'Audits are about esprit de corps and finding out if you have it.'
If your company is struggling to find out how well it's coordinating external and internal messages, turning to a third party to conduct a communications audit will provide those answers. And it can uncover the solutions to polish your communications efforts and develop a better PR prototype.
Depending on the size of a company, its number of sites and what the objectives of the audit are, it can take anywhere from six weeks to several months to complete an audit. And costs vary substantially - from $5,000 for a small business to several hundred thousand for larger companies. But the effort's time and money are well spent when you accept that the value of an audit is using the results to implement change.
You should expect that the company you hire (usually your main PR firm) use several routes to accomplish that goal: focus groups, telephone or e-mail interviews and one-on-one meetings. It should also examine both formal and informal internal and external materials to amass your key messages. And generally a consultant can find broad-stroke and cost-effective ways of getting that done: for instance, coinciding its surveying with a trade show where constituent audiences are represented in large numbers.
In an audit, consultants are looking for certain recurring elements and for consistent themes that are woven throughout memos; managers' meetings with employees; the Internet; intranets; in-house publications; news about new business initiatives; broadcasts and articles; press releases; marketing materials; and conversations with outsiders such as the media or analysts.
What the Masses are Saying
For Syracuse University, an audit was the path it selected to determine if rumors (that cropped up when the university downsized about six years ago) that its College of Nursing might be merged with another school or shut down still existed, according to account executive Holly Foster and managing partner Ann Higbee, both of Eric Mower and Associates, the Syracuse, N.Y., firm which oversaw the audit.
Primarily, Eric and Mower, which was hired by the college less than a year ago, needed to ascertain what constituent groups believed about the college's future.
"What we found out is that the college of nursing hadn't done a deliberate and effective job of making its audiences understand where the college was going," says Higbee. It's now implementing a communications plan that will hit on a plethora of ways of letting key groups know that it's re-engineering the college and has actually broadened, not narrowed, it course selections. Outreach will even include promoting its degree programs to high school counselors.
Eric Mower and Associates conducted the audit via 41 telephone calls to a mix of staff, alumni, students and community and business leaders. (That doesn't include several faculty round-table discussions that were held to also gauge perceptions of what the college's future is.)
What surveyors realized, and concluded in a report to college administrators, was that core audiences were confused about the college's fate and that the effects of the rumors still lingered.
Higbee and Foster said results of the survey were recently forwarded to the college, and the school and EM&A are hammering out details for a new communications blueprint.
A Regular Tool
Even though communications audits are routinely done every few years, some companies are relying on them as a way of tracking the state of their business in specific industries and to constantly tweak their messages. The Shiva Corp., a $200 million business in Bedford, Mass., that's a remote-access provider, has conducted a communications audit annually for the past four years, says Angelo Santinell, senior VP of marketing/business development.
The audit's provided its PR firm, Lois Paul & Partners, with a baseline to trace its publics' perceptions about the company, which had a robust IPO (stock went from $15 to $85) in 1994, but this year's been dastardly (it's posted losses all three quarters) so execs used the audit to help relaunch the company. The audit is based on a telephone survey with about 60 people (employees, analysts, opinion leaders, editors and customers) with this twist: Lois Paul & Partners turns to some of the same respondents (their names aren't revealed to Shiva execs) each year to see if it's internal and external messages are in sync and if perceptions have changed.
"Audits are about esprit de corps and finding out if you have it," Santinelli adds. "We've learned that if everybody's singing out of the same hymnbook, they'll eventually bring along other evangelists. So much [in the business climate] is based on momentum and momentum is based on perception."
The Rebirth of the Audit
During this decade, the worth of the communications audit has both receded and peaked. But in recent years it's resurfaced as a key communications tool as reputation management has become a PR priority, according to Paul Fullmer, president of Selz/Seabolt Communications, a marcom firm based in Chicago with $4 million in annual billings.
Reputation management hasn't only become a corporate buzzword but the foundation of PR in the 1990s. In a recently released Thomas L. Harris/Impulse Research survey, corporate reputation management was ranked as No 2. out of 24 in terms of work that's done in-house and it was ranked No. 10 (out of 24) as work that's assigned to agencies.
What has made the communications audit so valuable is that it relies on two-way communication, a PR paradigm that can be lost in the sea of one-way communication vehicles.
Those include traditional corporate communications maneuvering: the internal magazines or the new policy that's introduced to workers via a notice stuck in an "in" box.
Two-way communication, however, has regained some strength with the advent of the Internet and other technologies, including teleconferencing.
"The most important aspect of the audit is that you speak with people who the communications vehicles are directed toward and you don't count on just one group," adds Fuller. "An audit requires involvement from the client as well."
That involvement includes talking to managers and speaking in-depth with the people who produce the information vehicles as well as those who receive that information.
Post-Audit Action
Based on findings from the audit, Syracuse University executives will move to counteract the residual effects of rumors and dispel uncertainty in the academic and general community by:
- Spearheading informal meetings with opinion leaders and policy makers;
- Taking part in national symposia;
- Piggybacking roundtables and events with gatherings of alumni in other states;
- Pitching stories to both the local and national media and offering up academic heads as sources; and
- Issuing routine press releases about personnel changes, collaborative grassroots programs and research.
Source: PR NEWS
An Audit Can Help You...
- Revamp in-house publications;
- Measure how well the media interpreted a major change, such as an acquisition or branch shutdown;
- Track how employees handled news about, or the events surrounding, a restructuring;
- Keep your pulse on workers' gripes and likes; and
- See if a new division or staff is carrying out the company's business philosophies and making its messages and its function part of the big picture.
Source: PR NEWS (EM&A, 315/466-1000; Angelo Santinelli, 617/270-8349; Selz/Seabolt, 312/372-7090)