The numbers we agree to be held to, defined before the work starts.
Any firm can promise results. Very few will publish the definitions they agree to be held to, or the ones they refuse to report. These are ours, and they do not change once the contract is signed.
If a number cannot be traced to a person who contacted your program, we do not count it as performance.
A campaign report is not a performance record
Most outreach reporting is built for the agency that produced it. Impressions, reach, engagement rate, and follower growth all rise with spend, and none of them answers the question your funder will ask at renewal: how many people who needed this service found it, and what did each one cost.
You are not judged on attention. You are judged on enrollment against an obligated population in a defined service area, usually by someone comparing your numbers with last year’s.
So we start at the end. Before creative, before media, we write down what will be counted, who counts it, and how it will be reconciled. The definitions become part of the engagement, not a slide at the end of it.
VA’s own research on treatment-engagement campaigns found something that should change how outreach is budgeted. Exposure to the campaign did not move treatment initiation on its own. Sustained engagement with it did, and the more someone engaged, the better the outcome.
That is why we do not report impressions. Reaching someone and moving someone are different events, and only one of them shows up in a chart review.
Two kinds of program, two ways to measure.
Not every funded program ends in a referral. Measuring one as if it were the other produces numbers nobody can defend.
Track 01
Engagement programs
Programs that move a person toward a service. Suicide prevention outreach, treatment access, crisis line promotion, care navigation.
Measured in
- Qualified referrals
- Cost per qualified referral
- Enrollment conversion
- Time to first contact
Track 02
Prevention and awareness programs
Programs that change a behavior or a condition without a referral endpoint. Naloxone access, safe storage and disposal, youth prevention, stigma reduction.
Measured in
- Priority segment reach
- Message recall against a defined baseline
- Distribution and uptake of the specific resource
- Partner activation
We agree which set applies before the work starts, and the Reach Audit establishes the baseline either way.
These are the numbers we report. Here is exactly what each one means.
- Qualified Referral
- A person who contacts your program through a tracked outreach source and screens eligible. Not a click. Not a form fill.
- Cost Per Qualified Referral
- Total outreach spend divided by qualified referrals. For programs with a referral endpoint, the clearest test of whether the outreach dollar worked. Prevention and awareness programs are measured on the second track above.
- Priority Segment Reach
- Reach measured against the specific geography and population your award obligates you to serve. Not against a general market.
- Referral Source Attribution
- Which channel produced which referral. This is what lets you defend a budget line instead of just reporting it.
- Time to First Contact
- Days from first tracked response to first contact. In this field, latency is not an efficiency metric. It is a risk metric.
- Enrollment Conversion
- Qualified referrals that become enrolled participants. This is the number that connects outreach to the outcome you are scored on.
- Message Review Pass Rate
- Percentage of assets passing documented safe-messaging review before release. Target is 100 percent. We report it every quarter. See the review protocol →
What the monthly report looks like
One page. Every number defined above, sourced, and compared against the month before it. No slide deck, no narrative padding.
Illustrative sample. Layout is fixed; the numbers are yours, and the comparison baseline comes from your Reach Audit.
Results are half the standard. Safety is the other half.
Message review pass rate is the one metric above that is not about performance. It is about not causing harm. The protocol behind it, the standards we apply, the four review stages, and the record you receive, is published as its own document.
Numbers we will not report as performance
We still collect most of these. They are useful for steering a campaign in flight. None of them belongs in a performance report, because none of them survives a hard question.
- Impressions
- Counts opportunities to see, not people reached. Rises with budget regardless of whether anyone in your service area was served.
- Engagement rate
- Measures interest in a post. A Veteran in crisis is not a high-engagement audience, and the people most in need engage least.
- Follower growth
- An audience you have to reach again tomorrow. It is not a pipeline and it is not eligibility-screened.
- Earned media value
- A dollar figure assigned to coverage by the firm that got the coverage. No funder we have worked with accepts it.
- Website sessions
- Useful for diagnosing where a message breaks. Reported as traffic, never as a referral, and never as a result.
When each number arrives
Reporting is scheduled, not requested. You should never have to ask us where a number is, and you should never be assembling a renewal narrative from memory.
- Week 3Baseline
Delivered with the Reach Audit. Service area coverage, current cost per qualified referral, and the message risk register. Yours to keep either way.
- MonthlyReferral report and working session
Qualified referrals by source, cost per referral, and time to first contact. Then an hour together to decide what changes: we bring a written recommendation on what to stop and where to move budget, and you approve it in the room.
- QuarterlyProgram review
Enrollment conversion, priority segment reach against the obligated service area, and message review pass rate. Written for your board or your funder, not for us.
- At renewalApplication packet
Year over year comparison and source data formatted for the outreach and engagement sections of your renewal application.
How a referral actually gets counted
Counting people who contact a behavioral health program is a records problem before it is a marketing problem. We build the counting method around your intake, your privacy obligations, and your staff’s actual capacity, in that order.
- 01Tracked sources, not guesses
Each channel gets its own path in: a dedicated number, a distinct landing page, a code on the printed piece, or a named partner referral. If a source cannot be tracked, we say so before it runs.
- 02One question at intake
Your staff already run an intake conversation. We add a single source question to it and a place to record the answer. That is the whole ask on your team.
- 03Aggregate only, no PHI
We work from counts your program produces. No protected health information moves to us, and no individual is identifiable in anything we report or store.
- 04Reconciled against enrollment
Monthly, the referral count is checked against the enrollments your system recorded. Where the two disagree, the discrepancy is reported rather than resolved in our favor.
If your program has no CRM or intake database, the Reach Audit says so plainly and the first month of work is building somewhere for the number to live.
The people reading your numbers are certified on the platforms producing them.
Search, analytics, and email measurement are where most outreach reporting goes wrong. We hold current certifications in all three.
What this buys you, twelve months out
At renewal, you will be able to write a sentence like this one:
We invested $64,000 in outreach, generated 411 qualified referrals at $156 each, improved cost per referral 34 percent year over year, and reached 91 percent of our obligated service area.
Most grantees cannot write that sentence. That is the whole point.
Illustrative figures. Baselines and targets are set from your own audit.
We hold to these definitions because we have worked under stricter ones. On a VA study, our creative was the measurement instrument and the outcome was whether Veterans entered care, confirmed by chart review.
Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center
PTSD direct-to-consumer outreach
Get your baseline first.
The Reach Audit takes three weeks and starts at $8,500. It establishes every number on this page for your program, so the first report has something to be compared against.
Victor Rogers, Founder and President
Reston, Virginia · info@strive3.com