Huntington Beach Coordinating Council

How to Measure Charity Publicity

by Mike Heywood

There is no better way to garner financial support and volunteer workers than to effectively promote and advertise your key activities.  Since the only way we can test promotional methods effectiveness is through measurement tools, this article is intended to explore how best to measure your information campaign. 

The majority of non-profits face a challenge that businesses don’t, which is what to measure.  Businesses can measure the dollars generated by an advertising campaign.  They generally have the resources to afford paying for a professional firm to measure “clicks” on their on-line media for example.  Most non-profits and membership organizations need to measure different, more nebulous things to see if they are having an impact.  The purpose of this article is to explore the best ways for such an enterprise to gauge its publicity efforts.  Let’s start by reviewing why it’s important to measure results.

I.  What’s the purpose of analyzing your PR campaign’s effectiveness?

“If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?”  Well of course it makes a sound, but if no one hears the tree fall, then the sound generates no reaction.  A service or charitable organization generates media coverage to produce a reaction.  The reasons for producing press releases, or advertising to promote your events, can be grouped into the following areas:

• Participant recognition
• Membership/ participant growth
• Fundraising

Participant recognition is important because every one craves some level of attention.  Most folks feel good about doing good works, but even the most humble individual gets a certain amount of pleasure at seeing their name or picture appear in some form of media.  To make sure committed, involved individuals continue to be engaged in your activities, it’s important that you have a vehicle to give them recognition.

Every organization needs new members and participants.  “For Profit” entities have to constantly recruit and hire new employees to replace the inevitable 10 to 20% that leave during any given year.  Charitable and service organizations are no different. 

No matter how many hours volunteers dedicate to your mission, all organizations need money.  Effective fundraising is a key need for any charitable enterprise.  The competition for donations is fierce, so being able to develop folks willing to pay some of their hard earned funds to support your cause is critical.  

II.  What should you measure?

The challenge for member or charitable enterprises is determining an appropriate metric or metrics.  Unless you’re a very large entity, using the relative change in amounts of funds raised is likely not realistic.  On the other hand, there are some straightforward things you can use as measures of effectiveness:

• Website visits
• Attendance estimates
• Timely event web hits (Google search) 
• Print media appearances

It goes without saying that a well maintained website, with up-to-date content, is a critical tool for all well run service clubs and charities.  One way to gauge an information campaign’s impact is to measure the change in the number of visitors to your site before, during and after an event or activity.  Print media and radio or TV spots should drive folks to your website, where the public will have an opportunity to “act” in response to your campaign.  Yahoo and Google both offer services that will support this measurement.  

Year-over-year attendance estimates can give you a good comparative measure of the relative effectiveness of your events or activities.  One good example is the opportunity to measure the “number” and not just the aggregate amount of sales during a cooking event.  Knowing the relative increase or decrease in the number of pancake breakfasts sold will be a good measure of your pre-event publicity or advertising effort.   Sure, it’s an added step to measure the numbers of meals versus just the cash raised.  However it’s the only genuine measure of the relative effect of this year’s versus last year’s media blitz.

Regularly counting the number of “web-hits” generated from a publicity campaign is one way to measure its effectiveness.  A simple way to measure the impact is to count the references to the event promoted by doing a Google search using your organizations name and event date.

By “clipping” print media appearances, and measuring the number of times your PR piece shows up “in-print” you can get a good idea of your success in obtaining “free” print exposure.  Creating and maintaining a scrapbook of such clippings will give you not only a physical count of “times-in-print” but it will also provide a good record of your flow of information to the public.

Article courtesy of Byron's Dream 

President - Mike Heywood, Box 1983, Huntington Beach, CA 92647

How do we know if anybody is hearing your mesage?