How To Measure
Your Performance Under Pressure
or, "Just how far up the creek am I?"

By Katharine Delahaye Paine

"Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed."
—William James, to his wife in 1906

No matter how well-written your crisis communications plan, or how excellent your relationships with the media, Fate will sooner or later intervene with a crisis. And then you'll find the TV cameras at your doorstep and the spotlight upon you. In the midst of all that chaos, how do you know how well you're doing?

There are three elements to measuring your effectiveness during a crisis.

1. Measuring Outputs and the effectiveness of your process: Hour by hour, or day by day monitoring of the media to determine if your key messages are being communicated and to whom.
   
   
2. Measuring Impact: Determining if the messages are having the desired effect, if they are being believed, and if they're swaying public opinion.
   
   
3. Measuring Outcomes: In the long run, did the crisis impact your reputation? Customers' intent to purchase? Employee turnover? Shareholder confidence?

Which type of measurement you select should be driven by your internal needs for better decision making tools.

CHECKING THE VOLUME AND CONTENT

Daily or hourly monitoring is a wonderful tool, but if you can't respond or react to the data, there's no point in commissioning it. However, if your crisis is on-going, and you need to make decisions hourly or daily as to what to say or not say, such monitoring will be essential. You should schedule delivery of such a monitoring report in plenty of time to allow you to craft and refine the key messages you need to be communicating.

A monitoring report typically examines print, television, radio, internet news groups and chat rooms to determine what is being said, how the organization is being positioned, and what messages are being delivered.

Sometimes the ultimate measure isn't the content, but the shear volume of crisis coverage.

The following charts track the volume of clips over the first few weeks after a crisis has broken for several well-known crises. As you can see, sometimes the volume of coverage goes up after the crisis breaks and sometimes it goes down. That's the difference between well-managed crises and poorly handled ones. A well-managed crisis gets all the bad news over with up front by aggressively dealing with a problem. A poorly handled one can drag on for months, as you can see by the following charts:

1. In the infamous case of the Intel Pentium flap, Intel long denied its existence until camera crews showed up on their door step. The resulting coverage went on for months.
   
   
2. In sharp contrast, Odwalla, a natural juice company, was found to have sold batches of contaminated unpasteurized apple juice that sickened a number of people and ultimately brought death to a child. However, their corporate culture and social responsibility was so strong, that they managed to contain the crisis in a few short weeks and ultimately avoided law suits all together.
   
   
3. In the case of Levis' first-ever layoffs, the company took a novel approach, simultaneously announcing grants to all the communities affected by the layoffs. As a result, their coverage spiked the first week, and steadily decreased after that.
   
   
4. Unlike Levis, Kodak corporation suffered a series of leaks about potential layoffs, eventually announced layoffs, and then had to announce even more layoffs, because the cuts hadn't been deep enough. Again, the result was many, many weeks of bad news.
   
   

CHECKING YOUR MESSAGING

Looking at volume of clips after the fact is one way to judge how effective your actions were, but just getting the messages out into the world is seldom enough to turn around a crisis. Frequently you need to ensure that those messages are being heard and believed. The best way to check in with your key audiences in a crisis is through overnight polling. One cost-effective way to conduct over night polling is to add a question to an omnibus poll. Alternatively you can commission your own overnight telephone poll which can cost anywhere from $5000 to $25,000. However given the cost of "talking" to your audiences via a full page add in the New York Times ($100,000) the cost of "listening" seems relatively cheap. And compared to the legal, personnel and emotional costs of a crisis, research always represents a relatively small percentage.

Case in point: A major high tech company under intense fire at a highly visible sports event, was able to ascertain that its key customers were highly supportive of its actions, despite a loud media outcry. The data served to calm executives, and enabled the company to make more rational decisions.

CHECKING THE IMPACT

Post-mortem measurement examines not just how well you did at getting messages communicated, but what ultimate impact the program had. Did consumers change their behavior, did employees leave at a higher than normal rate? Did the stock drop? Some of these measures are easy, i.e. looking at the stock price and adjusting for other activity in the market as a whole.

Tracking consumer behavior requires broader cooperation with the organization. Frequently, consumer data is readily available from your organization's market research department. There are also many firms that specialize in integrated marketing research. One such firm, Loyalty Builders, (www.loyaltybuilders.com) examines customer transactions to determine the impact of events on customer loyalty. They examine how frequently they purchase, the amount of purchase and the time between purchases and can then plot their data against your crisis data.

Even, if you don't have "customers" you may still need to check on the ultimate impact of a crisis on your target audiences. That's what Habitat for Humanity did after a television reporter in Chicago launched an "investigation" of its Chicago office. Concerned that the negative publicity might discourage volunteers from participating or donors from giving to the program, they commissioned Delahaye Medialink to survey the audience to determine what impact it had on Habitat's reputation. The study showed that, thanks to a coordinated and consistent effort to provide facts figures and information and thanks to the fact that the organization had such strong relationships with its constituencies to begin with, the negative publicity achieved scant awareness and had no impact on the audience.

Similar data was found when Delahaye Medialink examined long term opinions of a waste disposal company in Texas. The company had sued a television station for libel charging that a negative story about its dumping of sludge wastes had damaged its reputation. In follow up survey research, DM discovered that very few people remembered seeing the show and no one remembered the name of the company.

While every crisis differs, research is critical: No matter what the nature of the crisis or the nature of the organization, the best thing that can come of a crisis is learning from your mistakes.