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.
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