Measurement and Analytics Certificate Program

Too often, measurement is considered at the end of what we think was a successful campaign or project. However, in order to make sure the project plan addressed the right messages and used the right channels, research needs to precede planning. This module will cover different ways you can incorporate audience research into developing a plan that will be more likely to help achieve your organization’s goals.

By the end of this module, participants will be able to:

• Apply available research/measurement models and resources: Barcelona Measurement Principles, IPR’s outputs/outtakes/outcomes and CIPR’s Internal Communication Measurement Matrix.
• Identify what success will look like before developing a plan: what stakeholder behaviors need to change and use that as the framework for researching the best messages and channels to achieve those outcomes.
• Define primary research and understand examples of how pre-planning research changed different organizations’ original communication plans.
• Define secondary research and become familiar with some major studies that offer data communicators can use, such as the Edelman Trust Barometer and the Willis Towers Watson Change and Communication ROI Study.
• Implement best practices for conducting research methodologies like surveys and focus groups, and for interpreting and reporting your findings.

Messages don’t exist in a vacuum; they are carried through the channels we choose for them. However, there are ways to measure how well the messages are getting through to our stakeholders regardless of their distribution medium. We can track the quality and quantity of content we generate, and we can measure to what extent those messages were seen, read, understood, believed and accepted by our audiences. In this module, participants will learn a variety of ways to conduct these measurements, from less resource-intensive approaches to highly quantitative ones.

By the end of this module, participants will be able to:

• Use observational metrics, including content analysis and readability statistics.
• Demonstrate understanding of qualitative research through talking to stakeholders in interviews, focus groups and online discussion forums about the topics being communicated.
• Demonstrate understanding of quantitative survey research on message effectiveness through interest and information levels on topics - current and preferred channels - and actual knowledge.

Channels don’t exist in a vacuum either; they’re loaded with message content. However, there are ways to measure how effective the channels themselves are overall with your target audiences. We can track how many people have access to those channels or find them useful or easy to use. We can identify what types of topics they prefer finding through various channels. Module 3 will cover a variety of ways to conduct these measurements, from less resource-intensive approaches to highly quantitative ones.

By the end of this module, participants will be able to:

• Identify observational metrics including that of passive online usage statistics for digital channels and proactive tracking of desired usage for websites and online publications.
• Develop questions to use in qualitative research for talking to stakeholders in interviews, focus groups and online discussion forums about channels.
• Apply quantitative survey research to analyze access to channels, usefulness of channels, preferred frequency of channels, consumption of channel content, relationship of channels to desired outcomes and face-to-face communication metrics.

Measuring messages and channels is an invaluable way to keep improving the quality of our work. However, executives often ask if the work we do is helping them achieve bottom-line results for our organizations. They want to see the connection between the communication we are doing and how that has changed the way employees work and the way customers and other publics interact with our organizations. Module 4 will demonstrate ways to either correlate our work with business outcomes or prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship that allows us to talk about credible returns on investment as other business functions do.

By the end of this module, participants will be able to:

• Connect communication to stakeholder outcomes: knowledge, attitudes and behaviors.
• Define the formula for calculating incremental ROI on a specific communication campaign or channel.
• Describe several ways of isolating communication’s contribution to behavior changes resulting in improved business results: timing, pilot studies (intentional and accidental), survey questions and correlations between survey results and business results.

This module will focus primarily on measuring earned media and earned social, two channels that offer unique opportunities for measurement. Participants will hear examples of how the most meaningful metrics to track can be consolidated into a scorecard that helps communicators keep their eyes on the key analytics and share the results with executives.

By the end of this module, participants will be able to:

• Explain why Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) is not a meaningful measure of PR effectiveness for earned media
• Discuss which of a variety of quantitative measures for earned media are most meaningful in different situations: impressions, reach, share of voice, etc.
• Discuss the relative importance of various social metrics, such as likes, shares, conversation ratios, etc.
• Interpret the results of sentiment analysis of social media conversations.
• Develop and use dashboards of key earned media metrics.

All the preceding modules focus primarily on the “what” to measure. Many of the case studies included use a variety of research and measurement techniques. This final module provides best practices to follow and pitfalls to avoid when using the most common research methods — the “how” of evaluating success. The two methodologies we’ll be covering will be focus groups and surveys.

By the end of this module, participants will be able to:

• Identify how many focus groups and interviews might be needed for a useful qualitative research project, and the pros and cons of different selection methods.
• Practice techniques in facilitating focus groups, such as setting expectations, developing open-ended questions, encouraging quiet participants, taking notes in a way that results in easier analysis, and presenting qualitative results visually.
• Determine when to survey everyone in your audience or a random sample and being able to understand what the resulting margin will mean in interpreting results.
• Write more effective survey questions that avoid the most common mistakes made in wording and use of response scales.
• Analyze data by simplifying and consolidating to find the stories behind the numbers.
• Present survey data in visually understandable ways.