I had long given up on my aspirations of being a professional athlete by the time I perused a career in PR, so when a fellow speaker at the Chartered Institute of PR’s North West Committee’s Manchester breakfast meeting, told me that, actually, Usain Bolt can help us with our measurement and evaluation, I thought it might be worth dusting off my boots one last time.
This was, of course, a metaphor. An aid to help practitioners understand that if you get measurement and evaluation right, you’re performing like a finely tuned athlete. Not only allowing you to end the race in a strong position – or, back in the real world, add value to your clients – but to start it right, too. Coiled, full of energy, on target, and ready to deliver. Without such a framework, however, you’re veering off course; unfocussed and unlikely to succeed.
All of this happened as a result of Refresh’s ongoing partnership with the CIPR North West Committee. For the next 12 months Refresh will be sponsoring a series of Manchester Breakfast Briefings, brought to the city by the CIPR committee.
For this inaugural event, we also teamed up with our friends at CTI Digital. Together, we delivered talks and engaged in the fruitful breakfast networking session. The theme – if it wasn’t obvious – was all about how we, as PR practitioners, can measure and evaluate properly in order to show our Boards and our clients that we’re adding value.
How to measure PR and content campaigns
Once the audience had taken their seats and we were kindly introduced by the CIPR representative, the committee’s President-Elect, Advita Patel, took the floor and delivered a detailed, but digestible account of how we can all include measurement and evaluation into our daily professional lives.
Advita advised introducing simple things like compiling a Playbook about your client or organisation – what’s important to them? Who are the key industry players? What does success look like? What are the major threats and opportunities to their sector? The same document could cover more intricate considerations, like ensuring PR tactics are aligned to business objectives, and taking into account personnel and budgetary constraints.
Her overarching message of “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” left me enthused for my future work… but nervous about following such a great talk!
My own section was about trying to answer the question: why aren’t we nailing this yet? The question of “so what?” circles all our activity, and with tech tools and sophisticated measurement frameworks at our disposal, it’s fair consideration. Touching on some themes Advita highlighted, I talked about how an increase in both the quality and quantity of data creates a lot of sound, but not necessarily much signal to the impact we’re having, unless we’re capable of interpreting that data.
To ensure we avoid this mistake, we can utilise frameworks such as AMEC’s, which stresses the importance of starting with the business objectives, creating a strategy, then rolling out the tactics to realise this. KPIs therefore subtly move away from performance indicators, to impact showcasers, and as such, it’s much easier for Boards or clients to see how our work benefits theirs.
Setting objectives and KPIs
Continuing the theme of the morning was Steve Whitely, Digital Analytics Manager at CTI Digital, and the man who temporarily reignited my aforementioned sporting ambitions. By his own admission he’s not a PR man, but is blessed with understanding how important measurement and evaluation is to any industry, an instinct which is complemented by a career in data analytics. Steve drew the audience’s attention to another acronym, OKRs. As well as key performance indicators, he chartered Google’s use of Objectives and Key Results, showing that having clarity around those contributed to the enormous company’s growth. Even though they missed their targets in the first two years, they weren’t blown off course, because they had faith in their overarching objective which was as simple as increasing the number of users of Google Chrome.
How AI could impact PR measurement
Without sounding fatalistic, we seem on the verge of an AI revolution, one which will increase even further the access PR practitioners have to performance metrics, but at the same time, increase expectation our Boards and clients have that we’re delivering real value. Today’s breakfast meeting brought together three view points on broadly the same issue, each speaker showing how their own informed ideas can help us all continue to deliver our great work in an age where measuring and evaluating performance is more important than ever.
