intelligent measurement

Bill Paarlberg and K. D. Paine have a relatively new blog online: the measurement standard blog - it’s a handy summary of their regular newsletter of the same name which focuses on PR measurement. There are plenty of interesting posts on various topics such how does PR measurement take news timing into account and measuring success of small organisations.

Glenn

Adding to what I wrote about last week concerning measuring behaviour changes that result from communication campaigns - and why I recommend to consider looking at immediate responses (or “outtakes”) as an alternative to long-term changes - I can see parallels in areas other than in campaigns.

As you may know, a favourite of mine is measuring the impact of conferences and meetings. Industry conferences are traditionally sold as being great places to learn something and network, network -  and network. But I’m always surprised when attending such conferences at how organisers, if they measure something, focus on measuring the reactions to the conferences, usually in terms of satisfaction. No attempt is made to measure immediate changes to behaviour (such as extending a network) or longer term behaviour or impact in general.

But it is certainly possible, this diagram (pdf) illustrates what I did to measure immediate and mid-term changes to behaviour following a conference (LIFT). Despite the limitations of the research as I explain here, I was able to track some responses following the conference that could be largely contributed to participating in the conference - such as meeting new people or using new social media in their work. One year after the conference, participants also provided us with types of actions that they believed were influenced largely by their participation. Actions included:
- launching a new project
- launching a new service/product
- establishing a new partnership
- Initiating a career change
- Invitations for speaking engagements

Some of these actions were anticipated by the conference organisers - but many were not. It shows that it can be done and is certainly worth thinking about in conference evaluation.

Glenn