Melody Kramer, one of the two-person social media team at NPR has a great post discussing how she and her colleagues built a tool to measure key metrics around the public broadcaster’s content. The post is a great overview of newsroom tool development, but more than that, it displays a great understanding of how to use tools to support and drive culture change.

You can build the most useful tool in the world, but if you can’t change people’s behaviors so that they use the tool and understand the value of the tool, then what’s the point? Culture—and changing existing habits—is key to introducing a new product in a newsroom.

How did they change culture?

To support the necessary cultural change we also launched the dashboard simultaneously with an auto-generated daily analytics email—one that summarizes the dashboard’s stats from the previous day, and linked to the dashboard for the 50 top stories from the day before—instead of the stories themselves. This means that everyone at NPR is exposed to the dashboard on a daily basis. In addition, we send out a daily email with social tips and tricks.

Brilliant post well worth reading.