Challenging the Status Quo in PR Metrics

Doug Downs (00:07):

This is a true story. I know because I was there. I spent 15 years in broadcasting before crossing over into corporate communications. This was in 2001, and my first assignment was a doozy. The electricity system in Alberta, Canada where I live had just been deregulated, which other jurisdictions had already done successfully, more or less. But in Alberta, it happened at a time when natural gas prices were spiking. So electricity costs went up and up. Not to make this complicated, but suddenly there were multiple companies and multiple computerized billing systems involved in any one customer's bill, which hadn't been the case before. And those billing systems hadn't learned to understand one another.

(00:57):

So the situation was bad and very, very public. There were so many people angry about their electricity bills. There were more media stories done that year on this situation than healthcare, and it was the number one issue. My job was to travel around the province doing media interviews, meeting with politicians to assure them we were working to fix things, giving very public presentations and meeting with people one-to-one about their specific situation, the angriest people who were giving their local politician a hard time. My job was to calm them down so the politicians didn't get mad at us. One lady I met with, she was a little bit older, probably in her late sixties. I spent a half hour with her going over her bill. There was actually nothing wrong with her bill in this case, but electricity bills are complicated. At the best of times. I very carefully answered all her questions, delivered all my key messages, and with great care I might add. At the end of the meeting, I was feeling great. I really explained things well. I thought, Bravo, Doug. She was courteous and thanked me. And then when she left the room, the next person was coming in and they were around the corner. I couldn't see them, but I could hear them. How did it go? The next gentleman in line, Oscar,

(02:25):

That guy's got answers for everything she answered. Our little meeting had been a complete failure, but by all measurements, I felt I delivered my messages so well. My objective was to show her and tell her the situation to the point she understood it. I was convinced she did. If she had filled out a survey at that moment measuring her understanding of the situation, to this day, I believe she would've scored high. But I still, perhaps we need to reevaluate how we measure communication success. Maybe it's not just about metrics and modified behaviors today on stories and strategies. Maybe perhaps it's about a little bit more

(03:30):

My name is Doug Downs. Music Off the top, you're a main one. Mr. Grinch Music composed by Albert Hague. My guest this week is Anne Gregory, joining today from Huddersfield, England, right smack in the middle of the country, and welcome back to the podcast.

Anne Gregory (03:46):

Good to be with you, Doug.

Doug Downs (03:47):

Anne how are things in Huddersfield today? You and I are recording in fairly early January, so lots of rain.

Anne Gregory (03:53):

Well, it has been since about the 1st of December, almost incessant rain. I very rarely see rain going upwards, dog, but the ground is so saturated that it's bouncing upwards at the moment. So welcome to

Doug Downs (04:08):

England. That's amazing. Anne I, as you know, I'm in Canada's Rocky Mountains. New Year's Eve. My wife and I went to a movie, came out of the theater about 1130. It was this warm rain. It was like we were somewhere right in the middle of England, and that's probably not good on the hole for us. It should be snowing here.

Anne Gregory (04:29):

Well, all I can say, I'm glad I'm not a sheep out on those wet hills,

Doug Downs (04:35):

Anne I never know where to start with the list of credentials for you. And I know you hate this part, so you can just plug your ears and then I'll do them again. The list is so long. You're a former chair of the Global Alliance, former chair of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, or CIPR, professor Emeritus from the Huddersfield Business School in England. You've received the Atlas Award for lifetime achievement in International Public Relations from the Public Relations Society of America, PRSA, and an outstanding achievement award from the Canadian Public Relations Society or CPRS.

(05:10):

Anne I know the list goes on and on and on, so we'll skip, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you ran a workshop recently for PR week in the UK on evaluation. Always a good topic. And since I got into this business back in the eighties, has always been a timely topic where some have said it's easy, we shouldn't fuss over this, it can be done. And others say, no, no, this is quite complicated. There was some controversy in your workshop. What happened?

Anne Gregory (05:45):

Okay, well, as you can imagine, there was a room full of evaluation companies as well as people wanting to learn about evaluation. Doug Amick was there too, and lots of people who are do training on evaluation, and I was questioning one of the sacred cows of evaluation. Well, we're all taught that evaluation starts with organizational business objectives, whether that's a, not-for-profit, profit or public sector. What are the objectives of the organization and that we should align our comms and PR objectives with those, whether it's sales or policy changes, whatever. And I was questioning that, and we know, Doug, that there's a huge emphasis these days on behavior change. And it's always to the organization's benefit and who has the right to change my or your behavior? And if that's an objective, then I think we should ask some questions about that. Because when we set objectives, the orthodoxy is always, it's in the organization's favour.

(06:59):

It's to benefit the organization. And I think that's ethically questionable and practically pragmatically, I'm not sure it actually achieves what public relations is all about. And that thinking is based really on orthodoxies that were developed in the 1980s and nineties, 30, 40 years ago, Doug. And I think we need to adjust our models for the modern age. We can't start going round this track over and over again and not moving forward. As my colleague John White says on evaluation, we're like a car stuck in mud. The wheels are spinning, we're revving up. We are generating more and more metrics. You're getting more and more excited about an evaluation, but we're not actually moving forward.

Doug Downs (07:52):

Okay, so if I'm hearing that right, this really is challenging, not just from the eighties and nineties. Going further back to Basil Clarke in the UK, Edward Bernays in the United States both considered the originators of the modern PR concept and both basically said public relations is about persuasion and persuading the publics to or align with what we're doing. You are saying that starting point may not be the right starting point. Do I have that right?

Anne Gregory (08:28):

Well, I think it goes back to what the purpose of public relations is. I don't have a problem with somebody trying to persuade me to buy their products and services. It seems to be fair enough, really. And I don't have a problem with the government asking me to get my tax returns in on time and messaging me about that. That's fair enough, it seems to me. But if we think that that's all that it's about, then we've got an and given where we are now in public relations and the sophistication that we have in examining what audiences are and what motivates 'em and engaging them emotionally, and we have all the science now about behavior change without them necessarily knowing that their behavior is being changed and doing it very effectively. I think there's some questions about, well, I can persuade everybody to do something once if I incentivize them enough, but am I generating relationships that gives satisfaction to them?

(09:34):

And I think public relations purpose is about securing our organization's legitimacy. And yet you don't do that by constantly persuading people. They have to want to engage with you. They want to become your advocates if you are going to be legitimate. And if we're going to try and engage with them at a base level to say, look, there's a level of mutuality here and I will do things that are in line with what you expect of me, and I will do things in line with the values that you have as an individual or as an audience, as well as me persuading you to buy my products and services. It seems that that's a happy hunting ground for us to think about what we're doing in public relations and making a real contribution to our organization. If we have stakeholders and supporters, we are not going to be sustainable.

Doug Downs (10:31):

So the nub of this really began with the exercises that you ran in the workshop. Why don't we, for the sake of those listening, why don't we run through one or two of the exercises to get a feel for it? I can be your Guinea pig if you like.

Anne Gregory (10:46):

Okay. Right. So it's back to school time. And what I did, Doug, so I hope you're ready, is I got pieces of paper to everybody. I know it's old tech, but I asked them to write down in big legible writing what they thought the important things were in setting good objectives for public relations to set good objectives. Come on, tell me what should be going through your mind as you write good objectives? What makes good objectives?

Doug Downs (11:20):

Understanding my business's true goals in alignment with their chosen audiences. I like the customer journey discussion, which I think aligns with what you're saying. So understanding the journey that my company's chosen audiences will take to get to our chosen destination together. So I do seek to understand them. I don't quite know how you measure that other than surveys looking backward. And I'm still thinking on number three. So maybe one or two if you have a couple of examples that would help fill it out.

Anne Gregory (11:58):

Okay. So what I got back was, well, they have to be smart. They have to be specific and measurable. We know what SMART stands for.

Doug Downs (12:06):

Smart Measureable Achievable Realistic Timely.

Anne Gregory (12:07):

That's right. And we want to make sure that our organization achieves its objectives. Those were another two contributions, and therefore we write objectives that aligned with that. And if you think about these, Doug, these and I wrote, the answers are all upon the left-hand side of a big whiteboard. These are all what we might call organization centric objectives, what's good for the organization. But I didn't tell 'em that because would've given them a clue. So the next bit of the exercise, Doug, was this, how do you individually evaluate the performance of an organization? What makes you think that it's a good organization or an organization that you want to support? Again, public sector, private sector, doesn't matter what sort of organization it is. And that's really about you. If you like saying, yeah, that's okay, I'll support them because these are the things that they do that I believe that I can support. So watch, have we got your piece of paper already?

Doug Downs (13:20):

The values? Yes. Yeah. For me, right off the top that my personal values, my societal values seem to match with what the company has genuinely expressed. If it looks like something that Chat GPT kicked out for them, which most do, then it doesn't work for me. I don't believe it deeds. So if I see them doing things that express their mission, and that could be as simple as a social post where they take a side in the Israel Palestinian conflict and that my personal opinion matches the side, they talk that would match the deeds that they do. And then ultimately what people just like me say about the company.

Anne Gregory (14:11):

Yeah, so that's exactly the sort of thing that the people in the workshop were saying. So does the purpose resonate with me? What kinds of decisions do they make? And what are the behaviors of their leaders? Is there a difference between what they say and what they do? What's the quality of their products? Do I think that they're fair to their employees or fair to customers? Can I call them a good organization? Those were the sorts of answers that came through. It's really quite a sophisticated understanding actually, that most people have about when or why they're going to support an organization and whether it's been successfully changing their behaviour never comes into their consciousness. Oh yes, they're brilliant at behavior change. I'm going to support that organization never crosses people's mind. So if you look at how we shape objectives very often as professional PR people, and I have to say that your answers were more enlightened than many answers I get Doug, and you match them against how we evaluate organization.

(15:27):

There's a gap and that gap, it has to have some questions in it. Like are these stakeholders satisfied by the things that we're putting out there? If all we're doing is trying to change their behavior or put out messages that are smart and that achieve the organization's objectives, they might not feel that there's very much meaning in this relationship. And if in public relations, if we evaluate our work using metrics that don't measure things like is this a meaningful relationship, not just have we changed their behavior, then they think we're on the hiding to nothing. Because as I said, Doug, we're able to change people's behaviour quite easily these days. We aren't them even knowing it. But does that mean that they're going to support us because of that? I wonder,

Doug Downs (16:29):

There was a survey done, it was published November, 2023. I won't name the company that did the survey. It's a good survey, excellent company. But because I'm casting a light on it that's somewhat disparaging of the respondents, I just won't name the company. The survey was of CEO, senior VP, VP, director level public relations and communications leaders. And part of the survey was asking them, what are the metrics that you're going to use to measure success in 2024? And I just want to read you the top four or five metrics and get your impressions of this. So number one, the number one metric for success, they said was the number of stories placed. I'm assuming they mean in big earned media, but that's not what specifically what it says. Number two was reach slash impressions. Number three was website impact. Number four, revenue impact, which gets complicated on how you measure it. And then number five, this is beautiful. Number five was key message pull through. In other words, how many times did your specific or close enough key message get printed or get written digitally or get used in the broadcast media story? Anne your thoughts on that. As you hear that,

Anne Gregory (18:02):

I'm crying, Doug. I just feel that we haven't made any progress in 20, 30, 40 years that CEOs have that perception of how you measure the contribution of public relations. It makes me weep. It really does. And I'm serious about that. And there's two things here that at play for me. The first is the vanity of CEOs. And we all know that we have to deal with the vanity of CEOs and they want their name in the paper and they want the name of the organization in the paper. And for a lot of them, not much else count. So that's a problem. The second issue is the lack of traction that we have had as a profession in persuading, and I'll use that word or demonstrating to the C-suite, what the value of public relations is. And if we're still going to be measured on the third factor and outputs rather than the impact and the difference that we can make to organizations, then it makes me want to pack up my bags and put my slippers on because I don't feel that we are making any progress here.

(19:13):

And so I blame us as professionals partly for this. And I think there are some vested interests in our profession. And I won't name agencies either that will focus on metrics who say that all these things like impressions and things like cuttings, the equivalent of the cost are the most important thing, and they're not. But that's where the majority of money is made on counting things like that. And we've got to give ourselves a very serious talking to about whether or not we want to disappear because that's what's going to happen to us given that everything's going to be automated into the future. And the CEO will be able to press a single button and get all these results or whether we want to demonstrate that we make a real impact for organizations. And it brings us back, I think, Doug, to the nature of what we should be doing in evaluation in the future.

(20:12):

And I think it brings us full square back to what you were saying about we have to think about the customer's journey, not what we want to make the customer do, but how that group of people interact with us. And it comes back as well to what I was saying about that right-hand side that I wrote on that whiteboard about how we evaluate companies. And unless we align our thinking and our actions with that right hand side rather than the left hand side of the whiteboard, which is all about the metrics, I think we're on a hiding to nothing. So I think if you did a quick analysis of the sorts of results that I wrote down on the right hand side of that whiteboard and that you gave me about how do we evaluate organizations, for me, there are four things that really stand out.

(21:08):

First of all, there's the whole thing about purpose and contribution to society, whether an organization is a good organization and makes a difference in the world or what its values are, that's crucially important to me. The second thing is how does their leadership behave? Is there a congruence between what they talk about, what they declare and what they actually do? Do they want the talk of the values that they declare? The third thing is about how they treat their stakeholders. And by that I mean not just customers and suppliers. I mean their employees as well, who possibly have the biggest stake in the organization, and are they good employers and are they good to deal with? And then the fourth area is around the nature of the communication. We have to evaluate that because those other three things relate through communication. And so I think we need to start asking questions.

(22:12):

What is our role in society? And are we good citizens? What are the expectations of us? What are our obligations because we have them? And does the way that we frame that purpose and enact that purpose get support? How about evaluating that? Are you informed by stakeholder understanding and sentiment? Do you know what's publicly acceptable? Do you know what's within the bounds of reasonableness? And the same goes for your behavior. You are laying employees off and you're taking a whopping bonus, doesn't compute. So rather than going in with the traditional TH factor, these are all the impressions. Suppose we went into a board or to a chief executive suite and say, this organization is at risk of losing the support of all its stakeholders because we are not fulfilling our purpose. And here is the evidence for that folks. And if you want a job next week, this is what you need to do.

Doug Downs (23:17):

Anne this would make a great talk at any upcoming event that PRCA or the PRSA or CPRS or IABC or IPR, if any of them are putting together online or in-person conference talks, this would be a great discussion. I would think. So thank you as always, Anne, for your time. I really appreciate getting together with you.

Anne Gregory (23:40):

Thank you, Doug. It's always great to talk with you and you always hit the nail on the head in your questions, so thank you

Doug Downs (23:47):

So much. You're the hammer today. If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Anne Gregory, we've got contact information in the show notes. Stories and strategies is a co-production of JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies podcasts. If you like this episode, if it made you think, please leave a rating and possibly a review, those being the world to us and we read reviews on future episodes. Lastly, do us a favour forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.