I attended a great CharityComms seminar earlier this week on how we connect communications activity to real world impact – and how we show meaningful outcomes, rather than just metrics.
The speakers were fantastic and I got such a lot from the breakout room. I’ve taken away so many lessons:
The difference between output and impact. There are practical tools you can use to measure – press coverage and monitoring, awards, social metrics and website hits – but how are you going to measure what actually matters?
Brand investment can be difficult to justify when the returns aren’t immediate or easily measured. Building trust can happen in a variety of ways.
Website dashboards show clicks and page views, but not whether your content changed anything. Go where your audience is and measure from there (my first PR rule!)
The whole conversation feeds into my values as a PR consultant, how I work with clients, get them to understand the value of PR, and measure their impact as a whole.
It reminds me of a client I had who was difficult to communicate with. My only regular contact was with a volunteer who gave me photos for social media. I needed more information to do their PR properly but I wasn't getting it, and had to work with what I had. When it came to the time of year for me to raise my rates I have never heard from a client so quickly. And what he said changed how I prep clients.
“But you haven't made any more money.”
I had tried over the course of months to communicate, to get stories in the press (I had actually got him a slot to talk on 5Live on a topical news story, and he refused to go on because he didn’t think it was relevant), to understand what their PR strategy goals were - and received nothing. Over 6 months I achieved really good results. Facebook content interactions were up 24.9% over a 12 month period, Instagram reach was up 3.5k% and Instagram content interactions were up 278.8% over 6 months compared with the previous 6 months. From a PR and visibility perspective, it was fantastic. And I had stats to back up the comms impact.
But he had (without telling me) given me a different set of targets and KPIs to measure impact. On each post I made sure how to donate was visible, and he couldn't tell me how many donations had come through social media, or legacy donations via someone seeing it, or recommending a corporate donation off the back of the post.
We both had different measurements of impact – and it hadn’t been properly communicated (not for want of trying). Now I have stronger terms in my contract about how we are measuring success. Measurement needs to be built into the communications strategy. You need to know what impact you're trying to achieve, what you can realistically measure and agree that with the people you're working with at the start.The speakers were fantastic and I got such a lot from the breakout room.
