Is your slice of the budget pie shrinking each year? It's time to fight back. Along with your ability to create terrific programs, your most valuable weapon is research.
Used wisely, it can get you more bucks and more influence in your company's strategic decision-making.
Research can assist you in three ways:
- It can help you do better programs.
- It can help you show a positive ROI.
- It can show how your use of the money compares with other groups'.
Using research for better programs. Research can help you develop better programs by providing you with valuable insights. For example, research can show you what the public
really thinks about your organization and your business issues. It can give you ideas to build creative platforms. Without these insights, you're flying blind. These days, when
budget dollars are harder to come by than a decent presidential candidate, it is positively irresponsible to ask for more budgets for programs without having a firm foundation.
Using research for strategic communication plans plays an important role in getting bigger budgets because it allows you to stand up before top management and show that you are
approaching your task in an objective manner and proposing only those programs with a solid, fact-based rationale.
Using research to demonstrate a positive ROI. If you want more money, you've got to convince someone his or her investments are paying off. You need to show that for every
dollar they give you, they get at least a dollar back. The tricky part is expressing what PR does in terms of dollars.
Some marketing PR programs are designed to generate sales, and this makes the ROI calculation easy. Total up the value of the sales, compare it with your costs, and you got a
ROI. Another example: Sometimes we're the first form of communication used in new product launches. Here again the math is easy. Reckon the value of the sales before other
forms of communications were introduced, compare that with your costs up to that point and calculate the ROI.
But more often we're one of several forms of communication, and our role is not so much to close the sale but to prepare the market for doing business with us. In this case we
can't take the credit (or blame) for sales, but we can take responsibility for changing levels of awareness or perceptions or attitudes. Here's another remedy: Ask your
researchers which perceptions and attitudes are "key drivers" of sales. Then ask them to design you a study that shows how people exposed to your messages and programs differ in
these attitudes and perceptions from those not exposed. If the research is set up right, the gap between the two groups is a measure of your impact -- then this can be translated
into dollars to make the ROI calculation. It takes a pro to design and execute this type of research, so don't try to do it yourself. Sure, it will take some of your precious
money to do the research, but it is money well spent if it can demonstrate a positive ROI that you can show to your top management at budget time.
When we're talking about corporate communications and trying to influence a vote among community leaders, for example, we need to take a more qualitative approach. First,
document your efforts against the target voters. These are your costs. Determine if any other groups from your organization are also trying to influence the voters and be sure
to document their efforts. Then put a price tag on the vote--how much it will mean to the company, in dollars, if the vote goes "for" or "against" you. After the vote is taken,
compare your costs against the outcome of the vote (in dollars). This will give you your ROI.
If another group is trying to influence voters, you need to give them some credit. Describe their efforts and then divide the value of the votes' outcome by two. This is a
crude way of saying that your efforts and their efforts contributed equally to the outcome. After doing the division, compare the resulting half of the vote's outcome to your PR
costs. Call this calculation your "estimated PR ROI." It's clearly not the most rigorous calculation ever made, but it does show that you're trying to be both realistic and fair.
Comparing your use of budget to other groups'. In order to compare results among groups fairly, the same measuring stick needs to apply to all. To do this, try to piggyback
on studies your company already does to measure other groups' results. Talk to the managers of the research and see if they can build in appropriate questions to measure your
results as well. Use the survey's data to calculate ROI's for each form of communication covered by the study and compare your results with others'. If there isn't an ongoing
survey, partner with marketing to field one. Get a professional researcher to design a questionnaire that will generate data about exposure to different forms of communication
(PR, advertising, direct mail, etc.), key driver attitudes and perceptions, and interest in doing business with your company. Then use the study's results to calculate ROI's for
each type of communication.
Bruce Jeffries-Fox is president of Jeffries-Fox Associates, a Cape May, New Jersey-based PR firm, and is also director of research, U.S., for i to i tracker, the research
subsidiary of Manning, Selvage & Lee. (a Publicis Group Company) He can be reached at 609.884.8740, bruce.jeffries-
[email protected]