Universal Information Services

PR Measurement, public relations measurement, is an integral part of the public relations process. This is the third post in a series of four that answer Key Questions for public relations professionals and corporate communicators.

The PR Measurement Process

PR Measurement is the process of objectively evaluating the outcomes from a public relations effort, an event or sustained program, in order to provide meaningful measures that show the client or organization their impact. More directly stated, public relations measurement is the science of analyzing  company or client objectives against outcomes to determine the efficiency, effectiveness and success of the PR or communications effort. Much goes into this process to ensure the methodology is unbiased, accurate, and repeatable, but this is enough detail to answer the question.

Why is measuring public relations necessary?

Evaluating one’s work is critical to the process of improving that work over time, and subsequently providing better service to your client or company. Measuring the effectiveness of your public relations effort is necessary for many reasons, most importantly as a metric on your progress. An effective PR measurement program gives you timely feedback on how well you are reaching your objectives. Without qualitative and quantitative measures, professional communicators have only a few indicators of success. These rough indicators can also lead to misleading assumptions that can be very costly in terms of dollars spent and time wasted. The two most important reasons to measure your public relations efforts are:

1. Your client or executive team wants to know what you do for their organization and if you are making progress towards the defined goals.
2. Unless you measure your outcomes relative to your goals, how do you know if you are making progress? Counting placements is no indicator of impact and data based adjustments are now the norm for PR strategies.

KEY QUESTION: What Is PR Measurement?

At the risk of being repetitive, PR measurement is the designed effort to reliably analyze and determine the relative effectiveness of a specific public relations program or effort according to a valid methodology. This transparent approach is best used by measuring the outputs and outcomes of that public relations effort against a predetermined set of objectives provided by the client or agency. Measuring your efforts is no longer something you can do the weekend before the end of the month. The tools are costly, the brains are expensive, and being under a time crunch never yields the results you want. Universal Information Services does this work for our clients and includes our concierge service and training.

To learn more about how PR measurement and analysis support can improve your public relations efforts, or why our clients love working with Universal Information Services, connect via email. To schedule a 15 minute demo, book a time here!