Every so often (usually as the end of the fiscal year approaches), someone influential asks about how we measure our effectiveness in placing news stories in major media. These types of requests usually come our way after some big suggests that “We aren’t getting enough press,” or comments that “We’re the best-kept secret” in all of higher education. If you’ve been in PR for any amount of time, you know the drill. (Funny that these folks never offer any insight from their line of work on how their companies measure PR effectiveness.)
Anyway, a conference call on this topic looms. If anyone has the magic bullet to kill this sucker once and for all — and I mean kill it dead — please advise in the comments. Or if you just wish to commiserate, you’re welcome to leave a comment to that effect, too.
Andy writes! 
If you have a clip book, burn it.
It may be slow going, but I think the key is to move the conversation to media strategy. What are the key messages? Who are the key constituencies? Where are the key markets? What do they read? And so on. Then you can talk about how you lay a media plan on top of those base-level strategic questions and measure against it. Talk about the kinds of stories that you’re pitching on theme x to publication y — sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it tends to elevate the conversation beyond just counting how many times you did (or didn’t) end up in the Times, Journal, etc.
Charlie – You’ve nailed it. My point in today’s conference call will be precisely that — media strategy. We follow a strategy tied to five key messages about our university and while we will never get away from some of the obligatory news releases, we focus our national media relations efforts on communicating those key messages. Then we measure how those messages are reflected in the media.
We burned our clip book a few years ago.
Thanks for commenting. And I’m looking forward to some more activity on your blog. (Still suffering social networking burnout, I take it?)
I feel for you, Andrew. I’ve been involved in conversations like this as well. We measure media relations success not so much by the placements, but by how we leverage the placements. A few years ago, we landed a big story on the school in the New York Times Magazine, which was cool, but most of our constituents don’t read it. But what we did was show how we leveraged it in admissions materials, our university magazine, our Web site and in fundraising appeals. The “clip” gained more equity the more it was used and basically became the media relations story of the year to all those who ask the “measurable results” questions. We still produce a clip book, but we leverage our placements so much, both in materials and on our Web site’s front page, that we never get asked that question anymore.
Charlie – Hi there. I’m still a newbee in communication, but i’m researching the possibility to build a model to measure PR effectiveness on a non-commercial/marketing base. Not so much the effectiveness in the amount of publications but more the quality of the PR. Do you have any ideas or suggestions?!