By Katie Paine—In a multi-influence world, tying what you do every day to the bottom line is a complicated process. It’s one thing if you’re doing PR for an e-commerce company, can tag every press release, and can tie them back to an inquiry or a sale. It’s quite another “bottom line” if you’re working for an international development organization and the goal is win support of EU voters. Or a hotel brand with your logo on properties around the globe, but each one is locally owned and operated.
Cristina Hanganu, Director of Communications at Lidl Romania, is someone who has mastered this process (she’s also one of our Measurement Mavens of the Month). The point is that how you define and evaluate your contribution to the bottom line varies tremendously depending on the nature of the expected “R” in that ROI equation. It’s complicated but, take heart, it’s far from impossible.
So, if you’re ready to let your value shine, follow these 5 steps:
Step 1: Identify the organizational outcome you are expected to produce
The key is, as the Barcelona Principles advise, to start with clearly defined goals and objectives. Not what you “think” is the goal, but what are the goals as defined by whoever signs your paycheck. Contrary to what shows up as “goals” in most PR award submissions, most organizations don’t invest in PR to “get placements.” They want to get something to change—be it constituency opinions, the number of attendees at an event, the volume of incoming donations, or the number of qualified leads.
The first requirement is that you thoroughly understand your organization’s business goals. Next set up a meeting with your boss and your boss’ boss and get both to both articulate and agree upon the goals for whatever communications program or campaign that you’re working on and trying to measure. Ask them what they perceive is the path from your communications effort to the achievement of those goals. What do they perceive as your contribution? When you report back to them, what change do they hope to see?
Step 2: Map out the path from your campaign to those goals
To do this you need to understand what makes your stakeholders change their minds or behaviors. If you work for an e-commerce company (or any large company with a customer intelligence team), then getting this information should be as easy as walking down the hall and talking to marketing research or the customer intelligence departments. They spend most of their days accumulating data on what makes the customers act. They should have consumer research as well as historical sales data that assists marketers (e.g., how to create a compelling ad, and maybe even how many sales happened as a result).
If you don’t have data to tell you what makes your customer/constituents/donors act, your next step will be to find your own data. Start at the top. Whatever senior leadership or the sales managers think will move the needle is probably your best answer. If that doesn’t work, interview the folks on the front line, talk to your finance and business folks, and find someone with sufficient institutional knowledge.
If those are no help, then you are going to have to look around a little. Start by doing an audit of what data you have in-house. For example, is there data from your CRM system or your version of a Net Promoter Score (NPS)? Are there goal conversions set up for your web traffic? If none of these get you the data you need, then I recommend you do own research by conducting a survey: Ask your stakeholders what would make them change, act differently, or buy.
You should end up with answers to two important questions:
- What motivates your stakeholders to act and
- What actions are you influencing.
If you can’t measure a direct action, you need to find a suitable proxy. For example,
- If you’re working in travel and tourism, then you probably can’t directly count the number of people who come to your city as a result of your earned media efforts. However, people who download your visitor guide might be an acceptable proxy, and one you can easily set up for free in Google Analytics.
- If your goal is to generate leads, then you might want have a chat with sales and the folks in digital to see if you can identify certain behaviors that a prospect exhibits before actually buying. Do they read a data sheet, or fill out a “Contact Us” form? Access specific product information on your website? Metrics like time on page and form completion might be a good proxy in that case.
- If you’re a nonprofit organization but you can’t get data on donors and donations, then an acceptable proxy might be the number of views on the “Thank You for Donating” web page. Did these go up after your PR event?
- For a government agency or advocacy organization, see if senior leadership will accept online petition signings or the number of views on the issue web page as the definition of success.
The important thing in this step is to make sure that senior leadership buys into whatever proxy you come up with.
One word of caution. If you are told that your goal is to “raise awareness,” then make sure you get senior leadership to articulate how awareness contributes to the bottom line. You can’t simply assume that “likes” or “clicks” indicate awareness, since some percentage are generated by bots and do not reflect the actual opinion of your audience. Changes in opinion—like awareness, consideration, and preference—are typically measured via pre/post surveys, so any increase might be considered an acceptable proxy.
Step 3: Connect to value
The next step is to correlate whatever metric or proxy you’ve gotten agreement on in Step 3 with the results of your activities. If you are working with PR or social media monitoring or measurement data (e.g., Cision, Talkwalker, Trendkite, etc.), then you will need to export all the data for the period or campaign into Excel.
First, match the structure of the data. For example, if you’re using daily data out of Google Analytics, to do any valid comparison to earned media you will need to have daily data from your earned media. So, if there’s a day when there isn’t any coverage, make sure there’s a 0 for that date.
Secondly you will need to decide which criteria in your earned media you are comparing. You probably have positive, negative, and neutral scores, and perhaps a host of other criteria that media monitoring companies provide. I recommend developing a “Media Quality Score” (see here for general steps, and here for social media) that aggregates and weights all qualitative criteria according to their influence in getting your stakeholders to act.
Now open the statistical function in Excel to run tests of the data to see if there is a correlation. Watch our video to find out how.
If your campaign includes events, you probably won’t have enough data points. So instead your go-to metric should be based on pre/post survey research. Before the event, survey potential attendees to determine a baseline level of awareness, preference, or consideration. Immediately after the event, repeat the same survey among known attendees.
Similarly, for digital communications, make sure you establish a baseline level of engagement before the campaign, so you have something to compare your post-campaign results to.
Step 4: Report the results
Once you have your data, start by reviewing what was agreed upon with senior leadership: How do your efforts contribute to your organization’s business goals? Then show specific outcomes, followed by the details and the numbers.
The point is that you don’t want to throw every bit of data up there. You’ll lose everyone’s attention. So start with your most significant findings and insights. Then have the data available when they ask questions.
If all of this seems overwhelming, or you want help setting up your program, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch. My experience with showing how earned media connects with outcomes spans three decades and four continents. I’m happy to help. Call me (603-682-0735) or email me (measurementqueen@gmail.com). We’ll soon have you on your way to showing your value. ∞
[ajax_load_more post_type=”post” category=”how-to-measure,international”]
