Bite Size Comms

Sound measurement and evaluation of our PR/comms activity is important. It is also one of the three big skills for practitioners, the other two being planning and creating content that engages our audiences. However, we tend to overcomplicate it. That, together with a lack of time and knowledge on how to do it, results in measurement and evaluation not being done. So here is my simplified 101 to measurement and evaluation of communications based on how I advise my PR apprentices.

Let’s start from scratch. Measurement is the collection of data, information and analytics. Evaluation is an analysis of that measurement data to understand what it tells us about our comms work.

We can split measurement into measuring regular activity, say every month or week, and ad hoc, at the end of a campaign or strategy. The most common form of regular measurement is to create a dashboard, a modern term for a document that portrays data. This dashboard should compare the last month’s (or week’s) data with the previous month’s to indicate changes. The dashboard should cover: 

• Media coverage (number of articles and their sentiment – positive, neutral or negative)

• Social media performance (reach or impressions and engagement rate for each social platform used)

• Newsletter performance (read rate or opening rate and click-through rate to links in the newsletter)

• Website page views (ranking the ten pages most visited plus visits to pages for specific campaigns)

• Internal communication (analytics from the internal comms platforms used),

• Any other type of content, like podcasts, blogs or thought leadership articles.

As only some people are comfortable with tables and numbers, add screenshots of the content that worked well to the dashboard.

For ad hoc measurement, nothing beats the AMEC Integrated Framework. This free tool is the gold standard for measuring campaigns. I introduced this to a large manufacturing company, and their comms teams loved it—so much so that they use the Framework as their planning model now. When planning a campaign, one should state how the objectives should eventually be measured. Bullets with the data sources that should be collected are fine.

The regular dashboard (and AMEC Framework if a campaign has recently been completed) should be on the agenda of a comms team meeting once a month. That is a good occasion for evaluation – analysis – to take place. I suggest you look at the results against the objectives of the campaign or the previous month’s data and determine why there were any changes to the projections. Discuss what worked well. The type of content, platform or process. Then, what worked less well, such as content, platform, or process? Finally, try to capture the learning from this evaluation as recommendations for future PR/comms activity.

That’s my measurement and evaluation 101.

[Image: Markus Winkler on Unsplash]