You've taken the plunge. You've scraped up the money from your ever-tightening PR budget and have reserved a place in your senior management's collective mind for measuring
your PR program. Maybe you've even conducted your first round of measurement and have baselines in place. Now what? The next questions you should anticipate are: How do we know if
we've succeeded? When can we declare victory?
These days your bonuses - or even your job security - can depend on being able to declare that victory. So creating accurate, achievable goals for your PR program is a vital
step in creating any useful measurement program.
Guidelines For Goals
The Institute for Public Relations' Commission on Measurement and Evaluation provides guidelines for setting goals. Those guidelines tell you that a goal has to be
quantifiable, specify a target market and specify a period of time. For example, a goal might be, "We are going to raise awareness of our company among the general public from 10
percent at the end of last year to 20 percent by the end of this year." If you achieve the 20 percent, you can declare victory. If you achieve 25 percent, you can really blow your
own horn.
But how do you set that end-of-year number without aiming too high (and potentially missing the mark) or too low (making it seem as though you're padding your numbers)? Should
it be a 5 percent increment? 10 percent?
To set the most realistic goals for your public relations initiative you need two things:
- A relevant history of your past PR efforts, relating outputs to outcomes;
- An educated estimate of how this year's outputs will compare to last year's.
The first item includes a history of how many press releases, how many interviews, how many mail pieces, how many mall events. Outcomes might be expressed as quantified changes
in awareness, knowledge, attitudes or behavior. These data might come from surveys, from counting media hits, from counting the number of people who attend meetings, or from
tracking people who invest in your company. Summarize the relationship between that history of outputs and the nature of the outcomes. In words it would be: "When I produced this
many outputs of these types, here are the outcomes I achieved."
Now take into consideration how your coming-year outputs will compare to last year's. This has a lot to do with resources - time, budget, manpower - available to you and your
department. If your projected outputs will be about the same as last year, you should be able to expect roughly the same results. So if you achieved a 5 percent increase in
awareness last year, you should be able to expect another 5 percent this year.
Following this reasoning, if you're going to be able to generate twice the outputs this year as last (because your team's budget has doubled!), you should expect roughly twice
the results. If lower budgets or staff cuts have diminished your PR resources, adjust the expected outputs accordingly.
Sure, there are many outside factors to consider, so this is not nearly as scientific as it might sound, but it's the best you're going to be able to do without spending
serious money for greater precision.
History Lesson
What if you have no history to examine? Unfortunately, so far, there are few published case histories with sufficient detail to help. So call your friends and see if they can
give you some idea of what they've experienced. Call PR research vendors and ask them what they've experienced. These relationships between outputs and outcomes are known, they
just aren't published. Compare your level of effort to the situations these sources describe and draw the best conclusions you can.
Finally, if you simply can't find any relevant histories, tell your management exactly what you've been trying to do. Tell them that you wish to set a "stretch goal" of an
incremental 5 or 10 percent gain. Tell them you have put in place a measurement mechanism so that at the end of the year you will know how you have performed against this stretch
goal, but more importantly you will have generated the necessary data to set fact-based goals going forward. With any luck, they'll go for it and you'll be on your way.
(Bruce Jeffries-Fox is president of Jeffries-Fox Associates. He can be reached at 908/766-1414 or [email protected])
The Measurement Tree
The Institute for PR's Web site provides other valuable resources for planning your measurement programs. The Measurement Tree is a systematic approach to measuring any public
relations program. The "tree" provides insight on setting realistic goals and objectives, and also notes various factors affecting PR outcomes, offers the basics on measuring
media and provides links to a variety of studies and white papers on the best measurement initiatives in the business. For more information, go to http://www.instituteforpr.com/ measurement_tree.phtml.