Inspired by the book, "How to Measure Anything", I would argue that we have a hard measuring Developer Advocacy (or Evangelism) because we haven't sufficiently defined it. More specifically, we don't have a shared understanding about how our efforts change the world around us.

I'm relatively new to this role, although I've done development, architecture, sales, marketing, product management, and many other roles. I do not yet understand the value of measuring those things you characterized as easy measurements and later as direct measures. For comparison, those seem like measuring developers by lines of code or marketing by emails sent. My experience tells me I want less of those things, not more, to achieve the same result.

To me, only the things characterized as "not so easy" and indirect, make sense. These seem closer to "the end goal" suggested above. But perhaps the term "end goal" is too finite. Rather than measure the above concepts as "end goals", I would think about them as flow like the way Dave McClure and Ash Maurya would have startups measure cohorts moving through a funnel. So rather than "end goal", I prefer the word "impact" and the technique of Impact Mapping as described by Gojko Adzic. In that technique, "impact" is a behavior change for some group of people.

As Developer Advocates, we might be trying to influence the same group of people -- developers. But working for different companies, the change each of us wants will be different. Doesn't that mean that each of us should have different measures of success? It seems like this discussion can only be about the heuristics of measurement, not which measures.

Just a thought.