Recording and evaluating your PR work
Evaluation is the toughest task any PR faces. It's important to set aside time to review your media work and learn from your experiences. The more you can record about your campaign, the more successful your next volunteer recruitment project will be.
Why evaluate your media work?
- In order to plan your next media strategy you need to discover which of your media activities are successful and which aren't doing as well as hoped.
- Use your evaluation to check your media project's effectiveness. Prove to others in your organisation that using the media is a key way to reach communities and get people involved.
- Evaluation will give you the information you need to improve the accuracy of your campaigns and make sure your volunteering message is reaching target audiences.
- It usually means you'll save time and money on your next media project.
Recording media coverage of your campaign
Make sure to collate and record all the media coverage you achieve. Keep a cuttings file and record which page the story appeared on or how long the radio coverage was at what time of day etc.
If your campaign spreads to several regions or across the country it can be hard to track where and when your story gets coverage. There are several companies who offer cuttings and media monitoring services. None of them are totally comprehensive and 100% effective, so it's always worth trying to keep your own cuttings/ media coverage file if you can:
- Durrants will search all print and broadcast, national and regional, for you by keyword and send you the cuttings. They will also show you where the article was featured on the newspaper/ magazine page. Costs vary depending on your search but it usually works works out at approx. £300 per month.
- Press Index, Cision, Press Data, Adfero, Metrica and PressWatch Media are other media monitoring services to consider and get quotes from.
Evaluating the success and value of your media work
- Always ask those who email or call your charity for more information about volunteering how they heard about you. Tracking responses to the coverage you achieve is the best way to prove the value of your media work. From the moment an article about your campaign appears in the paper (or a feature is broadcast on the radio/ TV) monitor all responses generated. See how TimeBank, CSV and Special Constables did this.
- Traditionally the value of editorial coverage is thought to be up to 4 times more valuable than purchased advertising space.
- Calculate the value of your coverage by working out the number of square centimetres of the article and multiply that by the cost per square centimetre to place an advert on the same page of that newspaper or magazine. Ask the newspaper/ magazine for their advertising rate card to get prices. This of course is not a true value of the coverage content but it will give you some figures to impress others with.
- Measure any increase in activity. Check the number of people visiting your organisation’s website. See if there’s any increase in activity the day (and week after) the article about your organisation is published or broadcast.
There is another way to really examine the quality of media coverage your organisation is achieving. With each piece of coverage you secure work through these questions and give yourself an honest mark out of 10. The closer your total score is to 100, the more successful that coverage has been for your organisation:
1) Did the key message you want get included in the article? Was it clear and easy to understand?
2) Was the tone of the article what you wanted?
3) Did your organisation get a good/ positive mention in the article?
4) Was the size of the article good?
5) Was the article placed prominently in the paper? Front page or p. 245?
6) Was the headline good or eye-catching? Was a large font size used?
7) Was a good photo included with the article?
8) Did the story reach the intended audience?
9) Did you get your organisation’s phone number and web address printed?
10) Did you get your “call to action” for volunteers included in the article?
CIPR publishes a guide, PR Toolkit: Media Evaluation Edition (£86.00) which includes a comprehensive set of guidelines to help you measure the effectiveness of PR work. CIPR also run one day training courses in PR planning, research and evaluation (costs approx. £350).
Vocus offer a software programme to help PRs analyse their media coverage.
nfpSynergy produce a Charity Media Monitor twice a year to find out what journalists think of particular charities and their media activities.
Read the next article in this section.... How do you prove that your campaign worked?
