Behaviour wins in PR strategy objective setting
By Craig on Aug 19, 2010 in Blog guests & critiques, interviews, Public relations, Research & evaluation, Strategic communication | View Comments
Paul Cheal, Account Director at BlueChip Communication, was the lucky winner of this blog’s free ticket to attend the IABC NSW ‘Measuring ROI on Communications’ workshop, with renowned measurement guru, the very passionate Angela Sinickas. He shares some of the points Angela made in this guest post.
For Angela Sinickas, measuring business communication is all about creating a “chain of evidence”, linking the tactical activities we do on a daily basis to the financial bottom line of the organisation.
This is chain is created by looking at:
- communication activities: messages we send/channels we use
- audience perceptions: did the audience receive the message/do they understand the messages?
- audience actions: what changes, what did they do more/less of?
- The financial impact on organisational goals.
Paul Cheal
Communicators can move along this chain, from lower (activities/perceptions) through to higher (actions/impact) levels of measurement by simply asking the target audience!
What did they read, see hear? Did it change their behaviour? And we do this through research.
PR crying poor over market research dollars
If you’re like me, especially in the world of PR consultancy, the initial instinct is to be sceptical once the term ‘research’ is mentioned. Who has the time, budget, resources to conduct research?
But Angela reinforces that a lot of our answers can be found in “observational research” – asking a random sample what they thought of the internal newsletter; tracking accuracy of coverage in target media; or using existing research conducted by other parts of the business.
“We’re so creative in everything else we do but we need to be creative about measurement as well,” said Angela.
All about business communication objectives and goals
It’s interesting that, in a workshop on measurement, Angela spent the first half of the session talking about objectives. This emphasis demonstrates the importance of getting the objectives right not just to illustrate the impact and validity of your communication strategy, but also your worth to your organisation.
If we don’t start with the correct objectives, we can’t determine what success looks like. (It doesn’t hurt in helping you win an IABC Gold Quill award either, Angela joked – alluding to her role as an IABC Gold Quill judge).
What business goal does this support? That’s the first question Angela says should be asked with any piece of communication – internal or external.
As a practitioner in the realm of financial services, I understand firsthand the importance of demonstrating value in the language of the client – numbers. For Angela, ROI is simple to prove: “Start with a small project, where changes can only be attributed to communication and prove yourself. Then move on to bigger projects. Communication is usually such a small part of the overall budget of an organisation that we only need a relative small change in revenue – even 1 or 2 per cent – to prove the ROI of communication.”
When Angela got into more granular detail in regard to objective setting, she said we need to examine how we can help achieve the business goal through communication – these form your communication objectives. They should be:
- SMART – how many times do we hear it, certainly, but how often do we do it?
- linked to parallel measurable results
- aimed at changing knowledge or an attitude (that’s how we change behaviour).
Practical takeaways from measuring business communication
Some of the elements of Angela’s workshop that I have taken back to my workplace include:
- Identify audience behaviour (current and ideal) before developing messages. What is the current behaviour and what is the ideal behaviour/attitude/action we want to achieve? Once you understand this you can develop the messages that will encourage this behaviour and from there what are the best channels to communicate this behaviour?
- Don’t only measure media success by volume, tone or accuracy alone. Think about measuring times you ward off negative coverage (sometimes the unsung hero of our roles), as well
- Communicate like every other department – in numbers. How do we calculate it: start with total financial value of new sales/increase in share price, improved productivity etc; take credit for a percentage of the financial value based on the impact your audience attributes to the communication (as identified through research); divide by the cost of communication; the result is your ROI.
It all sounds so simple and, surprisingly, it is. Some valuable food for thought.
Connect on LinkedIn with Paul Cheal.
What do you think about Paul’s perceptions of Angela’s points and Angela’s assertions themselves? Who can tell me the difference between an objective and a goal? Which one are you able to measure?
Have you read this blog’s interview with Angela? They are on setting meaningful public relations objectives and PR’s lack of measurement holding it back.
