Any PR executive measuring the effectiveness of his or her efforts knows that measurement is one of the most important aspects of the profession.
Just as investors need to gauge the ROI of their portfolios, PR executives need to regularly determine the net effect of their PR activities. However, PR measurement is more difficult to quantify than investments in the stock market or in Treasury bonds.
Just how do you measure whether your employee communications efforts are working? Or whether your crisis response was on target? Or whether your company's reputation is all the better because of PR?
In the first of a series focusing on PR measurement, we bring you into a recent conference call among leading communicators that was conducted and organized by the Public Affairs Group (PAG). The following article contains excerpts from that conference call, printed with exclusive permission of PAG.
On Measuring PR Departments -Internal Clients Want Something Different
Mark Weiner, MediaLink/Delahaye
About three years ago, MediaLink conducted a survey among about 400 top advertising marketing/public relations executives at Fortune 500 companies.
We asked them what they were looking for in public relations and in the future of public relations, by the extent to which their public relations departments delivered meaningful measurements.
Then we conducted a similar survey at the PRSA national conference and found that public relations professionals are measuring in ways that are much different than what their internal clients want. In addition to talking to corporate communicators about what they are looking for, you may want to talk to corporate internal clients directly and find out their needs because often they are different.
Edie Fraser, Best Practices/ Public Affairs Group, Inc.
Internal audience review is important. Thanks to you and Delahaye Medialink. As we look at the different functions of communication and measurement, what are people thinking after definition or other aspects of measurement?
Defining the Differences in Measurement and Seeing the Bigger Picture
Betty Devinney, Eastman Chemical
The last person commented on perhaps the most critical issue facing us. One of the things communicators have a tendency to do is to confuse what we mean by measures.
Are we measuring the success of the event, the success of a certain ad campaign, or are we measuring how we deliver value of our function to our internal stakeholders? There is a clear difference in those measures.
Most of us do measure actual tasks that we perform, but it is the bigger picture of demonstrating our value that we fail to measure. That is what I was hoping to get from any kind of measurement research.
At Eastman, we have on the walls all kinds of measures of functional values: from the number of bills we followed and got passed into law, to our employee survey information, customer survey information and the related impact of those. It is an area that we really have to clearly define.
Internal Coordination is Fundamental to the Process
Larry McNaughton, Corporate Branding
I couldn't agree more. One of the things we do at Corporate Branding more than anything else is to try to establish dialogue between the communicators, the marketing people, and whomever the leadership might be.
Leadership in management talks an entirely different language from communicators. You can talk about what you do in an advertising or PR campaign (that got so many positive mentions - that you can evaluate in some form), but it has little to do with the true business objective.
We talk to the internal client very directly and determine exactly what they are trying to accomplish. So we don't necessarily measure based on traditional means.
Accomplishing What the Internal Clients Want
John Hamilton, TECO Energy
We're not very scientific about the measurement portion of it right now, but we are not necessarily looking to the standard measurement goals of an ad agency. We go out on a particular project trying to accomplish what our internal clients tell us they want. It's almost a visceral type of measure.
We know we're successful if: 1) they communicate to us that they feel we heard them and 2) we've constructed a campaign which addresses the issues we identified as important. As an internal measurement, this process shows the success of the program.
Measuring Brand and Reputation
Mike Fernandez, U S West
When I came to U S West about three years ago, I started to talk to a lot of people relative to how we were going about measuring brand and reputation. I also came to the realization that fundamentally it comes back to who your client is and what are your clients' needs.
Around this question of brand reputation, I said "OK, we've got a 14-state region and I went through and spent time with each of our marketing heads and our product development houses."
Then, I got concurrence from the senior management team as to some of the five values or messages that we were trying to communicate about the brand. We then set about creating both quantitative and qualitative measurement systems around those values. In terms of quantitative media messaging, essentially what we did was score every article as it came in around the company as to whether those five values, or any of those five values, were present in that story - in the way we wanted them to be. We tracked that almost on a daily basis on computer. Then every quarter we would provide reports to senior management teams as to how we were doing. We do a lot of the other measurement as well.
Jim Shaffer, Towers Perrin
What you've described is a rather enlightened management that is very comfortable with saying that brand goals are fine. I don't necessarily need an ROI in terms of the value of my company or sales generator.
Mike Fernandez, U S West
Well, part of it is a little bit of campaign mentality. If you run a political campaign and you decide that you are not going to do some element of the campaign, you usually say "That's pretty risky. We're going to cover all of our bases and we're going to do all of this." A little bit of that is in the mix. Now, we've been blessed by one circumstance that was pure accident. We were launching a new product and there was supposed to be direct mail and some advertising behind it. Because of a mix-up at the advertising agency, we had just publicity and we were able to see the value of that over a period of time.
We've done the best that we could, not just to do branding measures, but also to look at (around product launches) how they are accepted by the marketplace. We try to place some kind of dollar value around it.
Trying To Measure Effectiveness
Dan Elman, United Technologies
At United Technologies, I am primarily responsible for internal communications, but when I was with one of our divisions (Otis Elevators) I was responsible for the gamut of communications.
When we talk about trying to measure the effect of internal communications in terms of sales and stock price, and the other similar impacts, it is difficult. We are never going to be successful, comfortable and confident that we are contributing to those things. If you look at your example about manufacturing, Jim, look at ways that companies measure quality.
Ultimately things that determine the successful measure of quality are the things that hit the customer. Our tie-in service, if it's like a jet engine for example, or elevators, is something called a call-back which is a service call-these are the ultimate customer measures of quality.
Behind those measurements are a hundred, a thousand, different measures of every component that goes into the product that is ultimately, presumably going to break down every once in a while and convince the customer that it is not a quality product.
If we look at our function as part of the big issue that ultimately affects sales and stock prices and so on, we have to get behind those broad measurements and look at the things that internal communications support.
That depends on what the objectives are in the company. For example, it might be the retention rate of employees. It might be the degree to which management perception of the company's success and the at-large employees' perceptions coincide.
The point is, there are a whole bunch of measurements behind the ultimate measurements of sales, profit and stock prices. As we get further from these broad measurements, we can get closer to measurements that we truly do affect. Again, I'll go back to, for example, employee retention rates.
Let's say that employee retention rates are, in good part, a function of successful employee communications. Then is the stock price a function of effective employee communication?
We need to get senior management to buy into the types of measurements we want to use to measure our effectiveness and our worth to the company.
Once they do, then we commit to proving that those matrixes are moving in the right direction. Then we can argue that it's in large part the result of our efforts.
(PAG, 202/466/8209)