How to Measure the Effectiveness of Communication

Establishing Boundaries for What You'll Measure

Pick 1-2 types of communication to measure to focus your study. In a company, you have a wide variety of options. You could measure internal communication by looking at emails or external communication by checking social media responses. Try to narrow your scope so that your evaluation will be more effective. Start by deciding what area you're going to look at: internal communications and external communications are the two main categories. Next, target a specific area within the category you want to evaluate, such as emails, social media outreach, a marketing campaign, or an informational campaign. Look at external communications to decide whether marketing campaigns or informational campaigns are effective. Examine internal communications to check whether you are getting through to your employees and changing behavior as needed. You could also look at how effective information campaigns are by requesting responses from your target audience, for instance.

Focus on one aspect of effectiveness to make your study more useful. "Effectiveness" can mean different things, and effectiveness for your project is going to look different than it would for any other project. As an example, it could mean that the audience understood the communication and changed its behavior. Alternatively, maybe the audience found the communication accessible and informative. Decide what is most important in your measurement and that will help guide how you measure its effectiveness. Being effective could refer to the fact that you engaged your audience and encouraged them to interact with the company.

Establish which stages of the communication you'll measure. Every time you communicate within the company or externally, you must prepare the communication, implement it, and then check the impact. Each of those levels changes how effective the communication is, as each part affects the end message. For instance, in the preparation phase when you're developing the message, you need to have your facts straight, have appropriate data to present to your audience, and present the information in a manner that makes sense to the audience. In the implementation phase, who you're reaching and how many people you're reaching is important. In the impact phase, the number of people who absorb the message or change their behavior is essential. All of these parts contribute to how effective the communication is.

Connect your evaluation to an end goal to make it more helpful. You likely have goals for your communication, such as informing the public, making policy changes internally, or encouraging a different company culture. Whatever your company goals are, they will affect what you measure when you're looking at a specific type of communication. You might also want to engage customers in conversation or increase sales. For instance, if one of your goals is to engage customers and you want to measure external communication on social media, then you might devise a formula to check how many posts received responses and what kinds of posts were the most popular.

Create a baseline for your evaluation if possible. The baseline is what your audience knew before you gave them any information. This type of baseline can be informal or formal, depending on your needs, but if you don't have a baseline, you can't measure how much more the audience knows or engages with the company after the communication. A baseline is like having a control group in a research study. For instance, an informal baseline could be a single person asking a random sampling of people within your company how much they know about an internal policy. If the person finds that almost no one knows what the policy is, that gives you a starting point. For a more formal baseline, you might use an informational survey to establish how much your audience knows about a given topic. A baseline evaluation can also determine the audience's values that might affect communication, as well as the audience's attitude towards a particular subject.

Establish milestones for your project to help with your measurements. A milestone is a small point along the way to meeting a bigger objective. If you set milestones, you'll be able to measure the effectiveness of communication better as you can see how things are changing over time. Set milestones up with specific things you can measure and then establish deadlines. Ultimately, your milestones should help you meet your objectives, which should help you meet your overall goal. Maybe you're ultimate objective is to engage 50,000 more customers on social media in a year. You can break that down into smaller milestones, such as "Name a social media chair," "Increase social media engagement," and "Create a specific social media personality for the company." Other milestones could be to "Get 3,000 followers in the first month," or "Make 20 posts in the first 2 weeks."

Deciding on a Type of Evaluation

Use qualitative analysis to see how many people you're reaching. This type of analysis simply measures access. You can use it to measure the number of people who've read or engaged with your communication, which is helpful in determining the accessibility of the information, such as who is able to see it and who isn't. You can use this type of evaluation on internal or external communication at any phase in that communication. With this type of analysis, it's simply a numbers game. You can see how many people have accessed an internal file. You could ask people to reply to an informational email to establish they've read it. On social media, you could count how many people have followed your company, liked certain posts, or left responses. For a coupon campaign, you can count how many people have used the coupon and ask for zip codes to establish the areas you've reached. You can even use data you're already collecting for this purpose, such as looking at how many people visit your website after a particular outreach campaign. In addition, make sure to collect data all along the process of evaluation not just at the end, as then you'll be able to measure it against your milestones as you go along.

Try surveys to figure out how people are receiving the message. This works well to determine if the communication is actually affecting the change you desire in the audience. It doesn't matter whether that change is to be more informed or to establish different behaviors; a survey can still be helpful with this type of measurement. Make your survey a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. For instance, ask questions where the audience can respond by choosing a number on a scale of 1-10 but then ask for feedback on those questions, such as "How interested are you in buying this product? 10 is you are very interested, and 1 is not interested at all. Please tell us more about your answer." Alternatively, you could ask whether an ad makes the person more or less likely to buy the product. For example, try, "Does this video make you more or less likely to purchase our product in the future?" with the answers "Less likely," "Neutral," and "More likely." A survey can be used to test your audience's knowledge of your communication, ask about the person's feelings and response to the campaign, or learn how it changed the person's perception of the company. This type of evaluation is beneficial for all types of communication at any phase in that communication.

Use consulting groups or experts to evaluate the truth and effectiveness of the message. If you're worried about how the message will be perceived or if the message is technically correct, you may not want your target audience to evaluate it. Instead, you may want to have experts review it first to establish that the communication will do what you need it to do. This could include technical experts, marketing experts, board review, or legal review, just to name a few. This works best for the preparation phase of communication. While you can use it for internal communication, it makes more sense to use it for external, as it's about perception.

Request informal feedback from users to gauge perception. Not all data gathering has to be formalized with a survey or analytics. Sometimes, subjective data can be just as useful. You could pose questions on online forums, for instance, to get a sense of how people are perceiving a particular campaign. This type of feedback can work for internal or external communication at any phase during the process. For example, you could ask something like, "What do you think of Rainbow Company's new advertising campaign?" Alternatively, you can talk to people in your workplace to determine if people have read and absorbed recent information you've given them. While you don't have to take a formal approach to how you ask these questions, you could take a formal approach to how you analyze the responses. That is, you could categorize them as "mostly negative," "neutral," and "mostly positive," and then check how many responses you have for each one.

Check your sales to determine if you've convinced your audience to buy. If you're measuring a marketing campaign, watching how your sales are affected is one way to determine how well your campaign worked. If your sales go up, then your communication was successful on some level as you persuaded your audience to buy, which is a change in behavior. If they go down, then either you didn't reach your audience or your campaign sent the wrong message. This also works outside of sales. If you're running an informational campaign, note if your audience's behaviors change in response to the campaign through observation. For instance, if you ran a campaign to educate a local population on the benefits of a free nutritional clinic and more people start showing up, your campaign was likely effective. This works best for external communication, and it is focused on the results phase.

Implementing Your Evaluations

Measure your results against the milestones you've set. As you gather your data, check it against your milestones, as that tells you whether you're meeting your goals for communication. Your milestones should already be measurable, so all you need to do is see if the data matches. For instance, if one of your milestones was to engage 1,000 more customers on social media, you can check the data and see if you have that many more followers across your social media platforms. Hopefully, you're meeting or exceeding your milestones and your data reflects that. If you are, you can continue on with your campaign as you've been doing, as it seems to be working. If not, you'll need to re-evaluate what you're doing.

Reevaluate and re-focus your milestones as needed. Sometimes, your milestones may have been too ambitious, and that's fine. You can re-establish new milestones that make more sense and are more attainable, such as lowering the number of followers on social media you want to engage in a specific amount of time. Other times, you may decide what you're doing isn't working, and you need to figure out a new communication campaign. Spend some time focusing on what needs to change so that you can be more effective. For example, if you're not having luck engaging customers on social media, you may need to change how you approach it, such as making your responses to customers more personal and engaging. Alternatively, you may decide to move those resources elsewhere to a more effective campaign.

Establish rewards for meeting milestones to increase effectiveness. Rewards are a great way to motivate employees to meet the milestones you've set. You could use bonuses and salary bumps as rewards if you have the authority to do so. However, you could also make other fun rewards, such as an office catered dinner or party if you meet certain milestones. While it is your employees' responsibility to meet these milestones without rewards, a little external motivation can do wonders for morale!