How to measure Public Relations

It is common for people to think that you can not measure PR works. This has caused
immense suffering to some PR professionals. Company cost cutting plans start with PR
budgets. It is important that PR professionals are not looked at as people who are only paid to
spend. PR specialists do not just warm seats and organise company parties. This article looks
at PR measurement and evaluation in Uganda.
PR measurement and evaluation process is often affected by the fact that few organisations
know even what PR is supposed to do. We should stop measuring how many fliers someone
can give out. Organisations must support PR measurement budgets.
PR evaluation is very important today and organisations must get serious. It is now required
for due diligence and award nominations. A potential investor needs to know the
communication muscle capability before they buy. Some organisations now have what is
called a PR balance sheet that shines light on reputation and other aspects of corporate
governance.PR officers give a lot to support all business operations though most of the time,
the results are long-term.
The most common tool to measure PR work in Uganda is Advertising Value equivalents
(AVEs). AVEs presents publicity that would have been paid for as adverts. PR officers use
advertising rate cards for radios, print, TVs and websites to be more accurate with
equivalents. More analysis must be done on AVEs. AVEs alone are not effective in PR
measurement as they focus on publicity. Media relations is just a small portion of PR.PR does
more than just being press agents .No wonder some countries have already rejected AVEs. If
analsyis goes beyond just the number of press clips, AVEs can attempt to measure almost all
aspects of PR.
A data analyst can be brought on board to help on that. It is not about copying and pasting
publicity clips into reports. Publicity content can also highlight negative stories and crises.
You will know if the PR teams got to the bottom of the crisis or not.PR measurement can also
analyse publicity of the industry as a whole. You can also lookout for stories that
misrepresented a brand or those that mentioned the right company message and brand name.
Performance management tools like Balanced score card (BSC) can help measure PR. This
targets individual PR officers in a particular organisation. For example if they planned five
articles and one CSR event each month, then that becomes a target to measure. All PR
outputs and inputs can be measured by a BSC.A Balanced scorecard measures a PR officers
performance in four ways: financial perspective, internal business perspective, innovation and
learning perspective, and customer perspective. The BSC combines the Communication
strategy, objectives, and measures of performance of a particular organisation. Decisions can
be made based on the scores of the practitioner.
Research helps measure PR output and input. Different types of research can be conducted to
measure a wide range of PR tasks. Research firms can be contracted to carry out perception
audits, Message research, channel research, content research, brand awareness research,

market research, and comparative competitor research among others. Findings from such
research helps know how PR has been performing in a given period of time. Was the message
effective? What was the share of voice?
Organisations can also use multiple feedback channels to measure PR output and input.
Feedback collected from social media, emails, traditional newspapers, and suggestion boxes
can be analysed to give you a picture of how PR is delivering to the clientele.
Online PR is the easiest to measure and evaluate. There are thousands of free tools that can
generate reports. Company websites can track site visitors internally. Google analytics is also
good in measuring website activity. Each individual social media site like Twitter, Facebook,
wordpress, and scribd has its own free statistical tools. Tools can tell you engagement rates,
activity, following, content development: successes and failures. Results will tell you if the
agency or internal PR team is sleeping.
Measuring PR must always focus on the output.PR Measurements must be frequent not per
quarter. PR people do lots of tasks and they may forget about others. Organisations must also
have PR task trackers. Supervisors must set aside time at least every week to demand updates
on pending tasks in status meetings. Status meetings help organization address PR personnel
weaknesses and organisational challenges after evaluating the deliverables at hand. This helps
evaluate the goals and objections in current PR plans.
PR Measurement by an organisation should however, start with a great PR agency service
contract and detailed job descriptions for the internal staff. You can not measure what you do
not want. The contract must have key result areas you will be interested in monitoring. Those
organisations that have never measured PR can benchmark with others on the way
forward.PR officers and organisations must always lookout for new tools to measure their
work.
Ivan N Baliboola
Public Relations and organisational diagnosis specialist.
nbaliboola@gmail.com
nbaliboola.wordpress.com