By Frank Ovaitt
As ever more money flows into event sponsorship, top management naturally starts asking what the company is getting in return. Increased sales are always a welcomed answer, of
course. But not all events are sales-oriented.
A paper by Bruce Jeffries-Fox, member of the Institute for Public Relations' Commission on PR Measurement & Evaluation, offers a straightforward primer on research and
measurement in this area. The paper starts with using research to select the right event.
According to Jeffries-Fox, successful events share three key characteristics:
1. They interest your target public
2. They are a good fit with your organization
3. They cultivate desired perceptions and behaviors
Successful events can follow a good-better-best trifecta of outcomes:
- Good: A good but low-budget research approach begins with a list of your target publics' interests, often available in marketing department databases. Trade associations
can also provide audience information for specific activities (think NASCAR demographics and psychographics, for example), often at no cost. Armed with real data on the interests
of your publics, you can get creative and use a variety of techniques to rank and evaluate candidate events against your targets. Even though this "good" approach provides no quantification, it does apply logic to identifying your best event possibilities and avoiding stupid mistakes.
- Better: A better approach would be to expose focus groups of your key publics to the list of possible events identified above. The results of this additional research can
then be analyzed against relative costs and risks for each possibility.
- Best: But the best approach would be to next conduct a survey involving significant numbers of your target publics. What do they think of the candidate events that made it
through the "good" and "better" screens? Be sure to ask about likely purchase behavior or other relevant outcomes.
Once you have implemented your event, you need to evaluate its success. There are four central questions to keep in mind concerning event evaluation:
1. How effective was the event in terms of desired impact on the target public?
2. Did the event change the targeted public in unexpected ways (desirable or undesirable)?
3. How cost-effective was the event?
4. What did we learn to improve future events?
Jeffries-Fox says that event objectives typically fall into three major categories, each of which may require different evaluation tools.
If your objectives are communications process-related, you'll need to track such things as attendance, favorability and message recall. If your objectives are communications
effects-related, you'll want to evaluate changes in awareness, understanding, purchase motivation, etc. And if your objectives are sales-related, you'll want to track actual
leads and sales.
The paper goes on to discuss a wide variety of different measurement tools for use in different situations. It's a recipe book for measuring everything from sales, media and
cost effectiveness, to return on investment when sales-related objectives represent the key rationale for sponsorship.
Finally, don't forget the learning factor. You need to diagnose what went right and what went wrong if you want to do better with every future event.
Jeffries-Fox concludes by saying, "PR leadership should insist that the normal course of business includes using research to develop and evaluate events. Doing so will allow
you to identify and implement more effective events in the future; and present solid data to upper management about impact and cost-effectiveness."
This and other Bruce Jeffries-Fox papers are available at http://www.instituteforpr.org.
Contact:
Frank Ovaitt is the President & CEO of the Institute for Public Relations. He can be reached at [email protected].