If You Can't Measure the Effectiveness of Your PR Effort , You'll Never Get to the C-Suite

Here's your business school saying of the day: "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." Here's your Catching Flack corollary of the day: "If you're not measuring the effectiveness of your PR programs, your career path will be severely limited."

I've railed recently about the lack of professional standards in our industry and how they hold us back. Another practice element sorely in need of improvement is measurement.

Other departments (operations, finance, sales) are obsessed with numbers and measurement, and guess what? The cream of the crop from those departments rises to the top and gets to the C-suite. Our department, all worried about "relationships" and "awareness" but short on the metrics to prove our worth, is forever stuck in middle management. When was the last time a CEO came out of the communications function?

One of the ways an industry improves in a particular area is to set up a competition and give out awards for industry leaders. And that's the driving force of this blog post -- to let you know that the deadline for applying for the Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award from the Institute for PR is coming up soon: August 15. Winners will be feted at the Institute for Public Relations Summit on Measurement in October in Portsmouth, NH.

This award -- named for Jack Felton, founder of the IPR Commission for PR Measurement & Evaluation -- recognizes excellence in public relations research, measurement and evaluation. The award's primary objective is to identify superb examples of research used to support public relations practice, and to publish them as case studies on the Institute for Public Relations website. You can see the 2008 winners here, and all the winning submissions can be found at that site on other pages.

How important is measurement? Let measurement diva and IPR Commission member Angie Jeffrey convince you:

“All of us on the IPR Commission are passionate about the Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award because it is truly designed to reward practitioners who prove themselves genuine leaders in our field by utilizing research and measurement to get the best possible results for their organizations or clients.

In today’s economy particularly, no one can afford programming that doesn’t hit the right target audience with the right messages to gain the right business outcomes. The only way to really do that is to utilize research both formatively in campaign creation, in measurement throughout the campaign execution, and in analysis at the end to pull ROI.

I wouldn’t be caught dead in PR today without making sure my programs were fully accountable to my CEO!”