About

Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO & Publisher

Katie Delahaye Paine, aka The Measurement Queen (@queenofmetrics), has been a pioneer in the field of communications research and measurement for more than three decades. She was recently awarded the prestigious IPR Jack Felton Medal for Lifetime Achievement, an award given for lifetime contributions in the advancement of research, measurement and evaluation in public relations and corporate communication.

She founded three measurement companies, KDPaine & Partners Inc. (purchased in 2013 by Carma International) and The Delahaye Group (purchased in 1999 by Cision.)  Her latest venture, Paine Publishing, consults with a broad range of organizations from Microsoft, Clorox and Southwest Airlines to the International Monetary Fund, NATO, WorldVision and National Wildlife Federation, Her work includes designing and developing integrated communications dashboards; conducting research, training staff; and advising on measurement best practices. Her newsletter, The Measurement Advisor, is the industry’s most comprehensive source of information about best practices in communications measurement.

Prior to her entrepreneurship in communication measurement, she was Director of Corporate Communications at Lotus Development (now IBM) She also served as merchandising director at Hewlett Packard where she supervised the launch of HP’s first LaserJet printer and HP’s first portable computer. She also served as manager of corporate communications at Fujitsu Semiconductor. Prior to her high-tech career, Paine was a reporter and editor for The San Jose Mercury, The San Francisco Examiner, The Boston Herald, and The Washington Post.

Her books, Measure What Matters (Wiley, March 2011) and Measuring Public Relationships (KDPaine & Partners, 2007) are considered must-reads for anyone tasked with measuring public relations and social media. Her latest book, written with Beth Kanter, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World, is the 2013 winner of the Terry McAdam Book Award.

Katie has also been a leading promoter of standards in the public relations and social media measurement field, most recently as the initial organizer of The Conclave that released social media measurement standards in 2013. She is a founding member of the Institute for Public Relations Measurement Commission and contributed to the creation of the Barcelona Principles, the first standards of measurement for public relations.

She was an early pioneer in social media and served as a Senior Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research. She is currently a Senior Fellow of the Marketing & Communications Center at The Conference Board.

She is a frequent speaker to marketing and communications conferences around the world and her writings have been translated into numerous languages.

She graduated Cum Laude from Connecticut College in 1974 with a degree in History and Asian Studies. She completed post-graduate work in graphic design and electronics.

Paine taught the Introduction to Business Course at the University of New Hampshire for several years. She is also a frequent lecturer on communications research and measurement for organizations including the Public Relations Society of America,  George Washington University, Brigham Young University, Quinnipiac University, University of Maryland, BI Norwegian Business School and  Quadriga University in Berlin, Germany

To say that printer’s ink runs in my veins is an understatement.

In the early 1900s, my grandfather Ralph Delahaye Paine wrote some 46 novels from a cabin he built here at Shankhassick Farm. My other grandfather, Thomas Justin White, was the general manager of the Hearst Corporation; my father was the managing editor, and later Publisher, of Fortune Magazine. My great aunt and my mother were editors-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar.

My other great aunt was the editor of House & Garden; three of my uncles ran or wrote for newspapers.

When I moved from journalism to public relations, most of my family no longer wanted to talk to me. I got into measurement as a way to make life easier for journalists, not PR people. I figured that if the people doing the PR had a better idea of what worked and what didn’t work, they wouldn’t bug the editors with as much mindless, irrelevant junk. It sort of worked. Much of my work for the past 25 years has helped PR people and their bosses understand that what works in PR is having interesting, authentic stories to tell.

Somewhere along the way, I got distracted from wanting to be in the publishing business by the idea of public relations measurement and running a company … or two. But at the age of 60, who knows how much time I have left on this planet, so I decided it was time for me to go back to doing what I’ve always wanted to do. So, I’m researching, writing and publishing interesting things that help people do their jobs easier and better.

Where is Paine Publishing based?

We are located on Shankhassick Farm on the banks of the Oyster River in Durham, NH. Katie’s grandfather bought this farm in 1906 and Paines have been living here ever since. The farm grows vegetables and chickens and great relationships. Katie lives on the site of the old barn where her father and uncles used to milk cows. Shankhassick is guarded by Sir Lancelot, Knight Protector of Shankhassick Farm (actually a fluffy white Great Pyrenees puppy) as well as two cats, Toulouse and Princess Fergie.

What does Paine Publishing do?

The short form is: Communications Research and Measurement.

Essentially, whether it’s content, media, events, internal communications, public affairs, marketing, social media, influencers, ESG, CSG — we can measure it. Our specialty is helping organizations design and implement custom integrated dashboards. We also offer publications, classes, events and other methods for individuals to become Measurement Mavens.

My therapist, of course, would tell you that it is a subconscious rebellion against my mother, who so hated the color purple that I don’t think I owned a single piece of purple clothing until I was old enough to buy my own clothes. I didn’t even know that flowers came in purple until I visited my grandmother, who grew the most spectacular Queen of Night tulips. I’ve had them in my garden as long as I’ve had a garden. But I digress.

My logo color is in a tribute to then-senator Barack Obama’s 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, in which he said, “there is no Red America or Blue America…” and talked about the things that bring human beings together. A bunch of us started wearing purple as a sign of support for Obama’s ideas.

When I was forming the company in 2013, I realized that barriers and silos within communications and marketing were collapsing in our industry in a way that Obama could only dream of. There are no internal communications vs. external communications or paid vs earned. What we learned was that it wasn’t about what you communicated or what platform you were on. It was about people who are searching for solutions and organizations that need to have relationships with those people.

When I began to measure consumer generated media, we noticed that customer-generated reviews were exerting a greater influence over buying behavior than the traditional magazine reviews. We also saw employees become brand ambassadors and spokespeople, whether they were authorized or not.

We also realized that social media was breaking down geographic barriers between geographies, as millions of people declared their allegiance with the street protesters in Iran by changing their geographic location on Twitter to Tehran. It didn’t matter where you were tweeting from; it mattered who and what you were tweeting about.

Somehow, as we talked through the changes we saw in the landscape, our fabulous website designer Dawn Boyer concluded that the best color to represent my new venture was purple.