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Well, hi everybody. Welcome back to the show. I am absolutely delighted you've decided to tune in again, or if this is your first time here. Welcome. Welcome. Also, thanks for all the podcast love on the socials and to those who have rated the show on your podcast apps. I'm seriously feeling so humbled and I love that your loving, the learning. So thank you.

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Okay. So speaking of [00:02:00] learning today's episode is all about it. Specifically learning through measuring your communications. I promise I will do my best not to make it boring for you. But I am going to share three top tips for measuring the effectiveness of your communication and give you some ideas to get you started.

Also, if you are a subscriber to my free 12- month comms toolkit, you'll be receiving a measurement framework in your inboxes this month. Hurray. So this episode will be super helpful for you. If you're not a subscriber and would like to hop on board, I'll pop a link in the show notes. Now, I'll also preface this episode with the caveat that there's a lot of different methods out there to measure.

And there's also no one- size- fits- all approach as with everything in comms. It really depends on what you're trying to measure exactly. But I'll get to that in a moment. Firstly it's worth noting why it's [00:03:00] important to measure the effectiveness of your communications. The first reason to learn. It really is a process of continuous improvement.

How do you know what strategies to use or what strategies to avoid if you don't know what's worked and what hasn't? If you are a comms pro who wants to hone your craft and advance your career, then you need to be constantly testing and trialing new things and be able to back that up with data. You need to be able to show people, this is why I've made this decision to do this particular comms strategy or tactic.

The second reason is to demonstrate your value back to the business or back to your client. So, if you want to earn the respect of your internal clients or build your great reputation with your external clients and get more work, then you need to be able to show how you've contributed to positive results.

And that needs to be backed up [00:04:00] with evidence. So that's the two main reasons to learn and to demonstrate your value. One other important thing to mention is that it's okay to feel like measurement is hard because it can be. It can be really hard to try and demonstrate a direct correlation between your communication and a business result. I totally get that.

But there are some things we can do to demonstrate how we've at least helped to contribute to that result. So with all of that in mind, let's get stuck into it. Tip number one, and this is the most important tip: focus on outcomes, not outputs. So again, focus on outcomes, not outputs. Outputs are things like, um, how many people read your internet article or how many news outlets picked up your media release?

That's great, but what did it achieve? So, yes, okay, 600 [00:05:00] people read your intranet article. But did that increase their knowledge on a certain topic or encourage them to do something differently? Uh, you know, five papers and a radio station picked up your media release and created stories out of them. But did that result in any influence with any stakeholders or did it deliver more customers to your website?

This is where the true value of your communication lies. So this is where we have to measure. So the first thing you need to do is go to your comms plan and look at your comms objectives. You remember, in episode two, we talked about the three objectives every comms plan should have: know, feel and do.

That each one of those objectives, you now need to assign measures. There's two parts of this one is how you're measure. So the methodology. And the second is what is your benchmark or your KPI for that measure? So this brings us to tip number two, choosing the right [00:06:00] way to measure. So for example, if one of my do objectives is that people will complete the employee engagement survey, then my, how, or my methodology is going to be quite simple. It's going to be to track the completion rates. And the benchmark we might set is 80%. And I might get that benchmark from whoever's supplying the survey or some research. If my know objective is that uh, for example, people understand their role to play in the organizational strategy, then my method for measurement might be a pulse survey. And my KPI could be that more than 60% of people agree or strongly agree that they understand how the survey applies to them. So that's great. So just to recap on that step one, revisit your know, feel and do objectives. Step two, decide how you're going to measure your methodology.

And step [00:07:00] three, decide your benchmark or KPI for success. Just a quick note on KPIs. Be realistic. So do your research find out what a standard benchmark might be. Or have a look at what's it's been in the past. And maybe set yourself a goal to improve that by a certain percentage. This is really important. You don't want to set yourself up for failure and you don't want to create really great expectations with your clients that just can't be met. So do a bit of research on your KPIs. And as we say better to uh, under promise and over deliver than the other way around. Right. Now when you're choosing your methodology, there's a few things to consider. First things first, what depth of insight do you actually need? Secondly, how much time will it take people to participate in your measurement? And thirdly, what method will help deliver the metric you're after.

So a deep dive [00:08:00] method would be something like a focus group. Yeah. That's a lot of resources, a lot of time and energy to get that together. But it does give you the opportunity to really get into the nuts and bolts of why people have done certain things or think certain things, et cetera. So you might do this at the end of a massive change project or campaign, for example. So where you need to do a post-implementation review and determine what worked, what didn't, what else could have helped.

But if you're doing something like trying to check, understanding, or, you know, get a guage of sentiment among your stakeholders, then a really simple, quick poll could work. Um, a few more ideas. If you have a network of change champions or similar in your business, ask them to complete a survey or get their anecdotal feedback just by giving them a call.

Always have a survey after an event, I'll give you my top tip for actually getting people to complete those at the end of this episode. So stay tuned for that. [00:09:00] Another idea, look at the comments people are leaving on your social media posts or blog posts and see what the sentiment is rather than how many comments you got.

So importantly with surveys, make it really simple. Really long surveys get a really poor completion rate for obvious reasons. I like to try and cap surveys at a maximum of five questions. And I'll talk more about what questions to ask shortly. Also check what other measurement is going on at the same time in the business or with your customers or whoever that might be.

People get survey fatigue really quickly. So if there's other surveys going on with the same group of people, you might need to delay yours or try a different method.

So tip number three is ask the right questions. The questions you ask directly relate to what you want to test. So for example, if you're testing a do objective, so a call to action, it can be a simple question of, did you [00:10:00] do X, Y, Z. And that's just a yes or no answer. So for example, uh, it might be, do you read the CEO's weekly email? That's just a yes or no.

If you wanted to understand more about what drove that action, follow it up with a why question. The why questions are where the gold is.

But if you wanted to test perhaps how well people understood something or their sentiment towards your brand or business or project, you need to ask more leading questions. Like how do you feel about our future of our business? Or can you describe why you chose our brand over our competitors? So, those will give you some really great information about what to continue to do.

And what to stop doing importantly. I do want to say here to be careful not to get disheartened by negative feedback. You know, keep your perspective. It's really easy to a focus [00:11:00] on the poor feedback, even when it's in the minority or B, not take the negative feedback as an opportunity to try something new.

I've seen it before. Um, there was an event many years ago, which I was part of organising and two people maybe out of the 300- plus who attended complained in the feedback survey about the food. And the event manager, she just went into overdrive about the catering and giving feedback to the caterers. And we've got to do something different next year and I'm like, mate, it's two people out of 300. I think the catering was okay. All right. So just keep the perspective. That's really important. Also, if you do tend to take negative feedback as a sign of failure, I'm here to tell you to stop doing that. I know that sounds too easy because it is. Too easy. But take it from me. I used to be a person who would take negative feedback really badly. Like it was a personal attack.

Realistically [00:12:00] looking back on it, I was just playing into this really inaccurate narrative about myself and my capability, courtesy of poor self-esteem. But once I started practicing taking negative feedback as an opportunity for growth or to try new things, I just had this exponential growth in my self esteem, my creative thinking and my results. Now I love feedback. I won't cry about it. I am hungry for it. Like I will proactively ask for it. Gimme gimme, gimme. Then I know what to stop doing and what to keep doing and what to try differently. But anyway, in a future episode, I'm going to share a model I have for how people respond to feedback and therefore, how to tailor your comms. But that's a story for another day.

Okay. So earlier I said, I'd share my top tip for getting people to complete a survey after an event. Here it is. The biggest mistake people make is to send out a link to a survey in an email after the event and [00:13:00] expect people to do it or to remember or to even care. So don't do that. I found what works really well is to create a QR code for the survey.

Print it out and put it on every table or seat. Also put the QR code up on the screen, whether you're in a room or in a virtual event. And show it before the event actually closes. So give people five minutes to complete it, then go on to close the event so they can't go anywhere until they've completed it. Basically.

It's simple, but it actually works really well to get great completion rates. And the feedback is fresh in people's minds. So do give that a go. Honestly, it works really, really well. So that's the 101 on measurement. As I said at the top of the show subscribers to my free 12- month comms toolkit will receive a measurement framework as their free gift this month. So if you'd like to hop on board and grab that and get a hold of the other tools I've already shared, head to the website at [00:14:00] heymelcomms. Dot training forward slash freebies. Or check the show notes for the link. Thanks again for listening as always, please share your feedback. As I said, I love it. And I'll talk to you all again next week.