The importance of measuring the impact of Guru
While it may be clear to you and your team how valuable Guru is - preventing countless shoulder taps and the spread of misinformation - it can sometimes be challenging to articulate this impact to other teams and leaders at your company. When you can demonstrate Guru's value and impact on your company’s objectives, you'll ensure your colleagues and stakeholders are enthusiastically invested in your efforts to create a knowledge-driven culture. It is also a great way to highlight the incredible work you’ve done as a Guru champion!
How to show the impact of Guru
Below you will find three suggested ways to measure your impact with Guru, as well as a recording from a Guru Deep Dive webinar where we go through each method step-by-step.
🕥 Calculate time saved (~5 min to complete)
Every time you view a Guru Card, you are saving time by not having to leave your workflow to search across multiple platforms or shoulder tap a subject matter expert. Based on what we’ve heard from 1,000s of customers, this time saved is estimated to be around 3-5 minutes per Card view. With this in mind, you can easily demonstrate the amount of time Guru has saved your team by looking at the total number of Card Views in a specific period of time.
Open up the Guru web application and click on Analytics
Go to the User tab
Adjust the Date filter to your preferred dates - we suggest the last 90 days
Look at the User Views chart in the lower right of the page
Hover over the tile actions in the upper right of the chart and select Download data
Select CSV or Excel spreadsheet and click Download
Open the file (you can move it to a Google Sheet if you like) and calculate the sum of Card views from all users by highlighting the “Card Viewed” column
Also, take note of the total number of users by getting the total count from the User column, should you want to break down your numbers per user
Calculate your total time saved by multiplying the total # of Card views by 3,4 or 5 minutes (see example below)
💡 Tip
If you want to see how other Guru champions have leveraged this metric, check out this Guru Community post on Annual Total Card Views from 2021!
📝 Conduct a survey (~60 min to complete)
Conducting a survey is a great way to quickly gather both quantitative and qualitative data on what your team thinks about Guru and how it is impacting their day-to-day work. Here's how to get started:
Check out our template survey questions here
Choose a survey collection tool that your team is familiar with (e.g., Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or Typeform)
Customize the survey based on your goals and what information you are most interested in conveying to your leaders and stakeholders
Create a Guru Card with the survey form linked and a short description of why it’s important to fill it out
Tip: You can also embed the survey in a Card so your team can fill out their responses within the Card and not have to leave their workflow
Send out the Card to a specific user Group or to the All Members Group as an announcement
Set a deadline for completion and send a reminder in any other communication channels used at your company (e.g., Slack)
Summarize and share your results - create a few slides highlighting your findings in this deck
Discuss next steps with your leadership based on your learnings
💵 Calculate your impact and ROI
While Guru Analytics and survey data can be super helpful in telling your impact story, sometimes the easiest way to prove impact is a direct line to dollars saved.
Guru recently partnered with an independent research group, Forrester Consulting, to examine and uncover the quantifiable value metrics (ROI) that a company may realize after deploying Guru. To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this ROI, Forrester interviewed several customers with experience using Guru across various industries.
These customer interviews resulted in Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™️ (TEI) report, which shares risk-adjusted data that can be used as a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Guru on an organization.
With this data in mind, Guru has created a simple calculator for customers to use to demonstrate your estimated impact and ROI from leveraging Guru. Here's how to use this method of measuring your impact with Guru:
Make a copy of this spreadsheet and follow the instructions in Column P for what data to update
Note: Please ignore any rows and columns that are hidden and DO NOT edit these as they hold the computations
Fill in the required metrics on the “ROI Calc Input” tab in the sheet for your team – all yellow highlighted cells can be edited. You’ll need:
Total Number of Guru Authors and Average Hourly Pay
Total Number of Guru Users and Average Hourly Pay
Total Number of Guru Licenses and Cost Per User
Please make sure to review the Average Hourly Rate
Note: The Average Hourly Rates are based on Forrester suggested averages, and assume employees work 40 hours a week with 4 weeks of PTO
When entering the inputs, assume the average time saved below for the following roles:
Subject Matter Experts save 4 hours per week on average
Users save 30 seconds per question and receive 24 questions per person per day on average (Forrester assumed 50, but Guru halved this number to be conservative)
Review the “Output" tab to see your results
Add your company logo to the "Output" tab in the upper right corner
Export the output as a PDF and share it with your team, manager, or leadership
How to present your findings
After leveraging one or more of the methods explained above, you can add them into a slide deck - here is a handy slide template you can customize for your team. Schedule a meeting with your boss and other stakeholders to walk through the incredible impact your work with Guru has had on your business!