PR measurement standards: a help or hindrance?
By Erika Mudie
It’s been four years since the creation of the Barcelona Principles, a set of measurement guidelines designed by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) and its partners specifically for the PR industry. However, the intervening years have seen little change in the prevalence of evaluation activities among PR practitioners and the barriers to incorporating evaluation into common practice remain the same. So, how have the Barcelona Principles helped the PR industry?
Simply put, the Barcelona Principles are:
- Set goals first – what business goals are helped by these communications activities? Who is the target audience and what is the desired action or change from these activities?
- Measure outcomes rather than outputs (i.e., behaviour changes amongst the target audience rather than the number of people reached)
- Measure the effect on business results
- Look at quantity and quality; not Advertising Value Equivalents (AVEs)
- Measure social media as well
- Be transparent with your methodology
Although these aren’t groundbreaking ideas, the Barcelona Principles have helped further the idea that PR is a unique communications field in its own right with specific value within an organisation. One of the most lasting impacts of the principles has been to discourage the use of AVEs to measure the effectiveness of PR activities. In place of AVEs, the principles recommend a ‘Valid Metrics Framework’, which recognises that there are a variety of PR programs and that evaluation metrics should be similarly varied to suit the aims of each program.
Perhaps this evolution in media evaluation towards specialisation, while helping the PR industry, has also hurt it. To the unfamiliar, the principles can lead to the perception that evaluation should only be placed in the hands of a specially talented few. Of course, we at Mediaverse love to think that we’re a bunch of geniuses working in media evaluation, but that doesn’t mean nobody else can make use of some basic analysis tools. The existence of a seemingly complex set of principles for analysis can also leave the impression that evaluation is costly with little organisational value and that is simply not the case. This potential to alienate does ultimately hurt the PR industry as it can discourage people from taking some simple steps to get started on measurement. You don’t need a PhD to set some goals and start tracking your activities.
So, where to from here? There has been a lot of anticipation for the discovery of a Holy Grail of PR measurement: a single metric that will accurately measure the return on investment of PR activities. This would be the wrong path for the field of media evaluation to take, as no two communications campaigns are the same. The Barcelona Principles should be viewed by PR practitioners as a solid foundation for adopting uniquely crafted evaluation methodologies to adequately demonstrate their value within their organisation.
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