Observational metrics: Before launching "audience-invasive" research techniques, it helps to use observational metrics to record all you can about what is actually occurring in your communication environment. These can include: an inventory, a visual audit, content analysis, reading grade level analysis, online usage statistics and social media scans, analysis of how communicators spend their time and budgets, pilot/control groups and communication flow analysis.

Qualitative audience research: An audit can include open-ended discussions with individuals and groups (typically executive interviews and audience focus groups) to identify the organization's communication opportunities and problems. Specialized techniques also include network analysis and Starch Tests. What you learn will also help you formulate the right questions for the survey you'll conduct next.

The business need: Pharmacia (which was later acquired by Pfizer) had hired a new leader for its Animal Health business unit who had generated a new business strategy that needed to be communicated by the unit's communicator. This created an opportunity to demonstrate how strategic communications could help improve organizational performance within Animal Health, including reinforcing organizational and brand initiatives and aligning employee behavior with business priorities. It also created an opportunity for Pharmacia's head of global employee communication, Wendy Kouba, to proactively share this approach and results with business unit presidents throughout the organization to gain global support and resources for expanding the scope and influence of communications internally.  

What made the research different: The communication survey used to measure the program's success asked many questions that typically appear on other similar surveys to measure progress against their goals for messages and channels. The key difference was that one goal was to measure the return on investment. To do this we picked one communication campaign for which the business goal was clearly exceeded--achieving far higher sales for a particular product than the expected year-over-year increase. One question on the survey asked sales people and other employees how much credit they would give the internal communications about selling this product for the increase in sales, well beyond the targeted annual increase. Overall 54% of employees, and 78% of sales employees, said that the internal communications were either the single greatest reason for the phenomenal increase or one of the top three reasons. (If you're a member of the CIPR Inside forum on LinkedIn, see a debate about this calculation online.)

Being conservative, we approximated internal communication's credit as 54% of the excess increase beyond the expected annual increase, divided by three (for being one of the top three reasons). That resulted in an ROI of 1971% based on gross excess sales and 294% based on net profit on the excess sales. To be even more conservative, we compared the return against not only the estimated proportion of time and money spent that year on this one campaign, but against the total cost of the function's annual salary, annual budget and cost of doing the research project.

Framing audits for positive organizational outcomes

 IABC Communication World

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   (1) Identify how many respondents you need to have based on the size of your total audience.

(See details & full calendar)

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