Evaluating Your Communications Efforts
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A brief presentation on the "Evaluation" step of the four-step public relations planning process, with examples of how communicators can set measurable goals and objectives and then measure their success.
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Evaluating Your Communications Efforts
- 1. Evaluating Your Communications Efforts Robin Mayhall, APR Corporate Communications Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana Originally Presented 2.11.09 | Updated 2.04.10
Editor's Notes
- Including a written plan in your award entry is not a make-or-break thing … we didn’t have a written plan, for example, for the 2006 Annual Report.
- Obviously this is going to be a refresher for most people!
- You conduct focus group interviews of several different possible target audiences. - Primary/informal You hire a polling firm to develop a questionnaire about your new product and to poll a scientific sample of your target audience. -- Primary/formal You send an intern to the library to read through archives of the local newspaper and determine how many articles about your company have been positive, negative or neutral. -- Primary/informal
- You e-mail each member of your Board of Directors to ask what they think the company’s strengths and weakness are and what challenges they will face in the coming year. - Primary/informal You hire a PR agency to do a statistical content analysis of all media coverage of your organization in the previous three years. - Primary/formal You ask your company receptionist to keep track of the types of phone calls she’s getting since your new product was launched. - Primary/informal A trade publication does a Q&A-format article each month, interviewing an opinion leader in your industry. You read through a year’s worth of these interviews and jot down the topics these opinion leaders thing are important. - Secondary/informal
- Several factors come into play, and you have to use your judgment. Realities of life: How much time and money do you have? What other resources? (Coworkers, temps, volunteers) How important is this project to your organization in terms of: Potential impact on sales, finances, people -- for example, is this a massive new product launch that could make or break the entire company? Is this your main advertising and PR campaign that will take up most of your communications budge for the year? Number of people it could affect -- will the plan have local, statewide, national impact? The company’s financial investment Who’s in charge of the project (who will you answer to) -- again, use judgment. It might suffice to give a report to a small nonprofit board of directors using mostly informal research -- they will understand and appreciate the time and budget constraints. On the other hand, if you are going to have to report on this campaign to the CEO, COO and CFO on behalf of your whole department, it might be worth the money and effort to hire a polling firm or do some more wide-reaching primary research.
- Before you launch new projects: Draft a communications plan -- see PRSA’s website at www.prsa.org; also my own website at www.hieran.com/comet Set measurable goals For Lantern Awards and many similar competitions, measurable goals and results are very important. Think ahead about ways to evaluate your results.
- Love those abbreviations!
- How do we set such specific, measurable goals in our non-ideal world? We all know that not every project we work on each day is a full-fledged PR campaign. What about smaller campaigns, individual projects, one-time special events -- or the all-time favorite -- those projects we have to do because the senior VP says so? Blue Cross annual reports consistently win awards, especially those related to graphic design. But it was hard in the past to evaluate results. Management does not allow us to survey recipients, and even if they did, we weren’t exactly sure what to ask them. We probably wouldn’t stop doing an annual report based on survey results… So, for several years, we’ve been able to relate the results of our annual advertising effectiveness survey to the success of the annual report. We align goals for the annual report to overall advertising/marketing goals, making it the “cornerstone” of our marketing communications for the year. This ties everything neatly together … even the goals for next year’s annual report.
- Importance of context: See our winning annual report entry Used words like “unprecedented” number of awards won to convey the impressiveness of the achievement
- If these different ideas and methods are starting to get confusing, take a step back and remember that you don’t have to use all of them on any one project! These are all just tools in your PR toolbox -- tools that allow you to put your campaign in context and report successes meaningfully to clients, coworkers, bosses, boards, etc. -- as well as to tout your campaign’s success to an awards judging panel.