PR performance is a hot topic with many of our clients trying to find ways to demonstrate value to their boss. I have spent about a decade on this journey and am sharing where I goofed up so you can learn from my mistakes.
Sharing too many performance metrics with the President.
My heart was sinking because I could tell I was losing him as I showed him slide after slide of PR performance data. I was hoping it would be a great engagement tool to talk about how my department was delivering value but it did not turn out that way as the data did not resonate or was not meaningful to what he cared about.
What I did next time: When I kicked off strategy discussions for the following year, we talked about how Comms could help him achieve his enterprise-wide goals and we discussed how to build a measurement framework from that perspective. This was way more effective as it was clear to him what my department's contributions were going to be and how we would measure progress.
2. Buying reports from agencies who did not know more about how to use data than I did.
I would get quarterly and biannual reports with pages and pages of charts and graphs that were pretty meaningless. When I asked for a presentation to explain the data, the agency was unable to translate the data into meaningful insights that could inform strategy.
What I did next time: I slimmed down the reporting to save money and directed the agency to dig deeper in areas that married the corporate strategy with communications opportunities. I also learned a lesson that just because an agency says they do measurement reporting, doesn't mean they can do it effectively.
3. Reporting and collecting data for no particular purpose because the team wasn't using the data.
In an effort to measure performance, the team spent too much time collecting data that it became cumbersome and a source of strife. Plus, the data being collected was not being used by the team to improve their performance or reduce costs.
What I did next time: As part of the exercise to slim down the data we collected, I invested in training to upskill the team to better understand how to use data to inform future work. To embed the learning, every month at our reporting meeting each member of the team had to say what they planned on doing differently based on the results they were reporting. The improved data literacy pushed the team to assess what data they were collecting and for what purpose.
This changed their data collection procedures to only collect what was going to be relevant to improving performance and meeting personal and department KPIs.
I hope sharing some of my goofs will help you avoid them.
Everyone goofs up sometimes….what have been some of yours?
Good reflection piece. Item 1 resonates with me. From the experience, it sounds like you learned how your audience would be receptive to the pitch.