PR measurement & evaluation – how can you score if you don’t know where to shoot? at Piaras Kelly PR

PR measurement & evaluation – how can you score if you don’t know where to shoot?

4 Comments Published November 16th, 2005 in General

The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don’t define them…Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them – Denis Watley

I’m relatively new to the PR profession and one thing that’s taken me a long time to get used to is the idea of measurement and evaluation. When someone asks to see the results of a PR campaign, it’s not like you can just reach for a chart and instantly show how Public Relations helped an organisation to achieve its goals.

One thing that firm I work for, Drury Communications, does is hold training days for its staff on an ongoing basis, whether it’s lunchtime briefings or specific training days. One of those training days that I attended was on Measurement and Evaluation, and delivered by our Managing Director, Padraig McKeon.

To cut a long story short, evaluating the success of a PR campaign can only be achieved by judging it against the objectives you set before starting? In other words, how do you figure out whether you’ve scored a goal if you can’t see the goalposts?

In other fields people think it’s easier to establish this because you’re dealing with numbers, but in reality I think a lot of PR practitioners don’t have a firm plan in place so when it comes around to repitching to a client, they aren’t able to tick the boxes to show what they’ve achieved because they’ve wandered off the garden path.

Rather than trying to find some magical piece of software, I think PR practitioners should learn how to take a client brief properly instead. You’re only able to succeed if you know what the steps to success are!

Technorati Tags: Evaluation, Measurement, Piaras Kelly, PR

4 Responses to “PR measurement & evaluation – how can you score if you don’t know where to shoot?”

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1 Stephen Davies Nov 17th, 2005 at 1:29 am

Many people think that PR should be measured on how many press cuttings you can get in the local rags for your client or working out the advertising value equivalent (AVE). This annoys me.

You’re right, an evaluation should be judged on how good you met your objectives. But it’s the bits in between that you should also take into consideration to help meet your objectives

Defining a clear strategy and the appropriate tools from your objectives should guarantee the best possible method to meet the objectives – be it to increase sales, change attitudes, gain exposure etc etc.

One thing I’ve learnt all the way through uni is to always plan. In Gregory’s Planning and Managing Public Relations Campaigns she states 10 steps to a PR campaign:

Analysis (of the situation)
Objectives (what you want to achieve)
Publics (who it affects)
Messages (what you want to say)
Strategy (how do you go about meeting your objectives)
Tactics (the tools you’re going to use)
Timescale (how long it will take and when to implement)
Resources (what you’re going to use)
Evaluation (was I successful? what could I do better?)
Review (Basically going round in full circle starting again)

But going back to evaluation. I think PR professionals should use evaluation as a key part of a campaign. Only then will the profession hold the position in management it deserves.
2 Kjetil Holm Klavenes Feb 19th, 2007 at 9:28 pm

Great ) Ill juse some of this in PR-class in Norway
3 Dominique Ruest Apr 18th, 2010 at 5:20 pm

Your piece is very interesting.
What I would like to add to it, and to Stephen Davies`s comment is that the Evaluation of a communications plan is not only done at the end of a campaign, but throughout the campaign, begin to end also.
If the objective of a campaign is to, for example, try to get people to carpool; you need to make sure that people have grasped the concept before the time you want the carpooling to start.
Basically, I want to point out that the evaluation is during AND after a pr campaign.
4 Piaras Kelly Apr 18th, 2010 at 5:58 pm

Good point Dominque