The MORI Impact Tracker
MORI stands for Measures of Our Reporting’s Influence. The MORI Impact Tracker is a WordPress plugin to help track and report the impact of your organization's journalism.
Overview
The MORI Impact Tracker plugin allows you to:
- Record an individual impact and attach it to a particular WordPress post, or to a broader category or tag. Impacts can stand alone, too.
- Review impacts over time. Search and sort them as you would with WordPress posts.
- Export lists of impacts to a spreadsheet, for further data crunching and sharing with internal and external users.
It also includes a dashboard widget to display your latest impacts where anyone working in WordPress can see them regularly.
Installation
- Download the zip file from this Github repo
- Upload the 'chalkbeat-MORI' folder to your WordPress site's plugins directory, usually found at /wp-content/plugins
- Login to WordPress, click on Plugins in the left hand menu
- Select the 'MORI - Measures of Our Reporting’s Influence' plugin and click 'Activate'
- Review the plugin settings under the Settings > MORI menu
Features
MORI creates a new WordPress post type — "Impacts" — and a new taxonomy — "Impact Type". It also creates some tools for exporting those impacts for analysis.
The Impact post type
Use the Impact post type to track individual impacts of your journalism.
Create an Impact and edit it like a normal post. It can include links, images, and other metadata you might want to use to sort impacts later, such as categories and tags. Impacts are not published for public consumption, only saved in the WordPress database.
Each Impact post can be attached to a post, page, category, or tag, so you can always refer back to the particular story or series of stories that made a difference.
The Impact Type taxonomy
Impact Types are for tracking different types of impacts and operate just like tags. They can be anything you want them to be, such as "award", "legislative action" or even "lawsuit".
See further notes on impact type taxonomies in the docs.
Configure the Impact Types for your site in the MORI Settings.
Export Impacts
MORI allows you to export impacts as a .csv spreadsheet so you can analyze your work. These exports can include data about an impact as well as information about the post or page an impact is assigned to. This comes in handy for sharing impact data with internal users, such as your fundraising or management team, and perhaps external users such as funders, where appropriate.
Documentation
Development and Contributing
We hope this release is the beginning of a public conversation around how news organizations can track and report impact, and look forward to working with developers from other organizations as we continue to develop the MORI Platform. The community of practice around impact tracking is already vibrant; we hope this release helps it grow and share knowledge.
Please see the contributing guidelines for more on how to participate in the MORI project.