Thursday, September 30, 2010

Measuring PR

Effective public relations practitioners are able to demonstrate their achievements in a language their clients understand. There are several methods of measuring effectiveness. Similar to a trip to your favourite restaurant, the ‘menu of measurement’ is vast, and public relations practitioners must select the method of measurement most relevant to their clients’ communication objectives.

First up on the menu is Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE). This technique measures PR by the amount of media space generated. The physical size of the news piece multiplies the advertising rate card while reflecting the credibility of the particular news source. The resulting dollar value is the AVE.

While clients can appreciate the taste of AVE, it is falling out of favour. In fact, PRINZ’s Paul Dryden has said “AVE [is] flawed and damaging to public relations’ drive to professionalism and probably even unethical because it is so misleading in presenting an indicator of success to the organisation or client.”

The next choice uses goals or SMART objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. In order to measure the success of a campaign, all one needs to do is evaluate the results against the campaign’s initial goals such as the quantity and quality of the media coverage.

While SMART objectives appear simple and practical solutions, the reality is, they too fall short. The media is made of a complex range of stories. A story must be weighted depending on characteristics such as tone, key messages, accuracy, comprehension; action generated and source credibility to really measure its success.

For example, often the objective of public relations is to not generate media coverage, so if an unreliable source published the story, would it be seen as objective failure? Also, could the coverage still be counted as meeting the measured objective if it was written in a negative tone?

Next up is the chef’s special: PRINZ has developed six golden rules for media and PR measurement. These recognise that unlike AVE, the quality of information is much more valuable than its quantity. PRINZ suggest PR is to be measured by its outputs, out-takes and outcomes. In other words, menu option three is the combination of AVE, a measure of target reach or audience awareness and the actual behavioural, attitude and perceptive changes resulting from the campaign.

On top of this, PRINZ’s Catherine Arrow states that this process has become a lot more complex with the growth of social media and online tracking, opening up a whole new world for publishing and collecting PR information.

In a perfect world effective PR measurement would evaluate results by comparing pre-campaign and post-campaign research results. Realistically however many organisations simply don’t have the budget for this research and post analysis and would rather invest in more PR activity.

Overall, while PR influences many people, it takes effort and time to measure its results. Simply appearing in the news media is no longer the only way to convey an organisation’s messages to its publics. Further research is needed to measure not just the initial coverage but also the behavioural changes, relationships built and audience perception and attention.

If that is what you wish to order.