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.

Reflections from the IoIC Excellence Awards

I don’t think anyone starts out in their career with the goal of winning awards, unless you’re an Olympic athlete or something like that of course!

A lot of the time, because what you do at work becomes second nature, you don’t realise how amazing it is.

I’m definitely someone who likes to work away in the background and I find praise difficult to take in, often because I think ‘I’m just doing my job’ and don’t deserve it.

Winning one of these would be nice!

I’ve been thinking a lot about awards recently. Not only because our Marketing colleagues are busy with their submissions for various things, but myself and Jenny, Bedfordshire’s Internal Communicates Manager, recently returned from York after making the shortlist for an Institute of Internal Communications (IoIC) award.

Sadly we didn’t take the top prize but we did get an Award for Excellence which we were very happy with. We also got a certificate which has pride of place on our desk.

The National Railway Museum was the perfect venue!

Although my background is in media relations and external communications, I have been more and more involved with internal communications as my career has progressed, something that I’ve really enjoyed.

I felt like a bit of impostor at the ceremony because the staff newsletter is Jenny’s creation which she set up and took care of long before I joined the team. But when I stopped and thought about it, I remembered that the newsletter is a team effort.

Me and Jenny work together to get it out every fortnight and we work hard to make sure it is full of things our colleagues across the University want to know about.

So I guess I want this post to be a reminder to everyone to take a moment and look at what you have achieved recently. Look at the do-to list you’ve managed to complete. Look at the piece of work you’ve finished that you’ve been working on for weeks. Think of the impact you made to a colleague by helping them out or making them a cup of tea when they needed it.

When you are close to something, you forget what a positive impact you’re making. We don’t have to be rocket scientists or anything that fancy but our efforts in our jobs do matter and do make a different. So take a moment to give yourself a little pat on the back - you deserve it.