CSOM: Measuring the True Impact of PR & Communications Campaigns

“What gets measured gets managed.” Wrongly attributed to management guru Peter Drucker and, according to the Drucker Institute, not only did he not say it, but he also didn’t believe it.

But there should be no doubt the importance of establishing measurable goals for your public relations campaigns.

As a young PR professional one of my responsibilities was to provide a clip report for each of our clients.  With my trusty ruler in hand, I would spend hours (hours!) measuring the hard copies of each of the articles we would place for a client.  That number multiplied by the ad rate for the same amount of space in the particular publication would give us the value of the clip.  The higher the number and the thicker the clip book the more successful we were.

But those numbers meant nothing.  And fortunately, our industry has done away with the Advertising Value Equivalency as a measurement tool for earned media.

But what should we be measuring then?  The impact our earned media efforts are having on the overall business goals.  And when we can demonstrate that, according to the 2025 Comms Report study from Cision and PR Week, the c-suite will find value in the role of communications and ultimately will invest more in it.

Respondents were asked if they were experiencing any of the following challenges as it relates to communications measurement:

• Aligning metrics to revenue or other KPIs – down 5% from the previous year
• Converting data to actionable insights – down 5% from the previous year
• Proving/validating PR’s impact to the c-suite –up 3% from the previous year
• Continued reliance on media impressions – up 15% from the previous year (sadly)

We have significantly more tools at our disposal now that I did back in the day.  But we still have a ways to go to make sure that the business goals and our communications goals are aligned.

Listen to this week’s Copper State of Mind as Adrian and I spend some time talking more about it.

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