MEASURING PR

It was the question of the week among global communicators at IABC’s 2007 conference: Can PR be measured?

7 days before I left for New Orleans I was asked a similar question by a group of 10 practitioners at one of the Caribbean’s top financial service firms.

It’ s not that our industry is devoid of measurement and several firms are on the right track counting their new clippings, looking at prominence scoring, examining newspaper tiers, conducting qualitative and quantitative research.

The difficulty for most however is the requirement to link PR to the bottom line. At IABC’s conference presenter Louis William said that the problem occurs when communicators are asked to determine the impact of a communication effort especially on organisational objectives especaily when those efforts require interfacing with other departments and functions to get the job done.

The answer lies in knowing what is possible, what can be measured and which communication variables can be isolated to demonstrate PRs return on the investment.
I guess that was my biggest learning here in New Orleans and as I set to change conventional thinking about the value of PR and business communication in Trinidad and Tobago I was happy to know that the week’s big question had a very simplistic answer: Yes! PR contributes to the bottom line and yes, it can be measured.