importance of quality end-of-year reporting to understand what your organization has accomplished and start to imagine a path forward for the business to continue growing. Early organization and planning go a long way in providing your department with resources and helping your firm grow strategically in the upcoming year.
Analyzing your company’s data provides valuable insights into how your organization can achieve its business goals, progress, and objectives. Seeing this all represented in a visual format—such as a flowchart, graph, or spreadsheet—provides a helpful primer on past, present, and future possibilities. Often, internal departments get under ten minutes to present their work over the entire year, and visuals are the best way to show all the work you have done in a short period of time (after all, who doesn’t love to see an upward sloping line?). Proper reporting usage quickly presents how your time and resources were spent and outlines the resources needed in the coming year.
How did you perform against your company’s KPIs this year? What successes did you see that you might not have anticipated (and how did they show up in your data)? Beginning to answer these questions will ensure that your 2024 plan will evolve based on what you learned from key data points and analysis in 2023, including reconciling accounts, growth potential, and operational insights. Even if your goals aren’t quite where you’d like them to be, the accessibility of your company’s data from the past year can provide valuable insights into the areas that should be improved in the coming year.
The value of working with public relations professionals is also an important aspect of seeing where you’ve been and evaluating projections for the year to come. Collaborating with public relations professionals—such as us here at Promova—will lay the groundwork for planning to achieve those goals in the new year as you continue building upon previous successes. Discovering and addressing areas of weakness will also show where you need to improve.
By properly analyzing all of the relevant data to identify key areas of improvement, ideas about driving the brand forward can commence. Putting in the time to properly go through all your data allows your firm to plan more meticulously and efficiently, putting you in a position to grow strategically and at a faster pace in the coming year.