Public relations (PR) will always be that nice to have add-on for an organisation if it fails to demonstrate its value. For any right thinking chief executive, it is how any function contributes to the bottom line that matters.
Public Relations with Lenox Mhlanga
When lecturing to PR students, I always emphasise the fact that the world is moving towards a more scientific approach to PR management. It’s now about the figures, or data, as it is now referred to.
The argument of PR pundits has always been centred around the ability to translate results that are intangible such as changing of perceptions into dollars and cents on the balance sheet.
For ages it has been about how many column centimetres or mentions in the media they have managed to achieve for the organisation.
However, such quantities fail to impress under-fire chief financial officers whose job is to allocate sometimes meagre resources to critical and strategic functions in the business.
Most PR professionals struggle to justify why they should get that extra budget dollar. And this is not restricted to in-house communications personnel alone. Agency or consultancy boffins find themselves in a bind when clients demand that they see tangible results for the fees they pay.
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Admittedly, the measurement and evaluation of PR campaigns has never been easy, yet it is important. Particularly when the value of communications in an organisation has been shown not only to be strategic, but invaluable.
“While reputation management, consumer engagement, brand awareness and affinity are all components of successful PR, our ultimate definition of success lies in how we contribute to the bottom line,” says Martina Byrne whose presentation, Demonstrating the Value of PR to the Bottom Line at the PR Institute of Ireland shared insights on this important element of the profession.
I must admit that I am one of those who is mortified by “figures” having spent the better part of my high school life jousting my mathematics teacher. So, I find myself in good company with 59% of public relations professionals surveyed by the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication in 2013 who said that biggest barrier they face in measuring their success is that it’s “too complex”.
This is not good enough according to an article in Wilde Words, an industry blog aimed at assisting small-to-medium businesses with their communications needs.
As an industry, we can and must do better, and that I agree. I have always said that if we want PR to be regarded as an essential rather than a nice-to-have, we must demonstrate how our activities impact the organisation’s profit margin. Otherwise, our demands for greater spend will justifiably fall on deaf ears. Well, I thought this was worth repeating.
The PR graveyard is replete with professionals who were jettisoned at the slight whiff of financial turmoil in the organisation. Them and the chaps from research and innovation suffer the ignominy of having their function outsourced to agency consultancies that are summoned on a need to basis.
I remember meeting a colleague who I though had landed a plum appointment with a blue chip company. He revealed to me that six months down the line, the executive decided to “tippex” (erase) his post from the organogram. Since he could not be redeployed, he was put to pasture. Their reason, PR had become a burden. He was so devastated that he turned to farming.
Yet it was easy to identify the real reason behind the move. He has failed to show how PR added value.
The measurement and evaluation of a PR campaign or activity depends on the communications objectives of the campaign, which should always relate to a business objective.
When your organisation successfully achieves a business objective, it is essential that the PR team can show which communications objectives were aligned to support this and contribute to it.
Those in the profession measure the quantitative outputs of a campaign. In traditional media, quantitative measures (that means stuff you can count) include press clippings, circulation and readership figures, opportunities to see, radio or television air time and volume of coverage.
For digital media, quantitative measures include web-rankings, followers gained, website visitors and social media engagement (number of likes, comments, shares or retweets.) We are still grappling with finding our feet in new media, yet as I demonstrated last week, it offers excellent opportunities to be heard and seen, at the same time create novel tools of measurement.
Evaluating the qualitative value of a campaign remains a big challenge to many. Assess the impact the activity has on the tone of blogger comments. Hold focus groups for consumer feedback, monitor any commentary by public figures including celebrities or politicians, the so-called influencers, and gauge the impact on community sentiment on your social media channels.
Internally, it’s possible to run surveys to find if the campaign had an effect on employee morale.
Advertising value equivalents (AVEs) are dead. They have been widely discredited as a mechanism for evaluating PR. As Byrne noted in her presentation, measuring our own industry by the yardstick of another (advertising) shows an alarming lack of confidence in our own abilities.
“There is no common measurement for advertising and editorial, and it is akin to asking a footballer how many ‘tries’ he scored in his last game!” Byrne quips.
What’s the alternative then? Byrne offers a simple, consistent formula (there we go again with our Maths) for calculating the value of your campaign based on total spend versus audience reached.
The cost per thousand reached formula has been adopted by some of the world’s largest PR firms, including Edelman, Ogilvy and Fleischman-Hillard. It’s calculated by dividing the total cost of the campaign by the number of stakeholders reached. Simple isn’t it?
Outcomes are a vital component of evaluation. Measuring outcomes depends on the objective of the campaign and is an essential step beyond measuring output.
There are some practical ways to measure PR outcomes based on communications and business objectives. These include creating more sales leads, increasing sales, showing a change of attitude and demonstrating the value for money of a given campaign. Evaluating the impact of PR output in the media should be the icing on the cake via carrying out critical analysis of the coverage.
Whether you’re working on an in-house corporate communications team looking for an increased budget or an agency looking to demonstrate your value to a client, measuring the success of your campaigns effectively is vital.
Lenox Mhlanga is a communication specialist with experience working for the World Bank Group. He is an associate consultant with Magna Carta Reputation Management Consultants and an associate lecturer at the National University of Science and Technology. He can be contacted at [email protected] or 0772 400 656.
