One of the challenges facing public sector comms is how to work out what you've done has been effective. Maybe, it's a case of using channel shift. Especially in the public sector which is changing almost by the day.
by Dan Slee
It's always been tricky working out the impact of good communications.
Back in the day, you'd get a big ruler, a sheaf of cuttings and work out column inches.
Then maybe work out who could have read them.
Proudly, you'd boast of how 500,000 would have seen your campaign.
Then everyone would pat themselves on the back.
Only thing is, that nice as that is that just doesn't prove a hill of beans.
How many turned a page and ignored it?
Add social media into the landscape and things get even more complicated. That niche Facebook page with 200 liking it? A waste of time? Not at all. Not if its the right number for that niche activity.
So how do you measure success? Likes? Retweets? Twitter followers?
Maybe the number of press releases you wrote or the tweets you sent?
The impact of communications - traditional or digital - must be not the passive audience who glanced at it but what people did as a result of it.
So, in other words, it's how many people signed up for that course or how many used a web form instead of calling a help desk.
Frustratingly, that means it's not a universal measurement. Getting 12 people signed-up for basket making session could well be just as much a success as getting 100 to join a library.
But it's more than that.
One thing that's always irritated me about measurement - particularly social media measurement - is a the vagueness of the results.
Take Klout. Break the news to your chief executive your organisations' score is 55 and they'll more than likely look at you strangely.
Other monitoring that produces a notional number also leaves me cold.
Your rating has gone up by 2.2. So what?
But it could well be that comms people already have the answer to all this right under their noses.
A few years ago, web standards organisation SOCITM did some research into the cost to local government of doing things for residents when they got in contact.
Doing something face-to-face costs £8.62, face-to-face £2.83 and the web 15p.
Accountants PWC apparently also did some similar work calculating the cost of local government replying to a letter was around £10.
So maybe one way to evaluate some comms activity was to look at the situation before you got involved and then look at it after.
In other words, helping channel shift, that act of going from the expensive offline to the cost effective online.
Did the number of phonecalls dip? Did the letters fall? Did more people use the web to report it?
Using a compare and contrast you can come up with a notional sum of money saved.
That's a figure that really start to pass the chief executive credibility test.
That's also a language that officers can understand too.