Introduction & Purpose
This topic is intended as a summary of previous discussions and materials
on business reporting and analytics for Resonate. Some of the materials originate from Basecamp topics and teams. The topic is open to all.
Scope
This topic is focused on the collective reporting needs of Resonate and its platform and stakeholders rather than the individual statistical needs of artists, listeners, volunteers or developers / administrators. For example, artist play and earnings statistics will be covered under Artist Analytics. This topic is of interest to all stakeholders, internal and internal, about the totality of Resonate’s business activity.
It is concerned with the discussion and high level definition of requirements for the reports needed to govern Resonate (context and high-level requirements / examples). More detailed epics and user stories will be created in the Platform sub-category for Accounting and Reporting
Resonate Business Plan and KPI’s
Resonate has a business plan (which includes the Community Credentials project business case) and there is a 'KPI’s (key performance indicators) page in it which helps to quantify the growth targets and ambitions. It’s worth a look for context - see slide 18 in here:
Philip Brown and I had a discussion on what might be a starting point for useful KPI’s:
Which metrics, for whom and how often?
Long term, potentially everyone, radically transparent by default, but ALWAYS with respect for privacy of artists and users on the platform (aggregation / dilution protects individuals’ data). For now, the dash is for the exec team / core team of board members who are working with those internal and external KPI’s:
Catalogue:
number of artists and tracks and growth. Rich wants this weekly. It fits with a weekly meetings cycle (ops meeting Monday)
Revenue:
Paid Plays, Overall artists share and revenue per play. Weekly Also, Monthly: co-op share of earnings. Also supporter shares and donations. Also player top-up payments.
Effort and Costs:
Mostly out of scope for now. Monthly.
Development delivery metrics.
From GitHub we could provide a summary of stats for each of our ‘pinned’ repos: Pulse · resonatecoop/stream · GitHub
Volunteer contributions
nothing yet… all we have right now are replies to ‘what are you working on’ in Basecamp. Out of scope until we can get some time recording in place. Other costs… there should / will be a separate financials report - monthly. Out of scope for these stats.
Community engagement
forum posts, participation in weekly open calls - see Discourse statistics. Ideally Weekly. ‘Hot topics’ list (top 5?) in forum?
Membership Growth and Social media / Brand awareness:
Melissa is best placed to advise here. Signups and subscriptions. Twitter, FB etc using SproutSocial and other tools to maintain our profile and brand. Also monitoring press articles. Ideally Weekly.
Growth Initiatives
There is interest in correlation of social media activity and mentions / posts / blogs / newsletters / campaigns with growth trends and spikes… e.g. what drives membership sign up as opposed to basic listening sign up?
Website / Player
We should also have website and newsletter response stats in there… our stats tooling needs to be set up again. We had this: https://www.offen.dev/ …but by default it collected too much. Needs proper requirements for setup. In particular, we need to ‘meter up’ the new signup flow on the website, so that we could one day do this type of thing (EXAMPLE ONLY):
Social and Community Reporting
There has been little systematic reporting to date, but Philip Brown and @nphilmasiakowski are busy looking at the potential to cover these areas, as suggested at a high level in the KPI dashboard and in the points above.
Reporting and Governance
Reports and statistics are useless if they are not actionable, and actioned in a governance process. It is not within the scope of this topic to address the governance processes <links?>, but reporting requirements defined here should have a home and target purpose in the measurement of Resonate processes and their governance by the co-operative.
Current Reports and Artist Payments
There is a 45 minute video tutorial which gives a tour of the current stats spreadsheet and an intro explanation of the update process. It’s available only to volunteer administrators at the moment, owing to privacy constraints:
Contents:
- Introduction
- Overview
- Importing the Data
- Checks after Import
- Reviewing the Dashboard
- Financial Statistics
- Payments and Statements
- Version Control and Conclusion
There are additional steps involving the attribution of any missing ISRC codes on the detailed statements where this is required by labels and distributors to properly identify releases for rights and onward revenue distribution.
Scope: these statistics are based on what is currently recorded by the player and the reference data available at reporting time.
A technical overview of the current database schema and the query that creates the CSV query results files is available separately (see Platform link to follow)
A new reporting solution design will be created when:
- There has been sufficient review and comment on these statistics (relevance, completeness, accuracy etc)
- We have stable new back-end source data structures to work from (still changing at the time of writing)
There are a whole lot more monthly statistics outside the scope of the player datasets that we should also be tracking as a co-op… for example, social media and engagement in our user forum.
Trend reporting is particularly important to us. We should be tracking the stats month by month and comparing with our growth targets, so there is a lot of scope to collect previous month figures for the playstats and collect additional membership, financial support and social engagement data so that we have a management tool that is fit for purpose.
Direct Artist, Label and Distributor level sales reporting and track-level reports are produced monthly by the spreadsheet reporting process.
Reporting to Rights Holders / Rights Administrators (Digital Sales Reporting)
We have new obligations under our ICE licence… to be investigated.
Project Reporting
It is desirable to provide a degree of consistency in reporting across Resonate projects in terms of financials, resources and delivery against a roadmap and completion of Resonate’s vision / architecture.
Reporting to National Authorities and Grantors (Taxes and Company Reporting, formal grantor project reporting requirements)
Mostly this is driven through our accounting and financials processes, but it’s important to register here the necessary alignment between the financial, volunteer activity and social perspectives.
Security and Access Control
Most of our current reporting is done in a spreadsheet template, fed by CSV extracts from the player database. It’s not possible to share the granular level data in spreadsheet beyond the core team working on stats owing to privacy and security concerns. The current solution is purely temporary and future solutions (see Platform) will include role based access control and permissioning.