A recent post by David Rockland on the PRSA blog commented on the importance of measurement. I completely agree that measurement is critical to successful communications, and am always amazed at how often communicators seem to overlook this. How can you possibly understand if what you’re doing is working if you are not measuring it appropriately?

This is precisely the reason why measurement matters to communications. Communication is an incredibly broad space. It continually evolves as messages shift and change, new communication vehicles develop, and targets become more focused. Every campaign and outreach effort must be continually measured, adjusted and improved upon to ensure successful messaging across this broad field.

Many communicators spend a considerable amount of time planning their strategy. The best of these start with business goals, identify their specific targets, understand how messages must be adjusted for each target and goal, and then design their campaigns. Sadly, even the better communication strategists tend to lose focus once the campaign has launched, or focus on just elementary metrics.

This is a flawed approach. As David mentioned, if you are not measuring, the campaign doesn’t count. You have no way of knowing whether your outreach was successful.

True, more communicators are beginning to grasp the importance of measurement. Unfortunately, many are using only the most basic of metrics – volume, share of voice, or impressions. That may be a starting point, but it is not a stopping point. What good does 10,000 hits from your press release do, if you are not sure who saw them, what impression they made, or what their impact really was on your target audience or your corporate reputation? These metrics only provide the very first step in determining whether your communications campaign is working. They tell you that it might have reached people. The logical next steps are to confirm it reached people correctly – that your campaign really is working, that the people you wanted to reach are the people you did reach, that the message you wanted to convey was, in fact, the message you conveyed, and that the impact on your corporate reputation was exactly what you hoped it would be.

This is where we at evolve24 tend to start when working with communications teams. Our analytics and consulting are designed around accurate measurement, and incorporate everything from emotions generated through reputational impact. We recognize that truly quantifying communications return may require borrowing a few ideas from the marketing teams. Our goal, though, is to provide what too many communications teams lack: a quantifiable, measureable assessment of communications programs.