Traditionally, measurement has been a weak area of public relations practice. For various reasons, many PR people haven’t used measurement as much as they could to plan and implement PR activities. The various reasons for the reluctance of practitioners to engage in measurement include: Pressure of time to start and/or complete communication activities Lack of interest in numbers (apart from their own salary!) Lack of professional/research expertise Inertia against learning new skills The view ...
Read moreSenior insurance executive Rob Borden thought he had all the bases covered in his plan to make sweeping changes to his company’s health insurance policies and procedures. New legislation meant it was important to make the changes. He had carefully briefed all managers about the changes and had launched the program with a catchy slogan. But it became obvious a large number of employees were resisting change – the program was heading towards a ...
Read moreKey measures of your writing quality include reader understanding and recall of your message. One of the ways to facilitate maximizing comprehension and recall is to write in easily understandable language. You can conduct many tests to find out how clearly you are writing and how well your audience understands your messages. Most of the tests are short, simple and no-cost or low-cost to run. So there’s no excuse for not doing them! And ...
Read moreMeasuring information gaps You can find out how well you are currently communicating on important organizational subjects and whether you are using the channel preferred by your internal or external audience. For instance, it is pointless to use your employee newsletter as the sole channel of information about a key issue if your target audience generally prefers to have a dialogue about it face-to-face with their supervisor or through the organizational intranet or even ...
Read moreCommunicators are always under pressure to produce results despite limited resources. For instance, Trisha, a subscriber to my newsletter, Cutting Edge PR e-News, emailed me last week to ask my advice on this. There is no easy way around this issue. With a given budget, the best a communicator can do is to make the most effective use of available resources. One way to do this is to tightly target your information material. Content ...
Read moreSurveys reveal that managers and supervisors think they are better communicators than they really are. Therefore asking managers and supervisors about their communication skills generally doesn't lead to much that's useful. However, by asking their direct reports to give anonymous feedback on the communication skills of their bosses is a different matter - there is a big disconnect between the bosses' self-assessments and the candid assessment of the people who report to them. The ...
Read moreOne of the contentious debates in the communication profession in recent years has been about the preferred source of information for employees. On one side of the debate is the view by TJ Larkin that supervisors and managers are the preferred source of most employee information. On the other side is the view that employees want different information from different sources. It's common sense - ask employees about their preferred sources of information One ...
Read moreThree excellent initiatives strengthen the amount of information available on good measurement - the weakest area of professional communication activity: Integrated Evaluation Framework The Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) has produced a valuable resource - its Integrated Evaluation Framework. This free interactive tool shows you how to align communication objectives with organizational objectives; establish a plan; and measure the outputs, outtakes, outcomes and impact of your work. The process gives you ...
Read moreA significant number of PR practitioners and others use techniques that purport to measure the dollar value of publicity and the way it is supposedly more effective than advertising. Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs) AVEs are estimated by calculating the area of a printed news item or amount of air time on radio or television and multiplying the area or time by the advertising rate of the media in which the coverage appeared. A hypothetical ...
Read moreHow effectively is your PR/communication department performing? And how well are you dealing with your internal stakeholders? The important thing is to identify only the matters for which the communication team has sole responsibility. For example, corporate reputation isn’t valid to use as a full indicator of PR performance because corporate communication is only one input into the factors that form a corporate reputation. In fact, other factors are much more important, such as ...
Read moreImage: World Economic Forum 'COVID Action Platform.' More details in the 'Resources' section below. The effects of the catastrophic COVID-19
If you want a high performing organization, you need to engage and inspire your middle managers. They are the key
Employers want communications professionals who continue to develop key skills Recruiters are actively seeking to place internal communications professionals who
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