How can you measure PR effectiveness during a crisis?

1 Define your objectives

Before you start measuring anything, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your PR strategy. What are the main goals and outcomes that you want to communicate to your stakeholders? How do you want them to perceive and respond to your organization? How do you want to influence their behavior and actions? By defining your objectives, you can align your PR activities with your business goals and create relevant indicators and metrics to track your progress.

2 Choose your metrics

When measuring the effectiveness of PR during a crisis, you can choose from different types of metrics depending on your objectives. Output metrics measure the quantity and quality of PR outputs such as press releases, media coverage, and social media posts. They can help assess how well you are reaching and engaging your target audience, as well as how consistent and coherent your messages are. Outcome metrics measure the changes and effects that your PR outputs have on your audience, such as awareness, knowledge, attitude, opinion, trust, loyalty, etc. They can help evaluate how well you are influencing and persuading your stakeholders. Impact metrics measure the ultimate results and benefits that your PR outcomes have on your organization, such as sales, revenue, market share, retention, referrals, etc. They can help demonstrate the value and return on investment of your PR efforts and how well you are supporting business goals and objectives. Examples of output metrics are reach, impressions, share of voice, tone, and message delivery; outcome metrics are surveys, polls, ratings, reviews, feedback, and sentiment analysis; impact metrics are conversions, leads, transactions, retention rate, and customer lifetime value.

3 Select your tools

Once you have decided on your metrics, you need to find the right tools to collect and analyze your data. Media monitoring tools, such as Meltwater, Cision, and CoverageBook, can help you track and measure your media coverage across different channels and platforms. Social media analytics tools, like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer, can measure and optimize your social media performance as well as provide insights on the demographics, preferences, behavior, sentiment of your social media audience. Web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Mixpanel can help you measure and improve your website performance and track online conversions. All of these tools can offer valuable data on the volume, reach, tone, sentiment, message delivery of your coverage. They can also provide information on the sources, outlets, influencers that are mentioning you as well as the trends, topics, and hashtags that are relevant to your industry and niche.

4 Analyze your data

Once you have collected your data, you must analyze it and interpret it in an effective manner. You must compare your data with objectives, benchmarks, and expectations to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your PR strategy. Additionally, you need to seek out patterns, trends, correlations, and causations that can help explain and understand your results. To analyze your data, you can use descriptive statistics to summarize it; inferential statistics to test it; and data visualization to represent it graphically. Descriptive statistics provide an overview of your performance while inferential statistics draw conclusions and generalizations from your data. Data visualization is also useful for communicating and presenting your data in a captivating way while highlighting the key findings of your analysis.

5 Report your findings

The final step of measuring your PR effectiveness during a crisis is to report your findings and recommendations to your stakeholders. You need to create a report that summarizes your objectives, metrics, tools, data, analysis, and results, while providing actionable insights and suggestions for improvement. It's important to tailor your report to your audience and use a clear and concise language and format. You can use various formats and channels for reporting your findings, such as written reports, oral presentations, or dashboards. Written reports are formal documents that provide an in-depth account of PR measurement and evaluation. They should include an executive summary, introduction, methodology, results section, discussion section, conclusion, and recommendations section. Oral presentations are informal sessions that provide an overview of PR measurement and evaluation. They should include an introduction, main body, conclusion, and Q&A section. Dashboards are dynamic displays that provide a real-time view of PR measurement and evaluation with various indicators, metrics, charts, graphs, tables, and other data visualization elements. Various software and tools can be used to create these reports such as Microsoft Word or PowerPoint for written reports or Google Sheets or Tableau for dashboards.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?