MEASURING THE IMPACT OF COMMUNICATION ACTIVITY ANDREW SMITH – MEDIA TRUST

WHAT’S THE PLAN? If you are going to attempt to measure the impact of your communication activity you must first develop or understand what is the communications strategy? Who says what to where. It is easy to identify where you would like your message to be seen or heard eg, local press, radio, TV and Online But it can often be more difficult deciding how and who is going to get it out there.

CAMPAIGN PLANNING If you don’t already have a campaign plan, now is the time to prepare one. This will allow you to set out your campaign; What resources you will use? Which Media you are going to target? What activities you will carry out? Who will be assigned responsibility? To decide how you will evaluate what is working and what isn’t?

KEY MESSAGES What do you want people to know about your organisation? What do you want people to understand about your cause? What do you want people to do?

CAMPAIGN MILESTONES/EVENTS The main points you need to keep in mind for your campaign. This can also include any events that are taking place that you may want to utilise during your campaign eg. County show, trade events, large scale public gatherings… These, too, are milestones you need to take advantage of to let people know about your project.

MILESTONE DATES When the identified ‘milestones’ will take place.

TASKS – RESOURCES AND TARGET AUDIENCE List the resources you have available and who you intend to target eg. Press Release – local radio and newspapers; Facebook and Newsletter – supporters and volunteers. Think about how you may get your message out there in as many ways as possible: Press Release – Minimum 4 paragraphs Facebook – Minimum 2 paragraphs Twitter – Max 140 characters (per tweet) Newsletters

RESPONSIBILITIES Plan and assign exactly who will be responsible for what and when. Eg. John is responsible for Twitter, monitors account and associated hashtags, engages and responds where necessary, plans tweets and publishes them when required. Eg. Lucy is responsible for Facebook, monitors and updates account/page/groups, engages and responds where neccesary, plans updates and publishes them when required.

EVALUATION There are simple ways you can identify whether your message is being heard, understood and acted upon. For Social Media like Twitter, this can be as simple as identifying how many Retweets/Favourites your Tweets have had, but this can be extended to include the use and activity of hashtags, number of click through from hyperlinks etc… For Facebook this can mean monitoring the number of Likes, Shares and Comments your pages/groups or updates have received. For conventional media this can include the number of stories published in print/online or the total broadcast appearances/mentions on Radio or Television