Tag: value of PR

Evaluation

Interesting piece in PR Week about the evaluation of PR campaigns and how long agencies can or should keep using the advertising value equivalent figure as a measure of success. The piece repeats all the reasons I’ve always mistrusted AVE as a measure – just colonising space in a paper for an article is no guarantee that anyone reads it, agrees with it or acts on it; it doesn’t offer a means of measuring social media comment; and for obvious reasons it can’t measure one of the key activities of a good PR – keeping bad stories out of the papers. How much might it have been worth to the BBC if the PR response to the Ross/Brand row had been niftier and those acres of press coverage about declining moral standards hadn’t been printed? How could you have measured it if it had happened?

Evaluation gets even harder when the campaign you are evaluating is trying to generate long-lasting behavioural/attitudinal change, as many of the campaigns run by government are. It takes years to achieve real social change – it’s taken decades for drink-driving to have become socially unacceptable, for example.  No client is going to pay for tracking research over a decade to prove whether or not they achieved their objective.  And no agency could wait that long to be paid. Who decides that social change has taken place?  As an agency, how do we demonstrate that the change was due to us and wouldn’t have happened anyway? Ultimately we’re forced back on easy to measure indicators: the delivery of materials on time/  budget, target take-up rates of info packs or testing kits among certain sections of the audience, an agreed level of media coverage measured through AVE or WOTS (weighted opportunities to see – which can generate their own meaninglessly surreal statistics, apparently there were 1.4billion WOTS for stories about bird flu in this country (pop 60m) during the last time we had a health scare).  On the occasions when I’ve been sitting on the client’s rather than the agency’s side of the process, I’ve always had my doubts that I’d be able to really measure the success of what I was being offered. COI were making a big noise about their new evaluation process, Artemis, a while ago – does it work?

Five reasons why money spent on PR is always worth it

Coming home on the tube yesterday I saw a headline in one of the freebie newspapers which said “Haringey Council blew £2m on PR”  The argument, depressingly familar to those of us who work in public sector communications, is that every penny spent on press officers means less for social workers, leading in this case directly to the death of Baby P.   Comforting myself with the thought that my source was hardly a paper of record, I googled the story this morning to see if any of the “proper” papers were running with it. I found this in the Telegraph, which repeats the argument pretty much exactly, making a direct link between the money spent on PR and the casework overload of the social worker in the Baby P case.

I am a PR consultant who works for public sector organisations (and therefore, obviously, am quite happy to grab cash and if possible food from the hands of widows and orphans), so I have a bit of a biased view of this one.  But I’m still pretty depressed at the frequency with which the PR = wasted money argument comes around.  I’ve spent most of my career in  publicly-funded bodies, and have always had at the front of my mind the fact that I am spending the public’s money on the projects I do,  so need to get value for money. (By the way, I appreciate the irony that I am now defending Haringey’s PR team, having criticised their performance over the Baby P case a couple of posts back – perhaps it means Haringey just aren’t spending enough…)

So, off the top of my head, here are five quick reasons why it’s worth public bodies spending public money on communicating with the public – and how depressing to have to trot them out yet again.

1.  There’s little point in spending very large amounts of money in providing services for the public and then failing to let them know how/where to access those services

2.  It’s good for local democracy to let people know how their elected representatives are spending their money.  Even if individuals don’t personally need to access all local services it’s good that they know that the Council does more than just emptying the bins.  If people understand how their Council Tax is being spent,  they can object if they want to, which is one way of keeping the link between local government and local people alive.  Comms budgets often pay for public consultations on contentious local issues.

3.  Media training doesn’t mean turning out hordes of automata who just parrot a party line.  It means helping people who are not professional communicators deal with the pressures of media scrutiny so that they can put their case as effectively as possible.

4. Press offices offer an invaluable resource of information and contacts for journalists – bet the Telegraph journo who sourced the quotes for this story gets lots of help from PRs!

5.  As a proportion of Haringey’s overall operational budget, £2.2m is peanuts.  I think I read that the total budget was somewhere north of £250m (I could always call their press office to check…)  So the PR budget represents just a shade under 1%.

If anyone wants to add more I’d be happy to hear them, and store them up for the next time this story comes around.

And finally, why is the PR industry so bad at doing PR for itself?