Mastering measurement

So the word on my mind this week is measurement. To be honest, this is probably not one of the most riveting topics that I could have chosen for a blog post, but I thought I would go against the grain and not focus on the other word preoccupying the department this week – Clearing. 

Never the less as it has been a priority on my to do list, so I thought I would try and share some of my thoughts on how I am trying to be more robust in measuring our internal communications, and specifically assessing the success of campaigns and knowing how we can improve for the future.

It often feels as though when it comes to measuring the impact of campaigns, things are more straight forward for my marketing and digital colleagues (especially as their outcomes are more tangible; resulting in enquirers, applicants and ultimately students). But actually I think it is just a bit more ingrained in their practice and this is something that internal comms or at least I could learn from.

Historically I think measurement is something that internal communications has grappled with. I recently had the privilege of helping to judge Institute of Internal

Communications awards and I was blown away by the standard of entries but it was clear that the measurement side of things was a little bit weaker. 

More often than not it’s really the outputs (i.e. the number of people that read an email, or a newsletter) that gets focussed on, as I suppose it’s just easier to demonstrate. But measuring and revealing the outcomes (i.e changes in behaviour) of our communications is something that we need to place more importance on rather than just showing reach. 

We recently launched our ‘Let’s make it happen’ campaign to encourage our staff to get on board with our new strategic plan, I mentioned it in my last blog post. When thinking about planning and evaluating a campaign, internal communications professionals are concerned with what we want people to know, what we want them to feel and what we want them to do differently as a result.

I’m now in the process of measuring how successful the communications have been in:

• engaging colleagues in the development of the plan, encouraging them to contribute to each stage of the development process
• raising awareness of the new plan
• encouraging shared ownership and accountability of the plan
• urging and encouraging action to help the University to implement the plan

Some of the tools in my arsenal to evaluate this include:

• Focus groups- to gather opinions and views on what has or hasn’t worked with our communications including assessing message recall and looking at what has changed as a result
• Pulse surveys - to quantify specific measures in relation to communications
• Walk abouts- casual research to find out what people thought of the communications
• Assessing analytics and feedback from our strategic plan intranet site, emails and our newsletters
• Evaluate feedback that we received from staff that attended consultation events and town hall style events

If our market research guru Andy is reading this, he is possibly currently grimacing at the fact that I’m going to be calling on his expertise shortly. 

I think in the end this blog turned out to be a bit of an internal comms lecture, but essentially this is what we are trying to do as part of our everyday practice, to develop SMART communications objectives that are both output and outcome focussed and linked to the overall objectives of the University.