How can you measure the work your team is doing on PR? Use our tool

Today, I'd like to talk to you about a tool to measure the input, so that you can track how much work you and your team are putting into your public relations. It's what we here at EastWest Public Relations call the Active Communications Index (ACI). The reason that we've built this tool is because there's a lot to talk about engagement, amplification, and thousands and millions of viewers, and so on. But actually, a bit like going to the gym, what really matters is how much effort you put in to the public relations. As we know, if you've had a great workout, it's because you've been put a lot of energy in. The feeling afterwards will be with you as a function of how much work you put in, just in the same way that your profit at the end of the day will be a function of how much work you put into the business during the day.

The Active Communications Index is a tool that we have built, and I'd like to take you through that, because we're finding it a really useful way of simplifying the amount of work that needs to be done, and it enables business owners to create a consistent activity level in the market because often, public relations is an activity that gets undertaken in a flurry. There's a new product launch, or an award won, or a new member of staff joined, or a factory opens, and after that, the cadence drops off. Now, the Active Communications Index is here to help companies find out what would be, for them, a natural rhythm of engagement in activities of public relations. Basically, there are three different elements to the Active Communications Index. The basic formula is [Content x Frequency x Channels = ACI]. Content is what you produce, frequency is how often you produce it, and the channels are where you send it to. So, let's go through how you can build a dynamic and consistent Active Communications Index for you and your organization. 

The first document that we have is what we call the Story Planner, which is made for the content. The basic premise is that we need to "Storify" our business. I talk about Storification in our SPEAK|pr model, which stands for Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify and to Know. You can Storify your business with the help of the day-by-day planner that we've created for you or your team to enter in stories. We have four weeks, and in Week 1, we have seven days wherein you can decide how often you want to publish a story. The idea is each day, we plan and think about, "What can we say?" It comes back to Personalization which focuses on the messaging of the business and especially on the content. You could share a story every single day of the week if you like. If you run a facility or a restaurant, you could have a different story, which could be a different dish of the day, a soup of the day. If you have a store, it could be a new sale item for the day. It could be allowing deliveries in a certain location.

Let's just try and think about something that's going to happen every day in your business that you could share about. At the top of that, there will have a total. We continue doing this until Week 4, and if we start this out at the beginning of the month, we've already planned out our daily stories. Anyone that has trained for a marathon, a triathlon, or any other sport will know that the secret is to plan your exercise well in advance, so you don't give yourself a chance to not feel like it on the day. By creating the stories in advance, mentally, we're already prepared for the day when it comes. And also, if we're teeing up something, then we can have that already ready. For instance, if we already know that we're going to a certain location, we'll want to come prepared with a camera, or take someone with us for a photo opportunity. What we'd have then at the end of the month is maybe 20-24 stories all lined up in advance.

The next thing that we're going to be looking at is frequency. Remember: [Content x Frequency x Channels = Active Communications Index]. Our focus here is the three different audiences that we've got and when we're going to send them the information. As we know from our SPEAK|pr, under Personalization, we talk about three different audience types: the internal which are your staff, then we have your partners or allies (suppliers, for example), and then we have our external, often considered to be the customer group. What we've got is a table with three rows and seven columns, because each column corresponds to a different day of the week, and it also gives us a total.

The idea is that what we've done with our story is we've decided which news we're going to create, and on the frequency chart, we're going to start to determine when we're going to be sending out that content. You could send out one piece of information to your staff, for example, on a Monday and maybe a Friday. It gives you a number of two. You might want to send something out once a week to your allies, or maybe only once a month to them. And then to external, you might want to have a higher frequency, sending out, say, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Maybe you've got specials coming up, or you want to announce something special for those people. So it'll also give you a total and what we do then is we'll have a total number of times that we are going to reach out and send information proactively to our three different audiences, so we have a combined number. 

The third document is for the channels, which are the different places that we're going to be sending the information. In the template that we've got, the first column is Channels, the second is Internal, and the third is External. We may have a staff newsletter. We may have a company newsletter for our customers. We may have a blog, which is good for just our customers. We may have just a Facebook group. There's Facebook teams now, we may have communication there. We may have a YouTube channel, we may have that just for external. We may have a podcast just for external. We may have SlideShare just for partners, because that's business information. You get the idea. So what we're going to do then is we're going to determine how often we're going to send information across those different channels, and that'll give us a number, once again.

If I send one email a week to my team, plus my partners, plus my allies, that gives me a total of three. If it's the same email, of course, then it's just one. But if we're going to actually create person-specific content, then we're going to increase that number. What we've got then is a matrix, which shows the number of channels by the different audiences, and that's giving us a total. Now, this is the fun part, and this isn't normally done by anybody, as far as I know, which is why I created this Active Communications Index, because we often talk in large numbers about engagement, the number of page views, the number of likes, and so on. That's all great, but I think it's also a little bit of vanity. If I'm trying to manage a business, I want to know how much resource and effort I'm putting into the activity, because that's going to be a good judge of what I'm going to get out of it. 

If we send out one piece of news, and we get lots of lots of hits, and a lot of pickup, that's great. But if we send out one piece of news and get none the next week, then we're not really getting much indication of the consistency. We're only getting how well that individual press release performed, but not how well the team or the agency performed. So, the Active Communications Index is really an indicator of how much effort is being spent on the public relations activity. The way it comes out is it gives the business owner a number that they can use, which is sensible and can be repeated on a weekly basis to get an idea of how much the team is doing and if it's doing it consistently, because public relations is about consistent engagement with the market. It is not about a one-off activity. The result is a trend for the business of how much it's communicating and seeing how well it's doing. It's also an indicator of how many channels the company is leveraging in order to get noticed. This is important, because one of the key learnings from the Active Communications Index is that it's about not only the amount of content and frequency, but the number of channels that you use to leverage the content.

I'll take you through an example of a month. In Week 1, let's say we have one piece of news and we send it one time across two channels. That gives us an index of two. Pretty simple, right? If we have one piece of content that's a press release, and we but we send it out twice, and we use two channels, we get an index of four. In other words, just by sending the same piece of news twice across the same number of channels, we've got 100% higher index. That could be, for example, you send a press release out on a Monday and on a Thursday, because people might have missed it on the first time it went out. You could send it again.

Now, let's say on Week 3, we've got five pieces of content, because we've got a story ready every day, and we are only sending those stories one time each, but we're using two channels, say, Twitter and Facebook. 5 x 1 x 2 gives us an index of 10. You can see there by increasing the content, even just by one per day, instead of one per week, with the same number of channels, we've got five times the uplift in the actual energy going into the marketplace for the public relations of the company. Finally, let's say in the final week, we have five pieces of content. In other words, one per day going out, but going out twice, so you're pretty much repurposing existing content, and you're using two channels. That gives an index of 20, so you've got 10 times the index from Week 1, but all you've really done then is to send something out once every day instead of once per week, and you're repurposing the same content. Remember, it doesn't have to be fresh content. You can use the same content but twice a week, and you're sending it across two channels. 

So as you can see, the Active Communications Index is an extremely simple tool, because frankly, I'm not a mathematician. I'm a PR person and entrepreneur. The goal of this is not to make it complicated, but to keep it simple, because if it can be used by everybody in the organization, it becomes part of the terminology, like sales leads, conversion ratio, acid ratio. What is our Active Communications Index for this week? The learnings here are straightforward, because the math means that if we can generate more content using the Story planner, if we can post more frequently with the help of automation, and if we can send it across more channels, again, by using social amplification tools, what we get as business owners is a multiplier effect. It's not about getting hundreds of agency staff or lots and lots of people doing lots and lots of work. It's about using tools, content, and technology to leverage the story of your business. This is the essence of the Active Communications Index. The idea is that each week you track it, much like if you were working out to get fit for a marathon. If you track how fit you are, then you know that each week you're getting fitter, and you have to keep this relentless pace in order to build a great brand in the marketplace just as you keep that relentless pace if you are training for something or saving up for something in the markets.

The SPEAK|pr program is a program that I developed to help business owners who may not want to have an agency for whatever reason, but do need to find ways to unlock the value in their business. The Active Communications Index is the measurement device that I've created with my experience of over 25 years of building brands using public relations, so that business owners can have a free, effective, and easy to implement and manage tool, so they can see just how likely they are to get noticed. As we know, in business, the more we put in, the more we're going to get out, so let's track how much goes in and what comes out. I'm sure it will be terrific. If there's anything I can help you with, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. You can find me at [email protected] or on LinkedIn. You can also go to our website and send in a form.

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Cover Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash