Effective communication doesn’t end when the message is sent. Measure communication effectiveness tells you what happens afterwards, helping you understand whether you reached the right people, whether they responded as intended and whether your communication helped achieve its purpose. The real value comes from using what you learn to adapt what you do next.
You’ve worked through WHY, WHAT, WHO, WHERE and WHEN. You’ve listened to your audiences and built a communications framework around what your organisation is trying to achieve.
Now comes the part that’s often overlooked.
What happened after you communicated?
If you don’t know, you don’t really know whether it worked.
MEASURE closes the loop in The Adaptive Approach. It gives you information you can use to understand what is working, what isn’t and what may need to change.
But measurement doesn’t mean collecting every number a platform can give you. It starts with something much simpler: going back to your WHY.
Start with your WHY
Before deciding what to measure, remind yourself what you were trying to achieve in the first place.
If your WHY was to:
- increase registrations for an event, impressions alone won’t tell you whether you achieved it. Registrations matter.
- make sure field staff understood a new safety requirement, an email open rate doesn’t tell you whether they understood it or acted on the information.
- build professional credibility with a particular audience, follower numbers alone won’t necessarily tell you whether that is happening.
Different WHYs need different measures.
A useful starting point is to ask three questions:
- Did it reach the people we wanted to reach?
- Did they understand or respond to it in the way we intended?
- Did it help achieve our WHY?
Those questions help move measurement beyond reporting activity for activity’s sake.
Activity is not the same as success
Communications teams can measure an extraordinary amount of activity through organic and paid digital platforms, which can be great and overwhelming all at the same time.
Teams can measure things like how many posts were published, emails sent, articles written, videos produced or newsletters distributed.
That information can be useful, particularly for understanding workload and output.
But publishing 137 social posts in a year doesn’t necessarily tell you whether your communication worked, just that 137 posts were published.
So, what should we measure?
Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, there are various ways you can measure whether you’re achieving success.
Readily available insights and metrics can be found across:
- Social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube etc).
- As a general rule, I tend to focus on engagement rate rather than individual metrics such as likes. Engagement rate can give you a broader indication of how people are interacting with your content rather than focusing on a single action.
- Google website analytics (and other website analytics platforms)
- This can be extremely useful for understanding whether people are visiting your site, how long they’re spending there, where traffic is coming from and more.
- If you’re using custom campaign URLs, you can also measure clicks from individual campaigns.
- HTML Newsletters (Mailchimp and others, including my favourite, Campaign Monitor)
- Measurement can go beyond how many emails were delivered. You can measure open rates and, if you structure your newsletter with a summary linking to the main article or content piece, you can also see which links people are clicking. Those visits can then appear in your website analytics.
- Podcast listens
- I am new to this area of measurement, but you can track general measures such as listens and downloads across the various platforms where your podcast is available.
There are also various ways to track individual campaign activity using custom campaign URLs and QR codes.
For instance, if you have posters, you could create a custom campaign URL specifically for the poster and use that URL to generate a QR code. If people scan it, you can then identify traffic generated from the poster.
Measuring can be time-consuming
Most teams won’t have dedicated staff to collate and present results, which can become extremely time-consuming, particularly if you’re tracking more than a one-off campaign or relying on good old spreadsheets.
There are paid platforms that can bring digital measurement together, with some allowing you to build customised dashboards and reports.
You may already use something like this for your social media management, with platforms such as Sprout Social, HubSpot, Vista Social or Brandwatch providing various reporting capabilities.
One tool I’ve used in the past is DashThis, a marketing reporting platform that provides dashboards and custom reporting. No affiliate relationship here, I’m just speaking from my own experience.
Once you connect your sources, you can build custom reports and even email them automatically to yourself or someone else.
The reason I liked it was that it was clean and easy to use, and I could build custom reports around what I actually wanted to track. For example, I wanted to track our new newsletter, but I also wanted to understand whether the activity promoting the newsletter was generating engagement and click-throughs.
So, after some time to build the report, we tracked:
- Website traffic to the articles
- Newsletter opens and click through to the website
- Social engagement for the promotional posts for the articles
This meant I could go to the custom report and immediately view:
- How many people visited the website/news section, including year-on-year comparisons
- Which articles they viewed and how long they spent on each article
- Newsletter open rates and which articles received the most click-throughs
- This was great to compare with the website stats
- Which social posts performed best at driving click-throughs.
Tools such as these can be useful. They may seem expensive at first, but they can save considerable staff time otherwise spent moving between individual platforms and manually collating separate numbers and reports.
Some WHYs won’t be measurable through communications metrics alone. For example, if you are trying to change behaviour, this is not something that can be measured with click throughs.
Instead, you may need to work with the subject matter experts of that area and ask how they measure their work. They may already have a way to measure the impact of their work.
If the communication relates to workplace health and safety, for example, the organisation may already track incidents, reports or other WHS measures over time. Communications data can then sit alongside those measures to help explore whether communication activity may be contributing to the intended outcome.
Measure your framework, not just individual communications
Measurement is not only something you do at the end of a campaign or after publishing a social post.
Remember the internal and external communications framework we built in the previous article?
You can step back and evaluate that too.
Ask questions such as:
- Are the channels we’ve chosen reaching the audiences they’re intended to reach?
- Are people using our source content and finding the information they need?
- Are our short-form channels successfully directing people to deeper information where appropriate?
- Are our newsletters, meetings or other anchor communications doing the job we designed them to do?
- Are some channels taking significant time and resources without contributing much to our objectives?
- Are audiences engaging with our long-form or professional content?
- Have audience behaviours, organisational priorities or channels changed since the framework was developed?
This is where measurement can start informing bigger decisions about your communications ecosystem, not just the performance of an individual piece of content.
Don't let the dashboard become the strategy
A dashboard can be useful. So can a spreadsheet, analytics platform or monthly report.
But a beautiful dashboard full of numbers isn’t the same thing as understanding what those numbers mean.
Look for patterns rather than isolated wins or losses.
One post performing exceptionally well does not necessarily mean you should rebuild your strategy around it. Likewise, one poorly performing email does not automatically mean email is the wrong channel.
Consider the context, compare performance over time and look at what your audience is telling you alongside the numbers.
Measurement should help you make better decisions, not simply produce more reporting.
Measure, learn and adapt
No communications framework will stay perfect forever.
Organisations change. Audiences change. Technology changes. Channels change. Priorities change. And sometimes what worked brilliantly last year simply stops working.
The aim isn’t to create the perfect plan and then follow it forever.
It is to create an informed approach that can learn and adapt.
That’s The Adaptive Approach.
This article is part of The Adaptive Approach insight series.