Setting SMART goals for your public relations allows you to measure and evaluate against them to see if your Business and Communication Goals have been achieved. Image by Mohamed Hassan, Pixabay
How do you know if your public relations campaign has been a success or not?
It’s The $64,000 Question when you’ve paid a PR practitioner good money to do it for you.
It’s also the right question, one you should be asking and getting a credible answer to which can’t be dismissed with ‘So what?’
As I explained in my previous post, the answer isn’t whether or not any media relations got coverage in the media or not or even how many people it may have reached – because media relations is the means towards achieving your Business and Communication Goals, not an End in itself.
3 things you must do
So, to know if your public relations activity has been successful, you first need to do the following three things:
- Define the Business and Communication Objectives you want it to achieve. These need to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely. Care has to be taken with each of those aspects – they need to specific enough to be able to be isolated from other factors, something which is possible to measure and within your budget, achievable through public relations (not everything is), relevant to your overall organisation goals and timebound within the timeframe of the campaign – it’s no good setting a goal which can’t be realised till a year after it’s complete if you want to measure the level of success before then.
- Agree what metrics are most relevant to measuring how much, if at all, the Objectives have been achieved. Things likes Sales are simple and obvious to measure, but more nuanced things such as brand awareness, reputation and attitude change are more complex. AMEC’s Taxonomy has a helpful list of suggestions of relevant metrics and evaluation methods for a range of Objectives public relations is often used to help achieve.
- Agree a plan for how and when measurement and evaluation will be carried out. In any campaign which is more than a one-off activity, this will typically involve three phases: Baseline measurement of the metrics before any activity is done – so we know where you’re starting from; 2. Formative measurement – measuring part-way through the campaign to see if it’s on-track to achieving the overall goals or if any changes need to be made in the campaign and finally 3. Summative measurement – seeing where each metric is at the end and comparing to the baseline taken at the start. If the campaign is a one-off activity, you’ll do the first and last only.
Next steps
Once you’ve done these with your public relations practitioner, they will suggest activities to achieve your Business and Communication Objectives, the metrics they should be measured with and present a plan for measuring and evaluating whether the Business and Communication goals agreed have been achieved.
Once signed off by you, they will do baseline measurements, carry out the activities agreed and then measure the metrics agreed and evaluate whether the objectives set have been achieved.
Or, to put it more succinctly, to know if your PR campaign has been successful, you need to know what you want it to do, how you’ll know if it has and then see where it’s actually got you to. Simple!
Want to know more? Get in touch!