How do you measure PR – objectively?

The "Good" – building a simple PR dashboard that measures your effectiveness without costing a lot

We’ve been challenged by our CEO to ramp up the effectiveness of our PR efforts. Given that many execs view PR effectiveness subjectively, and with a recency bias as to whether we/they got good coverage, the team decided to create an objective-based dashboard.   We’ve used outsourced PR metrics in the past, but given our given our limited resources we wanted to spend our budget on coverage producing tactics instead of tools. 

That said, you can’t manage what you don’t measure so the PR team came up with a simple homemade dashboard (see graphic) that tracks interviews, bylined articles secured, coverage, press releases, speaking engagements, and pitches across the business, government and trade press.  The first tab provides a summary of all activity and each subsequent tab contains the underlying details.  For example, the feature coverage tab contains the details of all coverage including publication, headline, reporter, spokesperson quoted and URL of the article.

We’re just getting started with this tool but I find it to be a great way to set goals for each tactical area of PR and then track the effectiveness of our efforts…all without costing us much except for some staff time.  Now we can measure our effectiveness on a week to week basis and make course corrections more rapidly. 

I’m interested in what metrics you use so please shoot me an email with any suggestions.