Note:  These chapter notes and study questions should not be viewed as substitutes for coming to class and joining in the lecture and discussion.  Rather, they should be viewed as a starting point for lecture and discussion.  These notes will be heavily supplemented with discussion, examples and debate in class.  To do well in class, you should read the text and make some notes on the reading, read these on-line notes and study questions, come to class, make your own notes and be ready to discuss what you have read and studied intelligently. --Dr. John M. King

Wilcox Ch. 9 Notes
Evaluation
2/24/2000

The Purpose of Evaluation
-measuring the results of the PR campaign

Objectives
Were the objectives of the campaign met?
Evaluation criteria must be established before the campaign takes place.
Each objective should be analyzed and measured.
Informational objectives are measured by exposure, awareness and attention.
Motivational objectives are measured by attitude change and behavioral change.

Current Status of Measurement and Evaluation
PR Firms and Corporate PR are doing more measurement of PR effectiveness than ever before.
Basic level- lists of message distribution and media placements
Second level- measurements of audience awareness, comprehension and retention of the message
Advanced level- measurement of changes in attitudes, opinions and behavior

Measurement of Production
-simply count how many news releases, feature stories, photos, letters, etc. are produced.

Measurement of Message Exposure
-counting press clippings and broadcast mentions that were actually used in the media

Media Impressions
-how many people were exposed to the messages through media organizations

Internet Hits
-measures how many times people log onto web sites
-early measures were very inaccurate because a hit was recorded every time a person clicked to a page in the web site
-better measures that record how many visitors there were are available now

Advertising Equivalency
This is how much the space and time generated would have cost if it had been bought as an ad.
Should negative stories be counted here?

Systematic Tracking
Computer database programs can track variables such as mention of key copy points in a story, tone of the coverage and sources quoted to measure the quality of media placement.

Requests and 800 Numbers (and e-mail)
-counting the number of requests for more info

Cost Per Person
-calculating the cost of reaching each member of an audience
-divide the total cost of the program by the number of impressions to get cost per person

Audience Attendance
-counting attendance at events

Measurement of Audience Awareness
-survey research is used (before and after random samples are best)
-day after recall

Measurement of Audience Attitudes
benchmark studies- measuring attitude before a campaign is launched
This is using a pre-test post-test approach to accurately measure the impact of the campaign.

Measurement of Audience Action
This is used to measure the behavior of the audience that has received the messages.
-toughest measurement to achieve

You can use routinely collected data to give some measure of behavior.
If you conduct a PR campaign aimed at selling more Mars candy bars and sales go up 10 percent, that is a pretty good indication that the campaign did some good.

If you run a public information campaign to get adults to stop smoking and sales of cigarettes go down 5 percent, that is a pretty good indication that the campaign did some good.

If you run a public information campaign to increase blood donations for the local Red Cross and blood donations go up 15 percent that is a pretty good indication that the campaign did some good.

Note however that such measures are not proof that the campaign caused the behavioral changes.  There may have been other factors that had an impact.  Perhaps NASA launches a rover mission to Mars that gets lots of news coverage while you are doing your campaign. (This actually happened.)  Perhaps taxes on cigarettes are tripled during your campaign, resulting in fewer sales.  Perhaps a catastrophic event or natural disaster occurs that requires more blood donations.

Some health campaigns are designed in a quasi-experimental fashion so that one community gets an intense public information campaign through the media (the experimental group) and another similar community gets no public information campaign (the control group).  Then the number of deaths or hospitalizations due to a particular health condition are measured in both communities.  If they are similar enough communities, there have been no confounding events in either community and there are differences in the rate of deaths or hospitalizations, then we can reasonably assume the campaign was a major contributor to the differences we have measured.

Measurement of Supplemental Activities

Communication Audits
-an assessment of an organization's entire communications program

Pilot Tests and Split Messages
Pilot tests, in which product messages are tested in select cities before a national campaign is launched, are quite common in product marketing and marketing communications.

Split-messages, in which different appeals are sent to different audiences to measure which approach is most effective, is common in direct mail.

Meeting and Event Surveys
Participants are asked to fill out a brief survey to measure attitudes about the event.

Newsletter Readership
content analysis
-method to measure what kinds of stories are appearing in the publication
-helps the editor see if topics are being overdone or underemphasized

readership interest surveys
-usually done through mail surveys (A random sample of readers is selected.)
-can be done as part of the publication itself (Data analysis can be more expensive since the number of responses
can be quite high.)

article recall
-readers are asked which stories they recall reading

advisory boards
-feedback from employees on internal publications
-feedback from industry leaders on external publications

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