Demystifying Goals, KPIs, and Benchmarks
By nature of our work at EduCred Services, we read a lot of goal-related content. Strategic initiatives, institutional effectiveness plans, Susan promising us that someday she really will take a vacation and leave her computer at home—you know, normal business stuff. One thing we’ve consistently found in all this reading is that a lot of institutions have trouble differentiating between their goals, their KPIs (key performance indicators), and their benchmarks (achievement measures). This confusion is understandable because, although we all intuitively use and blend these concepts in our daily lives, we are rarely forced to separate, categorize, and define them by their specific purposes.
Example 1: Defining a Goal
Scenario: Susan works really hard and has an unhealthy habit of using her vacation time to catch up on more work (obviously, this is absolutely a fictitious example and any similarities between this Susan and EduCred Services’ Susan is 100 percent imagined). I know she’ll probably never take a whole week completely off without at least reading her emails (because that might make her more stressed), but she deserves a rest that is relatively free from work. She takes her computer on vacation with her in case there’s an emergency but promises she won’t work more than 3 hours total while she’s away.
For the scenario above, in a perfect world, our goal would be: Susan takes a week-long vacation and doesn’t even think about work once. But, as I’m constantly reminded by my lack of ability to fly through the air like Peter Pan, we don’t live in a perfect world. Knowing this, we adjust our goal to something we think is more realistic: Susan takes a week-long vacation that involves limited work.
If we added this totally fictional goal to our strategic plan (and we might), it would look something like this:
Strategic Goal: Susan takes a week-long vacation that involves limited work.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI): Number of hours Susan works during her week-long vacation.
Benchmark: Susan works 3 or less hours while on vacation.
Goals are the easy part! Dreaming about the future, brainstorming all the ways we can help students achieve their academic goals—everyone wants to do that! KPIs are where things get a little tricky. If you’re one of the many who get stuck on KPIs, one important thing to remember is that KPIs do not tell you if you’ve achieved your goal. They are objective metrics that you’ve decided to monitor because the resulting data will best measure your goal. Goals get all the press, but KPIs are just as important, and if you choose them lazily, you won’t get very helpful information.
Example 2: Appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Scenario: Disney can hardly believe how successful the movie “Frozen” was. Elsa, Anna, and the gang are some of their most beloved characters. They can’t wait to start making Frozen 2 so the world can revisit Arendelle and experience the same magic that made the first movie so compelling.
Strategic Goal: To create a delightful and beloved movie called “Frozen 2”.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI): Number of days per year Emily Haworth’s children ask to watch this movie.
Benchmark: 100/365 days.
Could you make the case that this KPI is relevant? Sure. Should you? No. My daughters are smart, loveable weirdos, but they are not film critics. In fact, their current system for rating a movie is based solely the “yellability” of the songs. Thus, their movie-viewing requests would not be a reliable indicator of quality. Yes, this KPI would be very easy to track—I can tell you right now that the result will be very close to 365/365 days—but this KPI does not provide valuable, relevant insight to Disney’s writers (with whom I would like a strong word). A better KPI might be: “Rotten Tomatoes score,” “Number of people who paid to see this in theaters more than once,” “Box office dollars,” or “Number of times this movie was streamed on Disney+.”
Ok, let’s talk about the numbers that make all of our hard work mean something: benchmarks. Well-defined, thoughtful benchmarks are how we determine, “yes, we’ve achieved our goal,” or, “nope, we missed it.” They are also crucial to understand, because ambiguous or misleading information has never been more prevalent in our world than it is right now. When faced with a claim that seems outlandish, most critical thinkers will say, “show me the data,” or, in the case of planning documents, “what measurable benchmark are you using to substantiate that claim?” Which brings us to…
Example 3: The Power of Benchmarks
Scenario: I want to be able to fly like the title character of the criminally underrated 1986 movie, “The Boy Who Could Fly.”
Goal: To be able to fly unassisted
KPI: Distance from the ground I can travel under my own power.
Benchmark: 1.5 ft (pair with this sound effect, please).
In this example, being able to jump (and not even that high) means that I can mark my goal “achieved.” I did it! I can fly now! Well, except the word “fly” is pretty disingenuous to anyone who actually takes the time compare my goal to my benchmark.
It can be tempting to pad an institutional effectiveness plan so that you can make grand claims or choose “benchmarks” that you’re already meeting or exceeding, but to what end? Your report might make you look efficient, but the data you spent your time and resources collecting isn’t helping you make meaningful improvements, and, at worst, someone is going to figure out you can’t actually fly and call you out on it.
Pop quiz!
Can you identify a meaningful goal, KPI, and benchmark for the scenario below?
Emily is really sick of the movie “Frozen 2” and will likely lose her mind if she has to listen to either her daughters or Idina Menzel sing “Into the Unknown” one more time.
No, seriously… tell me what to do, because this movie’s plot makes no sense, and it bothers me so much.
