How’s That Working For Ya?

     In a former career, our organization was once faced with a shortage of corporate sponsors, so our marketing department had to find new ways of reaching out to find sponsorships that once came from the Department of Education.  It seemed that targeting corporate sponsors was a whole different animal than the Department of Education because up until that year when they had major cuts, they were more than willing to hand out money for a proven worthy cause, but corporate sponsors seemed a harder sell.  In seeking new sponsors, our marketing department looked at what we needed, our corporate options, our stakeholders and came up with a plan.  Since the Department of Education had funded us for so many years, seeking new corporate sponsorship was somewhat new and we had to get a plan together, put it out there, see if it worked and learn from our success and/or failure.  It took years to line up sponsors that gave as willingly and as big as the Department of Education, but through strategic planning and continued work and evaluation, we finally made up all of that lost funding with more lucrative relationships that continue in that company until this day. 

     This week in Leadership and Media Strategies our question is how do you know that your strategic communication program is effective?  In order to evaluate any program or campaign, an organization first needs to know its purpose or its goals, what it takes to reach these goals and its stakeholders.  The article “Evaluating Communication Campaigns” by Thomas W. Valente and Patchereeya P. Kwan states that evaluation research determines whether a public relations campaign was effective in achieving its goals.  Evaluation has to first determine if a campaign resulted in its expected impacts or outcomes. Next an evaluation looks into how the campaign did or did not work. And finally, an evaluation garners information that will help professionals successfully plan future campaigns.  Our literature this week comes from so many forums and all of them specify many avenues of evaluating a strategic program and the problems in formally evaluating a program.  The fact that media has changed so drastically over the past few years is one reason that evaluating effectiveness is problematic.  Identifying the best means for evaluation presents another problem.  Yet there are good ways of evaluating a program. 

     The article “Five Ways to Measure the Impact of a Digital PR Campaign” states ways of evaluation that are reasonable and effective.  One method pointed out in the article is monitoring blog or web traffic.  Of course, if an organization is able to measure an increase of viewers once a program is instituted, this means the program is working.  Another measure would be referrals.  Social media shares are prevalent these days and easily tracked.  There are also ways to track press release engagement.  One last way the article recommends to evaluate a program is through outputs and outcomes in the amount of media coverage, articles and leads that come from a campaign.  In looking back on my former company, when we needed funding and put out a new campaign, we looked at all of these avenues in evaluating our successes even though back then some of the measures were not so popular as they are today because the Internet has grown so much since then.  But just as this article states, first you have to monitor things such as traffic, referrals, social media shares and any attention from your program that will push the public in your direction.  All of these results will help you to evaluate each step in your plan to see if your initial goals or outcomes have been reached.  These results are key indicators as to whether or not your program is on target or needs improvement. 

     It is interesting this week that in the midst of our literature for this topic that we had several TED Talks that really made me look at not only my professional journey but my personal one also, which of course are closely connected.  I love the TED Talk which featured Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist, who spoke about how your body language shapes who you are.  At first I didn’t connect this piece with our topic of the week.  After looking at everything and looking over the course of this class, I had an ah-ha moment.  Cuddy is passionate about the fact that “our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes.” Just as tweaking our bodies can pump our minds up to change our behavior, organizations today can look at their goals, tweak a few things and pump up their outcomes.  Gone are the days of old and relying on traditional methods of communications.  If you expect a return on your investments these days in strategic communications, you have to be bold, utilize all sources of media from traditional to the ever-changing Internet methods in order to reach your audiences.  This is not enough, because success also means keeping up with emerging media and innovations and utilizing them to the fullest in order to reach your audiences and fulfill your goals. Media and its audiences are changing every day, so strategic communications has to be changing along with them. 

     Our sources this week mentioned many methods of evaluating strategic communication programs, but in this market, as we have learned throughout this class, it can be quite obvious if your campaign is working.  People are watching around the clock.  People are posting on social media, writing blogs, checking links on websites and sharing information 24 hours a day.  If your program is effective, you will have an indication in one form or another, positively or negatively.  Sure it is important to have internal programs to evaluate a campaign, but keeping an eye and an ear on the powers that be in our popular streams of media is a major way of knowing if your program is effective or not in reaching any outcomes in your communication plan.