intelligent measurement

For those of you in the Geneva (Switzerland) here is an event  I’m helping organise that you may be interested to attend:

As part of the Future Series, the International University in Geneva and Geneva Women in International Trade present a roundtable:

“The Future of Corporate Communications”

Tuesday 14 November 2006, 6 p.m.
Movenpick Hotel, ICC, Rte de Bois 20, 1215 Geneva

Panel members:
- Cary Adams, Managing Director, Lloyds TSB International Private Banking
- Charlotte Lindsey, Deputy Director of Communications, International Committee of the Red Cross
- Peter Warne, Senior External Communications Manager, Nestle

“Through blogs, wikis and podcasts, publics are conversing amongst themselves and building influential sources of information as alternatives to traditional media. Are organisations ready and willing to converse with publics? Can corporate communications cope with competing sources of influence and use social media to build relationships with their key audiences?”

Entry fee: 25 CHF (15 CHF for GWIT members and IUN Alumni)

Agenda:
6.00 p.m. Welcome
6.30 p.m. Presentations followed by discussions
7.30 p.m. Cocktail and networking

Register online for the event.

Glenn

A real gem of a paper here (.doc) by Jim Macnamara, a well-know PR evaluation specialist from Australia. He provides an interesting response to the question “why don’t communication professionals measure more?”:

This is the real reason for lack of commitment to measurement. Most PR practitioners do not proactively use research to measure, either for planning or for evaluation, because in their worldview, it is not relevant. When one focuses on and sees one’s job as producing outputs such as publicity, publications and events, measurement of effects that those outputs might or might not cause is an inconsequential downstream issue – it’s someone else’s concern.

A very interesting conclusion - the focus on production is something I’ve seen a lot - I think there is certainly some truth in what he says.

Read the full article here (.doc).

And thanks to K D Paine for sharing this paper with us.  

Glenn

Last night, I attended a communications forum in Geneva where Harold Burson, the founder of the PR agency Burson & Marsteller spoke (in the photo above, he is on the right and Keith Rockwell from WTO on the left).

 In responding to a question from a member of the audience (none other than the public affairs representative from the US Mission) - as to how can communicators measure the effectiveness of their programmes, Mr Burson responded:

“The lack of research by communication professionals is the number one obstacle in the PR field today - people don’t do enough research to evaluate the impact of their activities..”

I agree fully. Then he went on to explain the reason “why”. For Mr Burson, the reason is cost - PR research and measurement is too expensive, he mentioned that often research to evaluate can often cost as much as the activities itself.  And that’s where I disagree - PR measurement does not have to be expensive. Most capable communication managers should be able to manage measurement tasks themselves through using low cost media monitoring services, easy-to-use online surveys and innovative methods such as case studies and tracking mechanisms.  To get started, check out the guidelines from the Institute for PR. And there are certainly other reasons why communication professionals don’t evaluate.

You can read more about the forum on the Geneva Communicators blog.  And you can read more about Mr Burson’s thoughts on his blog (is he the oldest PR blogger at 84 years old..?)

Glenn

At the international conference of the European Evaluation Society, I attended an interesting workshop on Assumptions Based Comprehensive Development Evaluation Framework (ABCDEF) presented by  Professor Osvaldo Feinstein, evaluation consultant. The main thrust of his workshop was to challenge us to consider fully the assumptions that are made in development projects - and consequently the impact on evaluation. He has created a guide to what we should consider when exploring assumptions, namely: Incentives, Capacities, Adoption, Risk, Uncertainty and Sustainability. Cleverly, it makes the acronym Icarus, whom we all know flew too close to the sun which melted the wax holding together his wings. And that is the underlying theory of Professor Feinstein, as he put it:

“An unexamined assumption can be very dangerous!”

More information on ABCDEF can be found in the Sage Handbook of Evaluation.

Glenn

The International Conference of the European Evaluation Society is underway in London and I just participated in several of the pre-conference workshops.

In one workshop, Elliot Stern, a senior Evaluation Consultant made a very poignant point - is the aim of evaluation “to prove” or “improve”?

 A simple but interesting distinction - traditionally he pointed out most evaluation aimed to “prove” if an intervention changed anything - and that’s it (a gasp when through the room…)

It’s only a rather recent development that evaluation has been asked to focus also on “improve”  - how can an intervention be more effective. 

Most likely you are thinking that it can’t be so - how can an evaluation not make the step from ”prove” to “improve” ? But often the terms of reference for an evaluator is only to “prove” - in other words, evaluate but please no recommendations.

Glenn