intelligent measurement

This month, the Dutch authorities reported that people registering as organ donors had tripled compared to previous months.  What caused this sudden jump in registrations - a fantastic awareness programme?

In fact, they trace the increase to the now infamous ”Dutch TV Kidney Hoax“, a reality TV show where real patients in need of a kidney “competed” for one.  

From the communications evaluation point of view, it is an interesting example of how a communications activity can bring about a rapid change in behaviour (in this case donor registration) and perhaps one that was not intended.

In evaluating our own communication activities, we should try and identify other factors that could have influenced the change being seen - in the kidney TV hoax it was obvious but it will not be for many of the more day-to-day communication activities that we run.

Which reminds me of another example - in August 2005, the number of appointments made for manograms (to detect breast cancer) jumped by 101% in Australia. Was this the result of a successful communications campaign? No, in fact that month, pop singer and fellow Melburnian Kylie Minogue was diagnosed with breast cancer resulting in mass media coverage about the issue which I’ve written about previously.

The identification of other possible explanations for changes being observed (rather than just saying “look our communications campaign worked”) is important in maintaining a credible and balanced approach to evaluation. 

Glenn

I’ve written previously about measuring online behaviour and how it can be linked to overall PR evaluation.  I found of interest the recent news from Nielsen that they will now rank websites by time spent on sites rather than number of pages viewed. Interesting, as this is a recognition that an indirect indication of  ”interest” or “engagement” is the amount of time spent on a website, e.g. watching a video, clicking through a slide presentation, reading a text, etc.

When looking at measuring online behaviour, I’ve seen quite some organisations simply drowning in data from web metric software packages and are unable to pull out a real analysis of what they have achieved - or not through the web.

Ultimately indicators should be set to measure success by. These could be:

• “engagement” (average time spent on website),
• “interest” (number of podcast downloaded),
• “conversion” (number of  sign-ups for a sales offer),
• “preferences” (growth in visits to a new language version) ,
• etc., etc .

On a related note, when thinking about how to measure online social networking, the Measurement Standard blog provides an interesting list of suggested indicators to measure.

Glenn    

Two new blogs that have come to my attention recently and focus on public relations and evaluation/measurement:

 Evaluating the media from Michael Blowers in the UK

Measurement PRoponent / PRomulgator from Alan Chumley in Canada

Glenn