How to Measure the Effectiveness of Communication

Establishing Boundaries for What You'll Measure

1. 
   Pick 1-2 types of communication to measure to focus your study. In a company, you have a wide variety of options. You could measure internal communication by looking at emails or external communication by checking social media responses. Try to narrow your scope so that your evaluation will be more effective.^[1]

   1. Start by deciding what area you're going to look at: internal communications and external communications are the two main categories. Next, target a specific area within the category you want to evaluate, such as emails, social media outreach, a marketing campaign, or an informational campaign.
   2. Look at external communications to decide whether marketing campaigns or informational campaigns are effective. Examine internal communications to check whether you are getting through to your employees and changing behavior as needed.
   3. You could also look at how effective information campaigns are by requesting responses from your target audience, for instance.
2. 
   Focus on one aspect of effectiveness to make your study more useful. "Effectiveness" can mean different things, and effectiveness for your project is going to look different than it would for any other project. As an example, it could mean that the audience understood the communication and changed its behavior. Alternatively, maybe the audience found the communication accessible and informative. Decide what is most important in your measurement and that will help guide how you measure its effectiveness.^[2]

   1. Being effective could refer to the fact that you engaged your audience and encouraged them to interact with the company.
3. 
   Establish which stages of the communication you'll measure. Every time you communicate within the company or externally, you must prepare the communication, implement it, and then check the impact. Each of those levels changes how effective the communication is, as each part affects the end message.^[3]

   1. For instance, in the preparation phase when you're developing the message, you need to have your facts straight, have appropriate data to present to your audience, and present the information in a manner that makes sense to the audience. In the implementation phase, who you're reaching and how many people you're reaching is important. In the impact phase, the number of people who absorb the message or change their behavior is essential.
   2. All of these parts contribute to how effective the communication is.
4. 
   Connect your evaluation to an end goal to make it more helpful. You likely have goals for your communication, such as informing the public, making policy changes internally, or encouraging a different company culture. Whatever your company goals are, they will affect what you measure when you're looking at a specific type of communication.^[4]

   1. You might also want to engage customers in conversation or increase sales.
   2. For instance, if one of your goals is to engage customers and you want to measure external communication on social media, then you might devise a formula to check how many posts received responses and what kinds of posts were the most popular.
5. 
   Create a baseline for your evaluation if possible. The baseline is what your audience knew before you gave them any information. This type of baseline can be informal or formal, depending on your needs, but if you don't have a baseline, you can't measure how much more the audience knows or engages with the company after the communication.^[5]

   1. A baseline is like having a control group in a research study.
   2. For instance, an informal baseline could be a single person asking a random sampling of people within your company how much they know about an internal policy. If the person finds that almost no one knows what the policy is, that gives you a starting point.
   3. For a more formal baseline, you might use an informational survey to establish how much your audience knows about a given topic.
   4. A baseline evaluation can also determine the audience's values that might affect communication, as well as the audience's attitude towards a particular subject.
6. 
   Establish milestones for your project to help with your measurements. A milestone is a small point along the way to meeting a bigger objective. If you set milestones, you'll be able to measure the effectiveness of communication better as you can see how things are changing over time. Set milestones up with specific things you can measure and then establish deadlines.^[6]

   1. Ultimately, your milestones should help you meet your objectives, which should help you meet your overall goal.
   2. Maybe you're ultimate objective is to engage 50,000 more customers on social media in a year. You can break that down into smaller milestones, such as "Name a social media chair," "Increase social media engagement," and "Create a specific social media personality for the company." Other milestones could be to "Get 3,000 followers in the first month," or "Make 20 posts in the first 2 weeks."