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History and Forming of the DAA Implementation Task Force

By Garrett Mark Scott posted 03-14-2022 09:16 PM

  
This article is written to serve as a documentation of the implementation journey our members have been on and serves as a testament of the DAA DNA.

Any member in our organization can make a difference and rise as an organic leader.

Authors:
June 2019 - Present


November 2021


This was a big month! We had our first official election following our group's bylaws! From this point on, operations of this task force can live sustainably through our volunteers by following our Governing Rules of the Implementation Task Force. A large effort over the past year has been dedicated to 'ironing out the kinks' on how to handle our meetings in the most productive way possible.
OFFICERS 2022 ELECTED
Visualization Officer: Mark Redfern
Technical Engineering Officer: Damon Guidaitis
Governance & Privacy Officer: Courtney Fenstermaker

October 2021


Our Implementation Task Force successfully created our Google Cloud Platform and linked it to GA4!


March 2021


OFFICERS 2021 ELECTED
Link Tracking Officer: Laura Reed
Visualization Officer: Marc Richard
Technical Engineering Officer: Damon Guidaitis
Governance & Privacy Officer: Courtney Fenstermaker

February 2021


The first DAA Implementation Task Force meeting was had!

November - January 2021


This marks the passing of the baton from Wpromote to our volunteer members of the DAA! This was the time to build a task force infrastructure that would last! The original format of the Implementation Task Force operations focused on a loose form of Parliamentary procedure. To learn what he could, Garrett even joined the Young Professionals in Parliamentary Procedure Association and did his duty to read an introductory book on the topic,"Idiot's Guide to Parliamentary Procedure." This was in efforts to run the best meetings possible. With documentation made, a stout Google Drive folder structure, and Google Group created it was time to recruit our founding members!

October 2020


@Matt Windle of Wpromote and Garrett completed validation and provided sign off that the 'stock' analytics implementation of the DAA has been complete. This felt like winning the Pennsylvania PowerBall! 
Out of curiosity, Garrett queried his Gmail and throughout the duration of the project Matt and him shared 449 emails! View the actual powerpoint used in the last presentation.

September 2020


Wpromote provides the solution design package.
DAA - Architecture Overview - By Wpromote : This was a high level view of the tracking structure. A good starting point for a volunteer. 
DAA - Event Structure and Resource Asset - By Wpromote : This is a resource asset that maps out the event structure and has additional tabs for details. 
DAA - Technical Specifications - By Wpromote : This is more technical documentation for a developer to utilize. Coding will be maintained in GTM. 

August 2020


Another big month here.  @Will Mather and @Rebecca Kim created our first visualization that we used for our OneConference measurement! This was also the month that we were finally able to place our GTM container on the Jobs Portal. There were a lot of people to talk with in order to make that happen and sometimes that is the trickiest part. We all had a big sigh of relief once we were able to get that because the Job portal is a large part of our organization!

July 2020


This was a good month where we finalized the modifications to the pre-existing UTM Builder with some additional tracking parameters. We have gone through some rebranding with the DAA colors but as of March 2021 we are still using this document! Once of the cool things we have is an 'Influencer' lookup table where we hope to one day be able to gamify DAA link tracking with a self-serve link builder and then a public Data Studio visualization showing who was able to influence visitors to come to our website. That will be a bigger project though!



At this point during the process, Garrett was doing a lot of work on his own and wanted to thank Valerie Kroll for the help and give her a status update. The below is what was summarized. One of the cool things you will notice is that the final bullet is some of the first documentation of the Task Force forming!
  • OneConference 2020 is looking positive for tracking by the time registration opens next week
  • There are now blockers getting a GTM container on the Member purchase transaction page. I've taken this on to get to the bottom of.
  • GoToWebinar source tracking is closer to completion than ever. We have overcome the technical barriers I had concerns about.
  • Zoom meetings will only have tracking if we use ZoomWebinars... It does not seem we have access and support has not got back yet, this is a secondary task for me right now
  • Path/Blue Sky, we had positive momentum here but made it secondary to OneConference registrations. There are dataLayer issues where ONLY revenue is coming through in GA. No product names or quantity.
  • All cross-domain tracking will be completed in final phase, including Community website
  • As a long-term Community Task Force member, I can let you know we already have some cool things in the works that will coincide with this larger project.
  • After the above are complete I have about 7 candidates for the Task-Force team to maintain and optimize our implementation
    • Meeting 1 will be an introduction
    • Meeting 2 will be a long recorded meeting where Wpromote will go over documentation and set up of the analytics covering the SDR, GA, GTM, and anything else
    • Meeting 3 and beyond will be persistent monthly task force meetings. My first goal will be creating various reporting visualizations for our various teams, especially Virtual side

June 2020


What our KBR document actually turned into since March 2020. This was the most effective version for our team even though it wasn't really pretty! Another roadblock we got past was that a particular vendor wanted $135 to place a GTM tag on our site for us. We felt that was a bit expensive considering they placed their own GTM container on our domain without asking. We were able to get our GTM placed :) 

May 2020


This was another big month and where we had our official first kick off with WPromote! During this first month WPromote was able to provide a really nice project timeline and converted our Business Requirements into more of a text format.







April 2020


We finally got around to making recruitment posts! We got a great responses from both private practitioners as well as agencies. This was a big moment where we had to choose between starting our implementation journey with individual practitioners or an agency. We had some discussion and ultimately decided to go with the agency WPromote. They had great spirit and would already have a system of working together to enable a quicker turnaround. As a follow up to the individual practitioners that showed interest, we invited them to serve as founding members of the Digital Implementation Task force that would follow up Wpromotes initial implementation.




As well as updating our section on the DAA Volunteering page.




March 2020


This month the biggest step was that we made a more formal Business Requirements Document and reviewed it with key stakeholders.

February 2020


@Lori Brock helps instrument a requirements prep call. At this point the implementation project was primarily spear headed by Garrett. He wanted to note that both him and Lori had great times on the calls that they had and a lot was learned through the process of mutual collaboration on the bigger project at hand.


January 2020


Following Valerie's challenge for Garrett to form a team. He set up a clearly documented Task Library with the intentions to present clearly articulated goals for DAA members to read, comprehend, and then decide to help with if interest was there. 

December 2019


(Unmodified from Garrett's Implementation Journal)
At some point between me raising my hand to help push forward the implementation of the community task force analytics it was transformed into me spearheading the implementation of the whole DAA along with all of its subdomains. Mind you I have not needed to set up cross-domain tracking once in my life yet so this was certainly a little intimidating. Again though, this was an opportunity to make a mark and connect with some of the most brilliant members of the DAA! I pushed forward. I tracked down the right contacts to help and hosted an introductory meeting to share the vision and what items needed to happen. You'll notice that EFFORT was put into creating the visualization below and when others see that you care they tend to be more helpful.
At this point I have managed to track down gatekeepers, explained what my goal is, and have been granted permissions to everything I needed so that access would not be a roadblock for any members looking to help.

November 2019


(Unmodified from Garrett's Implementation Journal)
Life happened and there was no follow up from the initial kick-off email seen from months prior in June. I followed up. Follow ups are ok. I did this and got all sorts of documents with others' ideas and trajectory of the plan of implementing the analytics of the Digital Analytics Association. This was a lot to go through and one of the toughest endeavors was finding the right people to communicate with.

June 2019


(Unmodified from Garrett's Implementation Journal)
Picking up in 2019 I was volunteering on the Community Task Force. Around this time in my personal career I was into my 2nd year of web analytics and sucking up everything I could from the DAA and reading E-Nor's Google Analytics breakthrough. Having enough analytics curiosity and desire to learn, I noticed areas for tracking opportunities for improvement on the DAA Community Section. I reached out and was welcomed with warm greetings. This lead to what I would consider the first kick-off email laid out below where the overall structure of the accounts was laid out. 


@Valerie Kroll is a guiding mentor of mine to this day and explained to me that I would not be allowed to try to take this on my own but rather needed to figure out how to lead and inspire a team. 
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