Cost-Effective Ways to Quantify Your PR Efforts

PR measurement is an issue for both the big and the small. Many organizations can benefit from public relations and not all of them are huge corporations with massive budgets. Those with more modest budgets can gain a lot from the value and cost-efficiency of PR, but measurement is one area where small to midsize clients are not getting as much as they could out of their PR efforts.

MEASURING OUTPUTS

It’s very common to measure news clips, which is the raw number of clips, column inches, circulation numbers or advertising value equivalency (AVE). That’s sometimes known as measuring output. There is nothing wrong with measuring output; it’s certainly a measure of producing results. AVE and similar calculations, like the MRP score (Media Relations Rating Points, used by the Canadian Public Relations Society), can be used to demonstrate a cost per individual reached, which could be considered a kind of ROI measure.

Even small-budget operations can benefit from this type of measure. For example, a midsize business-to-business firm we know recently did an analysis of its media coverage that told quite a bit about its PR program:

• Share: How it compared its share of coverage with top competitors;

• Quality: How it measured the quality of the coverage, based on criteria such as how substantive each article was and the presence of key messages;

• Reach: How it calculated total audience and broke it down by industry segment; and,

• Cost Effectiveness: How it did in an AVE calculation and compared it to its PR costs.

MEASURING OUTCOMES

But the best practices in public relations today are steadily moving in the direction of measuring outcomes. That is, what impact on the business has the PR program made: Do more people know about it, or have a good opinion of it? Are more leads generated, or more sales made?

It’s amazing, but often key decisions about what is most important to measure are made after the fact, if they are made at all. There are a lot of reasons to implement a PR program, and every one of those reasons could be measured.

For example, think about corporate reputation. People want to do business with an organization they trust. We could all think of entities that imploded when trust was lost. Is building trust a measurable outcome? You could certainly identify measurable perceptions and behaviors that would indicate a level of trust.

How about the value of conversation with our target audience? PR measurement expert Katie Paine ( KDPaine & Partners) advocates measuring the degree to which people trust you and the degree to which they are satisfied and committed to your relationships; then start a conversation with them and later measure how much more valuable people think the relationship is. Nearly anything is measurable, but again, budget comes into play.

MEASURING SOCIAL MEDIA

Further complicating the issue of measurement is the explosive growth of social media as an element of PR/communications programs.

You can calculate reach with social media, too. For example, Don Bartholomew, a principal with Acumentics Research, wrote a blog post about a company that calculated that 1.43 million people had seen tweets about it. He observed that the number assumes everyone that possibly could see a tweet did see it and all of them were part of the target audience. So it’s a measure no better or worse than counting circulation of a publication.

But rather than counting eyeballs, the best practices in PR measurement of social media also are moving very quickly toward a focus on outcomes, such as measuring engagement.

This is done by defining ways to measure online conversation and online behavioral patterns, and ideally connecting them to offline behavior: If my online audience is engaged, have their perceptions/attitudes changed? Does that mean they go out and buy my product or service?

HOW DOES PR AFFECT THE BUSINESS?

With PR measurement, as with most things, the devil is in the details. PR professionals know that drawing a straight line from PR activity to business results falls into the “nail Jello to the wall” category.

There are so many variables that affect a business, from advertising and other marketing activity, to product or service quality, to the economy, that attempting to draw this line is just an exercise in frustration.

Bartholomew has been quoted advocating a model that correlates PR outputs, such as media coverage, with PR outcomes, including awareness or purchase consideration, and then correlating PR outcomes with business results.

This approach makes a lot of sense: It’s clearly doable to measure against PR objectives and then to take a second step and look for relationships between changes in these PR outcomes and changes in business measures could provide some very convincing data surrounding the value of the PR program.

A STARTING POINT FOR PR EVALUATION

Where do you start in incorporating best practices into your PR evaluation? A four-step process might be a good place to start:

1. Set evaluation objectives: The best case is that you set objectives for outcomes, as well as output. Decide up front what output measures are needed to support and evaluate outcome objectives.

2. Define the research methods: Identify the research methods that will give you the best information to measure against your objectives.

3. Link outputs to outcomes: PR people are good at telling a story; the narrative you want to tell says that, “because we accomplished X (output), our target audience attitude, awareness, etc. is Y.”

4. Demonstrate impact on business: A final step, if you can do it—that pesky budget issue again—is to compare Y (attitude, awareness) to Z (a business measure, such as number of sales leads, or revenue).

In the end, PR measurement should demonstrate value. Value can mean different things to different organizations, but it is a pretty good bet that what is most valuable to any entity is an outcome, rather than an output. What is the value of a front-page story in a major newspaper? The real answer depends on how it influences your audience. If that big splash is the only media coverage, its value is probably somewhat limited. If it’s part of a bigger effort that results in measurable audience awareness, preference, engagement or other outcome, its value is very great indeed.

There are still going to be a lot of PR programs that can’t get sophisticated measurement into the budget. It happens every day in the real world. When the budget is tight, all resources have to be thrown into producing results, leaving no resources to measure results. The poor PR practitioner is left to scramble for anecdotal measurement. It’s a vicious circle—how can you defend a PR budget when you can’t quantify results?

But you need to start somewhere. Even on a shoestring, look for ways to start building that four-step process. When you can demonstrate measurable value to a CEO, what was a vicious circle can start turning the other way—who wouldn’t want to put more resources into those things that are producing measurable outcomes? PRN

CONTACT:

This article was written by Patricia Thorp, president and founder of Thorp & Company, and was excerpted from the recently released PR News’ Guide to Best Practices in PR Measurement Vol. 4. For more information on this and other guidebooks, visit https://www.prnewsonline.com/store/.