Case study
When the team at Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity (GOSH Charity) asked me to help them develop a measurement framework as part of a wider content strategy project, the brief seemed straightforward enough: build something that shows the impact of the team’s work. In practice, it turned out to be one of the more complex and interesting measurement challenges I’ve worked on — and the framework we ended up with looks nothing like a standard content dashboard.
This is the story of how we built it, why it works the way it does, and what I think other charity content teams can take away from this example.
About GOSH Charity
Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity is the charity that supports Great Ormond Street Hospital. For more than 170 years, Great Ormond Street has cared for some of the most seriously ill children in the country — children with rare, complex, and life-threatening conditions. The charity exists to support that work: funding pioneering research, world-class facilities, and the wraparound care that makes incredibly challenging situations more bearable for children and their families.
For many people, GOSH is deeply personal. Families who have been through its doors carry a fierce loyalty to the hospital. That emotional connection is one of GOSH Charity’s greatest assets, and storytelling is at the heart of how it’s sustained.
The content team sits within the charity’s brand and marcomms function. It’s a small, skilled team responsible for producing the charity’s most significant content: hero narratives, video, photography, copy, and messaging.
The context: a content strategy in progress
The measurement framework was one part of a larger content strategy project I delivered for GOSH Charity — a project focused on shifting the team from a reactive production unit to a strategic storytelling function.
The strategy is built around three guiding policies:
- A storytelling remit — the content team leads narrative strategy and produces hero content: the big, high-quality stories and assets that anchor campaigns and build the brand.
- A hybrid structure — the central content team owns content strategy, standards, and hero production, while other teams across marcomms and fundraising create content within guardrails the content team sets. Rather than trying to do everything themselves, the content team enables and elevates that distributed activity. (Read more about hybrid and other organising structures for content teams.)
- A content operations focus — clearer workflows, better governance, cross-marcomms enablement, and measurement. The infrastructure that makes the other two policies sustainable. (Read the guide to content ops.)
The process
Starting with a workshop
I’d been working with the team for quite a while by the time we got to measurement, so I had a good understanding of how things worked, what the team was being asked to do, and where the tensions were. That context was essential — I don’t think you can build a meaningful measurement framework without it.
We started with a workshop with Charlotte Young, Senior Brand Content Manager and Julia Clague, Senior Content Manager. The goal wasn’t to design KPIs — it was to do the thinking that needs to happen *before* you can design KPIs.
First, we listed every organisational goal that was in scope for the team — drawn from the brand strategy, marcomms business plan, and organisational priorities. We captured everything: fundraising targets, brand awareness goals, channel engagement targets, EDI commitments, efficiency objectives, and more.
Then we scored each goal against three criteria:
- Influence: how much could the content team genuinely affect this?)
- Accountability: would the team be held accountable for it?
- Measurability: could it actually be tracked?
This gave us a prioritised shortlist of goals to focus on — a critical step, because trying to claim impact across everything is how you end up with a framework that proves nothing.
Finally, for each priority goal, we mapped out an influence model: what content activities connect to this goal, what’s the theory of change (if we do X, then Y happens, which leads to Z outcome), and what would ‘good’ look like.
This is the approach I take to building KPIs. A meaningful KPI doesn’t start with the number — it starts with the goal. The chain runs: goal → strategy → objective → KPI. If you start with the metric and work backwards, you’ll end up measuring something that’s easy to track but doesn’t actually matter. Read Building a measurement framework: a guide to proving content value.
Working through drafts together
After the workshop, I drafted a first version of the framework. Charlotte and I then worked through it together in a dedicated session — reviewing each KPI, testing whether the logic held, challenging the targets, and checking that the data sources were realistic. There were a couple of rounds of feedback and refinement before we landed on something we were both confident in.
This co-creation process mattered. I could bring strategic thinking and measurement expertise, but Charlotte knew the organisation, the relationships, the practical constraints, and what leadership would and wouldn’t find credible. (A shout out to Charlotte: she has the most incredible level of organisational expertise, which is only matched by her passion for the work GOSH does). A framework I’d built in isolation would have missed things. Working through it together made it better and, crucially, made it something Charlotte and the team could own.
Getting into the implementation detail
The final step was implementation — a working session focused entirely on the practical question of how to actually make this happen.
This is a step that often gets skipped, and that’s a mistake. A framework that sits in a document and never gets used isn’t a framework — it’s a list of good intentions. We went through each KPI and asked: what needs to happen first? What data sources do we have access to? What do we need to set up? Who owns this? What can we start now, and what needs something else to be in place first?
The implementation session was where the framework became real. It’s also where we caught things that looked straightforward on paper but were actually more complicated — and where we got into the fine detail of how to gather the data points we needed. Nicola Stebbing did an incredible job of understanding and then taking charge of all the complexity at this stage.
The central challenge: a team that doesn’t own channels
Before I get into the KPIs themselves, I need to explain the thing that makes GOSH Charity’s content team unusual from a measurement perspective.
Most content measurement frameworks assume that the team owns the channels their content appears on. Traffic, engagement, conversion — these are the standard pillars. They make sense when the content team runs the website, publishes the social media, manages the email programme. You can draw a reasonably direct line from the content to the outcome.
GOSH Charity’s content team doesn’t work like that. They produce assets — video, photography, copy, messaging, stories — that are then used by channel owners, fundraising teams, campaign leads, and comms colleagues across the organisation. The content team might produce a powerful patient film. That film might be used in a fundraising email, in a paid campaign, on the website, at an event. The content team doesn’t control any of those channels. They don’t decide who sees the film or when. They can’t attribute the donations that follow.
This means a traditional content measurement approach — tracking traffic, engagement, conversion — doesn’t work. The numbers exist, but they’re not owned by the content team. Reporting on them would mean claiming credit for outcomes you can’t genuinely control, which isn’t just misleading — it’s the kind of measurement that can risk your credibility.
We spent time in the early stages of the process looking at attribution modelling — trying to find a way to trace the content team’s contribution to channel and conversion outcomes. We came to the conclusion that it wasn’t the right approach, not because the contribution isn’t real, but because the causal chain is too long and too tangled. The content team’s work enables good campaign outcomes. It doesn’t produce them alone, and pretending otherwise would have undermined what we were trying to build.
So we went back to the goal-setting work and asked a different question: given that the team produces assets rather than owning channels, what can we actually measure that shows the team’s strategic value?
The KPIs we built
The framework has seven KPIs, grouped loosely by goal type.
1. Story performance insights for priority audiences
The number of documented, evidence-based insights about what storytelling works.
This is probably the most unusual KPI in the framework. It doesn’t measure content volume or reach. It measures whether the team is building an evidence base — learning what works, writing it down, and using it to make better decisions.
The theory of change is: if the content team tests and experiments with different story types and formats, and documents what they learn, they’ll produce increasingly effective content over time. That evidence base also becomes a resource for the rest of the marcomms team — turning individual insights into shared knowledge.
An insight only counts towards the KPI when it’s evidence-based, documented in a shareable format, validated by the campaign or brand team as useful, and applied in campaign planning or content decisions. That last bit is important — an insight that sits in a document and influences nothing isn’t really an insight. It has to change something.
How we measure this: There’s lots of insight being shared by the teams that use content assets, so the starting point is pulling together what already exists rather than building from scratch. Beyond that, the team will also be starting to run its own content tests — like A/B testing, focus groups and community consultation. The key action from the implementation session was to start a simple database — a spreadsheet — to log insights as they emerge from evaluations, reports, and team knowledge. Once an insight exists, it gets shared: this is now a standing agenda item in content team meetings.
2. Brand compliance rate
The percentage of content created or led by the content team that meets brand identity standards.
This one is more straightforward, but important for a specific reason: one of the content team’s core responsibilities is to be the custodian of brand quality. In the hybrid model, where other teams are also producing content, that role becomes even more critical. If the content team’s own output isn’t consistently on-brand, the case for their leadership role in setting standards for others falls apart.
We put boundaries around the scope — hero stories, campaign assets, toolkit-guided content. Ad hoc work produced by other teams without content team involvement is not included. We’re measuring what the team controls, not trying to claim accountability for everything that gets made across the organisation.
How we measure this: A content audit, run twice a year, reviewing a sample of 20 to 30 recent pieces against brand identity standards. We also discussed running real-time brand reviews in team meetings — looking at content together as a critique exercise, which has the added benefit of being a learning opportunity as well as a measurement one.
3. Toolkit adoption and performance improvement
The number of marcomms and fundraising teams actively using the narrative toolkit.
The narrative toolkit is a central output of the content strategy — a practical resource that helps other teams produce better, more consistent, more on-brand content. But delivering a toolkit is not the same as it having an impact. A toolkit that lives in a shared drive and never gets opened has no value. This KPI measures whether the toolkit is actually doing its job.
‘Actively using’ has a specific definition: it means that a stakeholder has attended training, used the toolkit to inform content, referenced it in content planning or briefs, and/or engaged with updates.
How we measure this: There’s a lot of manual tracking in a spreadsheet here, for example training attendance, or mentions in briefs and planning. The team can also get data on toolkit content usage from their asset management system.
4. Content reuse
The average number of times each hero content piece is used across channels, campaigns and teams.
Content production is expensive. A hero film takes significant time and budget to make. If it’s used once in one campaign and then archived, the return on that investment is low. This KPI encourages the team to think about reuse from the start — to create assets with longevity in mind, and to actively promote reuse across the organisation.
How we measure this: Manual tracking, built into the post-campaign retrospective process. After each campaign, the team records how many times each hero asset was used and where. Again, there’s also data from the asset management system on what assets people have downloaded.
5. Story subject diversification
The percentage of hero stories featuring non-patient subjects — including staff, researchers, supporters and clinicians.
GOSH Charity’s storytelling has historically centred on patient and family stories. That makes sense — these are powerful, emotionally resonant, and central to the charity’s identity. But it also creates a narrow picture of what GOSH does. Stories about researchers, clinicians, supporters, and staff help audiences understand the full breadth of the charity’s work, and open up different pathways to connection and action.
This KPI emerged directly from the storytelling remit — one of the three guiding policies of the content strategy. Part of the team’s job is to expand the story ecosystem. Measuring subject diversification creates accountability for that.
How we measure this: A custom ‘story type’ field added to the team’s project management system — a small operational change that makes the data easy to capture as work is initiated rather than trying to reconstruct it retrospectively.
6. Accessibility compliance
The percentage of new content meeting accessibility standards — 100% of videos subtitled, 50% with audio description, and written content meeting agreed readability standards.
Accessibility isn’t an add-on. It’s a commitment to ensuring that everyone — including disabled people — can engage with the charity’s content. This KPI makes that commitment measurable rather than aspirational.
The targets are deliberately differentiated. Subtitles are achievable at 100% immediately and are non-negotiable. Audio description is more resource-intensive, so the target is 50% — ambitious but realistic as a first-year benchmark.
How we measure this: Content production records — a simple log of which content was produced with which accessibility features. This is also checked as part of the twice-yearly content audit, which covers two KPIs at the same time, keeping the audit burden manageable.
7. Stakeholder satisfaction with content collaboration
An annual survey of key stakeholders rating the effectiveness of their collaboration with the content team.
In a hybrid operating model, the content team’s relationships with the rest of the marcomms function matter a lot. If fundraising and comms colleagues find it difficult to work with the content team — unclear processes, slow turnaround, feeling like they’re being told what to do rather than supported — the whole model breaks down. This KPI measures the health of those relationships.
How we measure this: A short annual survey sent to a small number of key stakeholders: fundraising leads, marcomms colleagues who work with the content team regularly. The survey covers specific dimensions rather than asking for a general satisfaction score, so that if scores are low, we can tell where the problem is.
What makes this framework unusual
Looking at these seven KPIs together, a few things stand out.
None of them are traffic, engagement rate, page views, or social impressions. Those numbers exist, and they’re useful for the team’s internal optimisation work. But they’re not KPIs — they’re metrics. The distinction matters. A metric tells you something happened. But a KPI tells you whether your strategy is working. The content team’s strategy isn’t to generate traffic. It’s to produce great content that enables great storytelling, builds brand, supports campaigns, and develops the capability of the whole marcomms function. The KPIs reflect that.
The framework is also honest about the team’s circle of control. Several of the KPIs measure things the content team genuinely owns — brand compliance of their own output, the quality and diversity of stories they tell, and the accessibility of content they produce. Others measure the team’s enabling role — toolkit adoption, stakeholder relationships. Very few try to claim outcomes that are driven by channels, audiences, or campaign factors the team doesn’t control.
Key takeaways
- Start with the goal, not the number. It sounds obvious, but most measurement conversations start with ‘what should we track?’ rather than ‘what are we actually trying to achieve?’ Start with the goal. It will save you a lot of time picking metrics that don’t matter.
- Be honest about attribution. If your team doesn’t own the outcome, don’t claim it. Credibility with leaders comes from showing you understand your impact, not from inflating your contribution to it.
- Measurement is an organisational design question as much as a data question. The challenge at GOSH Charity wasn’t finding the right analytics tool. It was understanding how the team’s work connected to the organisation’s goals, and designing a measurement approach that reflected that honestly. That understanding comes from time spent in the organisation, not from a spreadsheet.
- Implementation is a deliverable. A framework document is not a measurement practice. Getting measurement to happen requires working through the practical detail — who owns it, what data source, what first action, by when. Build that into the process, not as an afterthought.
- The right KPIs will look unusual. If your measurement framework looks like everyone else’s, you probably haven’t thought hard enough about what your team specifically does and what it’s trying to achieve. GOSH Charity’s KPIs are, I think, totally unique to them. And that’s how it should be. Measurement should reflect the reality of how your team works, not a generic template for what content measurement is supposed to look like.
The framework we built for GOSH Charity won’t be right for every charity content team. The specific KPIs are shaped by the team’s remit, the organisation’s strategy, and the way GOSH Charity’s marcomms function is structured. But the process — starting with goals, working through influence models, being honest about attribution, and investing in implementation — is transferable. That’s the thing you should take with you from this case study.
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