On the Hunt for Best Practices? Look to Your Peers!

If you’re a local government organization, odds are you have a strategic plan with a set of goals aimed at meeting the needs of your citizens. You likely have measures helping you track your progress toward achieving those goals, with targets for where you’d like to be now and a year from now. But how can you know if these targets are realistic? Are you setting the bar too high—or, perhaps worse, not asking your team for enough?

What if you could see what targets other local governments like yours were setting for their goals—and how your team measures up?

Maybe you’d also like to see how you compare to the national leaders to establish what you’re working towards.

We know the process of sharing data is difficult, but we’ve got you covered. How would you go about it?

In practice, this type of peer data sharing can be a headache to arrange. Accessing this data for each organization requires finding the right point of contact at every city or county you care to collaborate with to extend your request. Then you have to figure out where to store their data within your systems and how to keep it up to date. Are you prepared to follow up with each benchmarking partner every reporting period for the latest information? It’d be an ongoing burden on both sides, and the process is vulnerable should your contact choose to move on to a new position.

So how can you create these connections—these opportunities to network and share with other organizations—to improve your local government’s performance? ClearPoint has the Community and Peer-to-Peer Sharing options to make it easy.

Benchmarking with the ClearPoint Community

We know how important benchmarking with peers and leaders is to our local government clients, and we wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to connect, collaborate, and share directly in ClearPoint. That’s why we’ve reimagined our Measure Library to enable live benchmarking and streamlined peer to peer sharing of the data you already have stored in our system.

While ClearPoint’s new benchmarking and sharing features will make sharing simple, we also wanted to keep the connection human. As we’ve been developing these new capabilities to enhance networking within ClearPoint, we’ve also been actively expanding our community of local governments ready and willing to learn and share with their peers.

Many of these practitioners have already participated in the regional and national best practice sharing events that connected the right people across the right organizations, shaping the bedrock of our community. Now we’re taking ClearPoint Community sharing one step further by enabling live data sharing among communities within the tool. We call it Peer-to-Peer Sharing.

Introducing Sharing

With Peer-to-Peer Sharing in the Measure Library in ClearPoint, you can link a data series from another organization’s measure directly to the measure you’re tracking in your own ClearPoint account. Concerned about whether or not your EMS response times are as fast as possible? Why not pull in EMS response times in similarly sized cities into your measure to offer more context on what you can expect from your own team? You could even use this information to create an average value for comparison.

From there you can pay it forward by sharing your own metrics in the Measure Library for others to learn from. You can also search the library to find measures from other organizations that you’d like to benchmark against. Not only can these measures be pulled into your data tables in ClearPoint, they can be charted right alongside your own information.

With peer to peer sharing, your benchmarking is live. When your peers update their information in their own accounts in ClearPoint, it will update in your account as well; no follow-up required. That means you don’t have to wait for an annual benchmarking report to come out in order to compare your performance to others,’ and you don’t have to spend time chasing down your peers to secure the information you need.

You also can create regional Measure Libraries.  So, if you want to share 10 measures with your neighbor local governments, but you are not ready to share them with the entire government community, you can do that as well.  Choose who you share with.

Standard Scorecard for Easy Sharing Across Reporting Styles

You may be wondering: how would this all work in practice? We know that different organizations manage and report in different ways. Different organizations operate on different fiscal years, some use quarterly versus monthly reporting frequencies, etc. So how can we compare measures side by side on different reporting frequencies or timelines?

By syncing your reporting schedule to our universal scorecard time periods, you can convert your measures to a standard format that all ClearPoint users have. This will allow you to pull and push data from the Measure Library in the format you need for quick comparison.

Beyond Benchmarking: Networking & Growth

Find a city in the Measure Library doing particularly well at responding to emergencies quickly or keeping their citizens satisfied? Now that you’ve identified a leader for a measure, you can reach out to the established ClearPoint contact who added the measure to learn more about where their data comes from, what their source and formula is, and how they’ve achieved those impressive rates. You can view the charts they build to make decisions based on real data and results and discuss which visualizations tend to work best.

But the sharing doesn’t have to end there! You can create a private benchmarking group only with the communities you think best represent the goals and resources of your local government, then set standards for what information all members of the group will share. By creating this private community, you’ll create a personalized sounding board for new ideas and a forum for sharing best practices that’ll help you succeed.

Prefer to do your networking in person? You should engage in a discussion about Measure Library measures at one of the several events we host each year.

ClearPoint Connects: Events around the Country

We host events several times a year to bring our Community together to share best practices. At our Community Meetings, you can talk with others in your region about how they’re measuring performance across their entire organization. At our annual summit, you can connect with other ClearPoint users and strategy and performance management experts. Or you can choose to get involved through one of our local government partners—we’d love to see you at conferences for Engaging Local Government Leaders, the Alliance for Innovation, and/or the Florida Government Finance Officers Association; let us know if you’ll be in attendance so we can make sure to reach out!

Conclusion: Connecting in the ClearPoint Community

From bolstering our Community of expert practitioners to enabling peer-to-peer sharing in the tool, we’re hard at work fostering connections and growth amongst our Community. Our hope is to make it easier for our Community members to learn from one another and establish standards for their own performance. It’s all part of our larger goal to simplify the process of data-driven decision making for our clients.

Whether you’re looking to find new measures for inspiration, compare your performance to others like you, or engage in ongoing sharing with a select group of your peers, we’re here and happy to help! Let us know if you have thoughts on what might help you engage with our Community, or if you have any thoughts or questions about the new features being released.

In the meantime, we can’t wait to connect.