Here’s a typical PR person’s dream sequence:
You: Impressions, we need to talk.
Impressions: The four worst words in any relationship.
You: That’s just it, this isn’t about relationships. I know we’ve been together for years, but I’ve come to realize that we are just not meant to be together. It’s not that I don’t want a relationship with metrics, I just don’t want a relationship with your metrics.
Impressions: I don’t understand why.
You: Let’s start with the fact that you’ve been misleading me for years, lying to me about how big you are, your power, and how far you can reach. You made me believe in things that weren’t true, and pursue strategies that were misguided. You let me down and even made me look like an idiot to the senior leadership team. Remember that time I reported that we earned 3.5 billion impressions in a quarter? That is roughly the population of the planet. I haven’t been invited back to the Senior Leaders Team meetings since. Now even the media keeps making fun of me.
Impressions: Fine, if that’s what you want, good luck finding anyone better. You’ll be back… You’ll be back like all the rest who think they can live without me. But then they lose clients and don’t get budgets approved and end up on the streets, begging for me. I know all about your insecurities.
You: Ha! Fat chance. I’ve already found a better alternative… (Read on to find out what the alternatives are.)
Impressions and AVEs have been the bad boy (or girl) friends of the PR industry for years. We all know they’re not good for us, and that they abuse the integrity of our profession. But for years we’ve returned to them over and over again, no matter how many times they lie to us and make us look stupid.
How to Break the Impressions Habit in 4 Easy Steps
But just as there are a myriad of books to help all of us get over our bad relationships, today there are a ton of tools and techniques to help us get beyond counting impressions and column inches. Here are 4 steps to help you move on to better metrics – the ones you’ll want to spend the rest of your life with.
Step 1. Understand the connection between what you do and your business.
You can probably articulate your organization’s key messages by heart, but behind those messages is (or should be) a business plan that all the communications efforts help achieve. Within that plan there are probably sales targets, market share objectives, growth strategies, and a lot of hard financial goals to which communications contributes. But it is no longer enough to simply assume that everyone recognizes the contribution that communications makes. You need to be able to draw a very clear line between what you spend your days doing and the contribution you are expected to make.
Whether your organization’s business goal is to grow sales by 5% or to increase market share among Hispanic women by 10%, or to grow your donor base by 20%, you need to come to a mutual understanding with leadership about how communications supports that goal.
In the for-profit world, communications is probably expected to do one of the following:
- Grow the marketable universe (the number of people interested in your products, typically a database of customers and prospects),
- Bring in qualified leads,
- Position or reposition the organization or a product,
- Manage the organization’s reputation,
- Communicate specific messages,
- Raise awareness, and
- Dispel negative myths.
In the not-for-profit world things aren’t all that different. Typically communications is expected to:
- Bring in new volunteers,
- Attract new donors,
- Raise awareness for the cause or the mission,
- Assist in the sale of the organization’s products, and
- Sway public or legislative opinion.
In public affairs or government organizations, communications’ function is typically to:
- Increase knowledge of an issue or a problem,
- Increase support for a policy, and
- Increase awareness of a policy or risk.
This is obviously not a comprehensive list, but will give us some objectives and a clearer definition of what matters.
Step 2. Know what data is available and what the parameters are within which you are measuring.
Conduct an audit of your organization’s existing data. And we’re not talking financial audit. Before you plan to start collecting data yourself, you need to take into account the data that is already available. That way you won’t duplicate efforts or waste money.
- Do you have attendance figures for prior events?
- Are there market studies of customers, prospects, or employees?
- Is there a database of prospects, or accurate data on the number of new donors acquired, or volunteers added to the rosters?
Check with marketing, accounting, your library, the competitive intelligence folks, and anyone who may have ever commissioned a study.
No matter how much you may want to be a hero, measurement is not something that can be done alone. You need to get buy-in from the entire organization. Don’t groan. You might actually find that the annoying accountant down the hall has some very important data that can help your cause.
The point is that, like any good organization, the results are greater than the sum of the parts. So just because you think you know the ROI for your direct mail, don’t be so sure that there aren’t other factors that you need to take into account. The best scenario is to put everyone in a room and get everyone to answer the questions listed next in Step 3.
Step 3. Set priorities.
You can’t measure everything perfectly, so start by setting some priorities. What are the most crucial (highest investment) priorities, and who are the most important audiences? Define them and figure out how to measure them.
Get answers to the following key questions:
- Where do those audiences go for trusted information about you and your peer organizations?
- What is most important to them about your specialty area? Why do they care?
- What do they currently know, perceive, or believe about your organization?
Once you’ve defined the important constituencies and audiences, prioritize them based on how they benefit the organization. Force rank your audiences. No ties allowed. Here’s a way to do that, if you’ve got all the key players in a room: Give each of them ten colored sticky dots (the kind you use for yard sales) and tell them that each represents $10,000 worth of communications budget. Instruct everyone to “vote” with their “dot dollars” on which audiences are most important. They can spend all the dots on one audience, or spread it around as they see fit. At the end, you should have a clear idea of what audiences are most important to measure and track. From there you can define the criteria you’ll be using to determine your success.
As part of this priority-setting process, make sure you all agree on what a reasonable benchmark should be. Is it a chronological one, e.g., this time last year? Or event driven, e.g., before or after the new CEO or CMO came on board? Measurement is, above all, a comparison tool. You can’t claim improvement unless you can answer “Improvement over what?”
Step 4. Pick your alternative to impressions.
Almost anything (except AVEs) is preferable to counting impressions, but there are various alternatives. Picking the right one depends on:
- The goals you’ve defined,
- The parameters you’ve identified, and
- The budget.
Here are a few alternative I recommend:
Optimal Content Score. I recommend the Optimal Content Score (OCS) as an alternative to impressions because it can be completely customized to your own situation. Think of what would motivate your target audience to purchase, support, donate, or change a habit or opinion. A story or post that succeeds at that would be a perfect 10, correct? And then there are some that might have the opposite effect.
Now, what components might that perfect 10 item contain? It probably mentions your brand in the headline, contains at least one key message, and perhaps a quote from one of your spokespeople or influencers. Other possible characteristics might include sentiment (positive, negative, balanced, or neutral), dominance (the extent to which your organization dominates the story), and visibility (is there a photo, a caption, or a call-out that includes your brand?)
On the opposite site, what’s a -10? It’s your worst nightmare story, perhaps one that perpetuates a myth, mis-positions the product, mentions the competition but not you, or contains an incorrect message or misleading information. Whatever those elements are, they are included on the negative side. Put all that into a chart that looks like this and make sure that all the various weightings add up to +10 and -10:
Now select all the stories that have appeared in key outlets that you know influence your target audience. Give each one a score based on the OCS index you’ve developed. Now take the average OCS for all stories that appear in a given month. That is your OCS for the month. And ideally, now that you’re focusing on conversations that contain these elements, your average OCS should improve month after month.
You can now use that score to compare campaigns, and also to easily correlate your results to web traffic and other outcome metrics.
A/B Testing. An A/B test compares the effectiveness of two variants of a design or process. It can easily be used to test two different campaigns or tactics against each other. Some email services (MailChimp, for one) can automate the process for email campaigns. I strongly recommend taking advantage of that feature if you have it.
As the name implies, A/B testing compares the results of two versions (A and B) which are identical except for one variation — e.g., a different headline, visual, or call to action — that might impact a user’s behavior. A/B testing is frequently used for websites, where you can easily vary one element; however, it can also be used to compare different PR tactics. For example, let’s say you’ve always issued invitations to your organization’s events via email. To test how effective reaching out via social media is, you would target half of your audience with email and the other half with social media.
Cost Effectiveness Metrics. Cost per thousand (CPM) is a commonly used way of judging the efficiency of one media over another, and has been used in advertising for years. There is no reason why PR can’t use it just as easily. Let’s assume that getting exposure for your key messages is the goal. To measure the effectiveness of one launch tactic over another, you take the budget for the 2 events, and then compare the percentage of your coverage that contained a key message.
Here’s an example: Back in my days at Lotus we were debating what would be the best strategy to launch the product that would become Lotus Notes. The product manager wanted to do a major event, but the PR person wanted to do a press tour. Luckily, we had data that showed that the last major event (it cost $300,000) was singularly ineffective at getting the key product benefits across to the media and key influencers. The data also showed that a $15,000 press tour we conducted had been very successful at getting key messages into our top tier media. This data made the decision obvious, and saved us from making a $300,000 mistake.
For a nonprofit, count the number of new donors each month. Divide that number into the total amount (including salaries) that you spent trying to communicate with those donors. Compare the cost per donor acquired to last year, or to a different tactic.
Awareness Testing. The goal of many PR programs is to raise awareness for a particular issue or message. Many people think that by counting impressions they are measuring awareness, but that is incorrect. The only way to measure an increase in awareness is to survey your target audience both before and after your event or campaign, then compare the results to see if their awareness or opinion has changed.
In the past such pre/post awareness surveys were expensive and cumbersome, but today, with tools like SurveyMonkey, Survata, and Qualtrics, it is relatively simple to do such a study.
If your raison d’être is educating the public or getting your messages across, you not only need to know if your idea was seen by your audience (via message analysis), but you also need to determine whether they heard it or not, or if anyone changed their mind as a result of seeing it. But doing pre/post awareness surveys is too expensive, right? Wrong. Think creatively. Can you build a “test” into your website or next event to gauge people’s awareness? Give them a prize for getting three right answers. Or create a “Passport” system for which they have to answer questions and get their passport stamped to signify they know one of your messages.
Proxies. Many times the necessary data simply are not available, which is where your creativity comes in. An acceptable proxy is a metric that everyone, especially senior leadership, agrees is representative enough of the desired action to be a substitute.
For example: There was a person in charge of Distance Learning for a certain state who was struggling to find meaningful measures of success. He could readily count the number of people enrolled in distance learning programs in the state, but that wasn’t convincing the legislature or even his managers that the program was really paying off.
However, the department had data on what kind of jobs the people they served got after they graduated. 75% of those enrolled in Distance Learning went into higher paying high-tech jobs. Clearly, the program was turning out better educated and better trained potential employees. Plus, these employees would have great appeal to any company considering relocating to his state. In fact, he discovered that the State Office of Economic Development knew that the presence of an educated workforce was the number one driving factor for companies considering relocating to the state. He then determined that typical states allocated up to $10,000 per job in tax incentives to entice companies to move to their state. The cost of the distance learning program was then very favorably compared to the amount spent on tax incentives to demonstrate that it was a far better use of state funds.
Here’s another example: For an international non-profit, institutional barriers prevented the comms team from having access to the donor database, so they couldn’t measure their results against the real goal, increasing revenue. Instead they figured out that Google Analytics could tell them how many times the “Thank You” page was served up – and the only way anyone saw the Thank You page was if they gave a donation! “Sessions” on the Thank You page became an acceptable proxy for revenue. ∞
Thanks to Rebel Desk for the image.
