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DAA Membership - One Member's Experience

By Elena Surcheva posted 11-20-2015 11:33 AM

  
Elena Surcheva is a model DAA member - one might even say a super model - due to the value she has derived from her membership.

When she was in college, Elena worked on a market research project and became fascinated by the idea of formulating a hypothesis, building an experiment around it, and then get answers that mean something. Then she moved from Bulgaria to Vancouver for the most common yet most unreasonable of reasons.

"Yes, I moved for love," she says, "It's a romantic story."

Her Bulgarian boyfriend wanted to do his Master's degree at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a long distance relationship ensued. When he was supposed to head back to Bulgaria, he suggested that Elena come to Canada... just to check it out. But we're talking about Vancouver here so it proved impossible to leave.

Elena started her professional career doing market research at Knowledge Network, a Canadian public broadcaster. As an Research Officer she studied data from the set-top box that tracked what TV shows a given household watched. 

Elena was obsessed with Day-Part analysis but discovered it wasn't nearly as telling and useful as the info that came out of the new WebTrends license Knowledge Network acquired. No one else in the company had any audience research experience so the web analytics task fell to her. 

TELUS hired Elena to focus solely on web analytics (campaign analysis in particular) as part of a team that was handling all the online advertising. It was her job to build the measurement framework and try to optimize it.

"Digital analytics was exciting," Elna says, "because here was this data that our visitors were leaving behind and no one was using it. We would pay a huge amount of money to do surveys or focus groups and we had this basically free data that was available to us.

"With every click and every play of a video or email open, they tell us what they need and what they value and that is very powerful."

During her time at TELUS, Elena became a member of the Digital Analytics Association and worked on getting the UBC/DAA online education program up and running. 

When asked why she volunteered, she admits to having been a very lonely web analyst. "I was the only web analyst in a 30,000-employee company at the time and I needed someone to bounce ideas off. Web analytics was just starting as a field and there were so many ways to approach a given problem. Getting feedback and learning what other people do to solve a specific problem was very helpful to me."

In 2011, Elena left TELUS to co-found ***, an analytics consultancy. She became an online tutor with the UBC/DAA program, helping dozens of others learn about web analytics. Elena found her time as a tutor very rewarding. "I am constantly surprised by the questions that students ask me." As usual, the teacher learned more than the students. "When I started doing this my main driver was to help grow the industry. I could see that there should be huge growth in the industry but it just wasn't coming fast enough.

Today, Elena works at MOGO** in a full time position. Why switch from consultancy to in-house analytics? "One of the drawbacks of being a consultant is that you don't get to see how things play out in the long-term. MOGO* gives me a chance to build a digital analytics practice pretty much from the ground up. I'm lucky to have some very smart people working with me and we're creating a systematic approach, the process side, and piecing together data integration, the technology side. We're now doubling our staff size."

The DAA's Competency Framework project has come just in time to help Elena with her recruiting efforts. 

"The Competency Framework sets a standard, if you will, of capabilities for the digital analytics industry. It's really helped me explain what I need to my manager, and it's given credibility for what I think I need because I have something to back me up. It's really helping me design the structure of the team over time. Now that I have a bit of a head count to play with, I can configure the team for the skills I need now and the those that I can train my people to do going forward."

Elena is also excited to get her hands on the DAA Competency Framework successors: a full set of job descriptions, and a self-assessment tool individuals and managers can use to evaluate skill sets.

"When my staff can tick some boxes about which things they're good at and which they want to learn, we can easily map out a growth path for each individual."

You don't have to have devoted a great deal of time and talent to the DAA to take advantage of the Competency Framework, the expert webinars or Though Leader Conversations the DAA produces, but perhaps you can see how Elena's volunteer work was reward in itself. As a project participant and a tutor at UBC, Elena helped a lot of people, did a lot to improve the industry she loves, and learned a great deal along the way.

"When I started volunteering, my boss at TELUS asked me, 'You're always complaining that you need more people and there's so much work to do. Why are you willing to work even harder? What are you hoping to achieve?' and I told him, 'To train more people who can help me!'"

If you're wondering about the value of a membership in the Digital Analytics Association, the answer is pretty clear. Just think of how it's helped Elena Surcheva: Super Model.

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