The Value in Measurement

I’m going to start this week’s post off with a little story. In my undergraduate Communication Arts program, there was a capstone course that was available for just 10 students every Spring semester. It was a very big deal to be chosen.  I was lucky enough to be selected for that course in my final semester. It was simply titled “Public Relations Campaigns” and the entire class was centered on researching, writing, and developing a campaign for a local non-profit in the area. We worked hard the entire semester on understanding what our non-profit needed and what we could do to help. We conducted in depth interviews with all the people who worked for the non-profit, as well as held focus groups and submitted surveys to other non-profits in the area trying to understand what the market was like for non-profits in Escambia County, FL. Once we had researched and written the campaign, we knew we had to include ways to measure the effectiveness of the campaign. What good would it be to hand over this beautifully researched and crafted plan if nobody could figure out if it worked or not? That will always stick with me personally as a reason why we should always take time to go back and review what works and what doesn’t. Not only is it valuable to us as communicators, but also to the people we work for as well. I still utilize measurements of success in my job today. If I know I have a solid plan for reaching 75 students and I don’t make the goal how will I know which part of the plan needs tweaking and which don’t if I don’t take the time to go back and review the measurements of success I have put in place for myself? As the saying goes, “Don’t reinvent the wheel,” and that is certainly true for measuring and evaluating the success and failure of strategic communication campaigns.

The end results of any strategic communications plan or campaign are often used to demonstrate ROI for public relations clients or organizations. The term ROI, or return on investment, is often used throughout the business world. It’s an expression that’s used to show how much profit you actually gain from the efforts you expend. Public Relations has certainly borrowed the word and utilize it quite often to “indicate the results of [an] activity” (Return on Investment in public relations: A critique of concepts used by practitioners from communication and management sciences perspectives.)  It seems that the community of public relations practitioners and scholars can agree to disagree on the term. While practitioners tend to view the term as a sort of catch-all through the definition I provided above, most scholars seem to be of the mind that the term should be more thoroughly defined for Public Relations. Some argue that it should be about measuring objectives rather than investment, others that the term should stand for identifying which part of traditional ROI is influenced by PR.  However all can agree that it’s the “complex nature of public relations activity that challenges ROI…as it can be difficult to disaggregate public relations from other communication and business effects” (Return on investment in public relations.)  The matter of proving ROI for a public relations plan or campaign can either help or hurt us and our client or organization. Understanding how we can show our worth and knowing where we are winning and failing when we deliver a plan or campaign is vital to continuing not only our individual careers, but the profession itself.

Just like anything else, you have to prove something works in order have it be considered a success. Proving your point can be difficult though for strategic communicators. Our value is inherent for just about every type of organization in the world but yet only recently has the job market and prospects for strategic communicators begun to improve (In recovery: Recruiters say PR job market is improving.)  Showcasing our successes and understanding how to evaluate our plans or campaigns is key to maintaining this positive momentum. In this day and age everybody is concerned over online public image. Companies are finally seeing the value in building actual, tangible relationships with their customers not just merely targeting them, as they have done in marketing activities of the past. Recently public relations professionals have realized that they can quantify “this abstract notion of relationship management as a means of contributing to the success and well being of an organization, as well as organizational financial success” (Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes.)  Taking the time to dissect the ins and outs of relationship building and applying those to our campaigns or plans can be crucial. And once the plan or campaign has been carefully drafted and carried out, how can we be sure it worked? There are various ways to measure the impact of digital campaigns today. Web traffic, referrals, social media shares, press release engagement, and outputs and outcomes are just a few of the variety of ways we can quantifiably and tangibly measure digital campaigns (5 ways to measure the impact of a digital PR campaign.)  There are also other desirable results we should keep in mind as we evaluate our campaigns and attempt to demonstrate our work’s ROI. Intangible results can be just as beneficial as tangible ones, like web traffic hits (Measuring ‘Intangibles’.) Customer satisfaction can’t be seen or touched but it can be measured and as such is a crucial intangible measurement that can translate to real ROI for a client or organization. What good does it do to focus on relationship building if we can’t show that that relationship building yielded real results? Measuring results are a huge part of what we do as strategic communicators and I think sometimes we can lose sight of why we need to do it. It may seem like it’s all about the bottom line for our organizations or clients but it’s also about demonstrating our work’s worth and showing why doing what we do is so important and valuable.

One last post to go before I take the blog on summer hiatus! I hope you have enjoyed these past few weeks as much as I have and I’ll “see” you soon!