Evaluating Communications Campaigns
Evaluating communications campaigns
When planning your communications campaign or strategy give consideration to the methods you can use to evaluate its success.
Below are some of the methods we would recommend:
- Media clips – monitor the media after an event and gauge the amount of time and the positioning of the coverage within the programme(1)
- Press coverage – usually measured in column inches, but again look to see where it is in the newspaper/magazine. As a monetary value, this can be measured against the cost of advertising space in the journal concerned
- Interviews – if you are getting follow up requests for interviews (monitor these too)
- Increased frequency/usage – establish before the campaign launch the frequency/usage and then compare with post campaign. An example might be visitors to your website (Google analytics), or volume of product being purchased
- Increased interest – for example additional enquiries, applications, phone calls etc
- Surveys – mainly to test greater awareness
- Focus groups – best used to test if the message was correctly received/perceived/interpreted
- Employee survey – such as the Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ) or ECCO (Episodic Communications Channels in Organisations)
- Feedback forms
Don’t keep your evaluation results to yourself. Share them to show what worked and what didn’t work so that improvements can be made next time, new communications channels explored and unsuccessful one are dropped.
There is a big difference between knowing the theory and making it happen. For help in implementing your communications practices email us now.
(1) Generally, the longer the piece the better. If it is near the start of the programme then again, generally, the better.
