April
30th, 2003
Ask
Dr. Paine
Katie Delahaye Paine,
publisher of The Measurement Standard,
welcomes your questions
on PR research and evaluation.
How
do I measure
change in attitudes
without expensive surveys?
and,
What’s the value of
crisis communications?
Measuring
attitude change
without expensive surveys...
Dear Katie
Paine,
My question
would be how you suggest measuring outcomes (as opposed to outputs)
on a limited budget? So, in other words, going beyond 'how many media
impressions did we generate/hits secured/key messages featured in
coverage' to 'did our audience change their attitudes and opinions
or did they increase knowledge?' without implementing pre- and post-surveys.
How do you measure change in attitudes or intention to modify behavior
without doing surveys that may be cost prohibitive?
—Leanna
Clark, APR, Principal, Schenkein
Dear Ms.
Clark,
First
of all, you need to look at what data exists within an organization.
Are there any ongoing studies of customer attitudes that you can take
advantage of or add an additional question to? Is the organization
using any kind of Omnibus research that you can add a question to?
Are there behavioral measures such as Web site traffic, requests for
information or regional sales data that you can use to determine behavior
at little or no cost?
What
do you have against pre/post studies? They really are one of the best
methods to measure outtakes and you can do email studies practically
for free these days. www.surveymonkey.com
is the one I'd recommend, but there's Zoomerang,
Wisco and
many others that help create surveys that are available online for
free. We've reviewed them in The Measurement Standard in
this
article and in this
article. You can field the questions either online for nothing,
or at an event for very little money. What do you consider cost prohibitive?
—Katie
Delahaye Paine
Dear Katie
Paine,
In terms
of 'what I have against prep/post studies' well, nothing other than
the fact that they truly CAN be cost prohibitive unless you go the
online route. You may not be aware, but online research is being questioned
rigorously by the research community for its validity for several
reasons. Sure, it's cheap...but how do you get people to take the
online survey? You can either spam them and risk alienating them as
well as ensure less than a 1/2% response rate....or you can buy a
list of people who've opted in and get respondents who aren't representative
of the population you want to reach.
In addition,
the client in specific I'm thinking of is targeting two primary audiences:
minorities and within this population, mostly immigrants who've recently
come to this country; and cash-based consumers, those without credit,
banking relationships, etc., who live from paycheck to paycheck. Neither
of these populations is likely to have Internet access, and online
surveys would be a total waste of time. We often assign specific web
addresses or 800#s for tracking purposes as well as use omnibuses
or tap other things a client is doing...I guess I was looking for
some new insights beyond these.
Leanna
Clark, APR, Principal, Schenkein
Dear Ms.
Clark,
Most
of the online research I've done is with specific email lists, customers,
thought leaders, etc. who are asked to participate by someone they
know. Typically I've gotten response rates between 20-40% for these
types of studies. With the audiences you're dealing with, chances
are that cultural barriers are going to be a bigger issue than technological
ones. Unless you can interview them at an event where you can conduct
face to face surveys very cost effectively, I think you'll have trouble
with response rate no matter what. Good luck.
—Katie
Delahaye Paine
How to measure
the value
of crisis communications?
Hi Ms.
Paine,
I've
really enjoyed your articles and presentation notes on pr measurement
and evaluation! I'm including a lot of your work in a research paper
I'm writing for an MBA class on the ROI for public relations. I'm
e-mailing with the hope that you can offer some insight into measuring
the value of crisis communication. In addition to being a student,
I do media relations for the University and so much of what we do
is crisis communication. I would like to be able to include this topic
in the paper and incorporate the measurement approaches at work, but
I haven't been able to find much research specifically on measuring
crisis communication.
I would
really like my paper to address: How do you measure the value of an
effective crisis communicator's skills on properly communicating a
negative situation? How do you measure the cost of how public opinion
could have changed if the communicator was not involved with message
development and strategy, as opposed to how it did change? Best regards,
—Rebecca
Maggard
Media Relations Coordinator (and aspiring MBA)
The University of Toledo
Dear Ms.
Maggard,
This
is the IPR paper on measuring a crisis, you might want to start there.
The definition of "properly communicating a negative situation"
is how fast it goes away and to what extent have you communicated
your messages. Ultimately you want to measure the impact you have
on the relationships with your publics (read Grunig/Hon's paper on
Measuring Relationships from www.instituteforpr.com.
You can't measure in real time the cost of how public opinion
might have changed, since you have no control over the news... remember
Gary Condit. So you can only look at other examples of how other organizations
have done it. I hope I have been of some help.
—Katie
Delahaye Paine 
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