In my years within this field, I have often run into the debate of whether or not effects within PR, or for that matter, communications on the whole, actually can be measured. Without traveling too deep into that debate, the “cons” refer to that communication or PR never stands alone, it cannot do that and neither should it. Hence, it will be impossible to measure any meaningful effects of PR-activities or efforts. Because if we can’t isolate what part PR actually played in the reaching of the goals, or the not reaching of the goals – how can we know if PR (or communications) have succeeded in anything? While I do give some credit to this opinion, this is somehow also true of all social science. It is not like physics, where A plus B determinedly leads to C. But as in other fields of social science, it is however possible to retract quantitative and qualities measures from a PR activity and draw conclusions from that, that later on is interpreted in a larger structure where you can see a pattern. From this, you will be able to draw the most plausible conclusions.
As an example, if you intend to reach a more upright position nationwide for your organizations work with unemployment, one part of this is the media attention you are getting. You’ll have broken this very wide goal down into different sub-targets. While you will certainly have more goals to reach, that are owned by other parts in your organization, the media attention falls to you, the PR-manager. And if you can show that in a year’s time, you have raised the number of articles published and spokespersons quoted in media, related to your organization, this will be one (and the first, in this case), factor that you will measure and show as part of the effect.
Naturally, it doesn’t stop there. You may want to know the share of the articles that are positive, natural and negative. You may want to know if your organization is the active part, or a passive part in the narrative. And, if you are a bit more advanced with your PR-strategy, you may want to know how much your brand-messaging is reflected. This is all examples of what can be measured, and what I think gives a pretty hint about whether or not you have reached the goals. The more clearly you can articulate those goals, the easier it will be to measure.
There are a lot of tools and methods for measuring PR, and more develops by the minute. There has been a dramatic increase of both tools and methods over the last 10 years, and they are getting more and more refined. It would therefore be meaningless to name any certain brand or company to work with here. It also depends on where you are in the world. Some examples to look into are media surveying platforms, social media listening tools, advanced web-statistics programs and SEO-statistics tools, for example Google Analytics or Ubersuggest.
A lot of them are AI-based and give a more accurate and actual picture of your landscape than I used to think would ever be possible. But as all tech-based systems, they are not smarter (yet!) than the question asked of them. So my last take-away about this subject is; decide what you want to measure and what you can measure. Then decide what is relevant to measure.
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