Public relations is not about numbers, or space or monetary value. It is about impact. The idea that a PR campaign can be assessed and measured through something as crude as getting a ruler out and establishing exactly how much space in a newspaper you have won for a client is naïve and ultimately holding back the PR industry from demonstrating what can actually be achieved through the use of good public relations.
The PR industry itself (well, most of it anyway) doesn’t value AVE’s, and recent news shows major players making this explicit. Ogilvy, for example, are ditching the method altogether with their Australian MD Kieran Moore describing AVE”s as ‘more about justification than determining actual effectiveness’.
So we think it is a good time for us to be helping businesses re-evaluate how they measure the success of their PR activity.
In a visit to Guernsey, Jay O’Connor, a past president of the CIPR said that PR should be about outcomes, not outputs, and that measurement should reflect this. We should not be counting clippings, or measuring space, or working out how much it would cost to buy the same amount of coverage we have negotiated on behalf of our clients. What we should be doing is measuring how effective our PR is: Is it in the right place? Does it contain the right messages? Does it have the right people in it?
At Orchard PR we try and identify what it is our clients want to achieve before we suggest methods of measurement as it’s rare that someone comes to us and says, ‘we just want to be in the paper’, and so we should measure the success of our work on that basis. We look to identify relevant objectives, such as winning more business, what tactics would support our clients in achieving this and what that would look like in terms of media coverage – then we can measure our success in providing what was expected in terms of targeted media activity, but also in any contribution to the overall objectives.
Good measurement can’t be done without good objectives and that is why one of our first questions to new clients is usually ‘why do you want to be seen in the media?’
Posted by Chris.