Factsheet

Creating a Campaign
Measurement
Strategy
Please note this factsheet is part of a series on measurement and should be read
alongside ‘Measuring Internal Communication – the basics’.

What is a campaign measurement strategy?

A measurement strategy is a detailed plan for how you’re going to measure the effectiveness
and impact of your communications. It goes into a lot more detail than you might include in a
standard communication plan and is therefore most likely to be appropriate for a big campaign
or change programme. A measurement strategy contains:
• A review of previous data and insights that might be relevant to the campaign
• Specific measurement objectives
• Detailed measurement activities you will do (surveys; polls, focus groups etc), and
• An explanation of how you intend to analyse and share your results.

Why is it important for IC professionals?

When an organisation is investing a significant amount of money, time and/or resources into a
campaign, it is even more important to understand the effectiveness and impact of the
communications. You want this to be about more than just how many people watched, clicked
or attended.
You want to know:

DO THEY GET IT? ARE THEY DO THEY GET IT?

INSPIRED BY IT?

KNOW FEEL DO

And importantly, we want to know what we can LEARN from the exercise to improve our future
communications activities.
What does a measurement strategy include?
Desktop data review – learnings from previous campaigns
Before you start collecting any new data, review any existing data and insights you have from
previous campaigns. Look for what you can learn from the data that will help you shape the
new campaign:
- What type of content was most successful? What type of content was least successful?
- What format of content worked well? What format didn’t work so well?
- Did you achieve your ‘know, feel, do’ outcomes?
- Which audiences engaged the most and least? Why?

Measurement objectives (What are you trying to achieve by measuring?)

Understanding and documenting why you want to measure your campaign, will help ensure
you capture the correct data. Some common campaign measurement objectives might
include:

▪ To measure the impact, reach and engagement with [the campaign].

▪ To learn what has worked well and what could be improved
▪ To learn the impact of [certain tactics] on [the outcomes you are trying to achieve]
▪ To get a view of engagement with the campaign by [market/grade/division]
▪ To provide recommendations for [further activity]
▪ To demonstrate the value of internal communications in supporting business outcomes.

Timings
You should plan to gather data and feedback throughout your campaign – not just at the end.
Before the campaign: Sometimes it might be appropriate to gather some baseline data before a
campaign, so that you can track any improvements in what employees think, feel or do. For
example, before running a big campaign to support the launch of a new intranet platform, you
might want to measure what employees think and feel about the current intranet as a
benchmark.
During the campaign: Gather data and feedback ‘as you go’ to assess whether you need to
adjust your approach before the end of the campaign. That means reviewing your data as you
go as well! If your campaign has a phased roll-out, for example, starting with leaders or
managers, use their data and feedback to influence your remaining campaign activity (This
would mainly apply to large change programmes or long campaigns with multiple phases).
 End of the campaign: Gather data and feedback as soon as possible after the completion of
activity whilst the campaign is still fresh – but allowing enough time for the impact to reach as
many people as possible (especially if a cascade is involved).

Measurement activity ideas

There are many different ways you can collect data and feedback. Here are a few ideas, but
always try and think of new and creative ways.

QUANTITATIVE QUALITATIVE
Email opens, clicks and read times Feedback from HR business partners / leads
(provide them with 2 questions to ask of leaders
in their areas)
Video views and duration of watching Feedback from official employee reps / forums

Intranet views, likes, comments Feedback from official networks / business

resource groups
Viva Engage posts, views of comms posts, Capture verbatims at events (and in feedback
likes, comments and # uses surveys) – but not just about quality of the
event – ask about your ‘know-feel-do’ outcomes
An online survey Do some sentiment analysis on Viva Engage
posts (% positive/neutral/negative)
A live poll in key events Do a ‘word cloud’ question at events or in
surveys
Number of attendees on a call / at a live event Take photos of people engaging with your
content (these look great in reports – but
remember to get their consent)
Number of questions asked on a call / at a live Observational methods: Note down people’s
event actions and responses when they interact with
your comms.
A flip chart / poster wall survey at live events Focus groups

Manager cascade feedback survey One on one interviews / calls

 The Measurement Framework (Example used below: financial results campaign)
This framework helps you to map out how you are going to measure each of your communications
outcomes (i.e. what you want colleagues to know, feel and do) as well as how this links to the business
goal you are supporting.
1. Start by articulating what the BUSINESS objective is. In the example below we are using the
communication of a company’s financial performance update as the campaign. The business
objective behind engaging employees with the financial performance of the company – is
ultimately to improve the performance of the company against the key financial metrics.

2. The next step would be to articulate the communications outcomes that will support this business
goal – i.e. what you want employees to know, understand, feel or do.

3. The third step outlines how you will measure the communication outcomes – how you will gather
the data you need to know whether you have achieved your outcomes or not. This could be one or
more of the measurement activities listed above.

4. Next you need to think of what data you need to collect – this will be the specific questions you
will ask or metrics you will gather.

5. Finally, you can set yourself a target score to achieve. This will help you to understand whether
your results are ‘good’. The easiest way to set target scores is to base them on previous scores
from similar campaigns if you have this historical data.

Business Communi- Data sources Questions to be asked / data gathered Target

Goal cations score /
outcome KPI
E.G. Improve KNOW: E.G. E.G. E.G.
performance
E.G. 1. Online Online survey questions (Level of agreement with
against key
Employees survey following statements):
financial 2. Cascade
understand
metrics feedback - My colleagues understand which of the
where the 3.4/5.0
survey company’s core financial metrics we are
company is performing well against
performing 3. Viva
Engage - My colleagues understand what we need to
well, and focus on as a business in the next 6 months to 4.2/5.0
posts on
where there improve our performance
team
needs to be focus
further focus. areas My manager facilitated a conversation about our
financial results with our team (yes / no/ not sure) 65% yes
 Cascade feedback survey questions (Level of
agreement with following statements):
- My manager explained how our work has 4.5/5.0
contributed to the financial performance of
the company
- My manager explained what our team needs 3.7/5.0
to focus on over the next 6 months

Viva Engage Campaign: ‘Team pledges’ (Share a 100

photo of your team discussing our financial results photos
and what one thing you will be focusing on over shared
the next 6 months to improve our company’s 200 uses
performance using the hash tag #H1teampledge) of the #

FEEL: E.G. E.G.

E.G. The Online survey Online survey question (Level of agreement with
company following statement):
acknowledges
I feel like my contribution to the performance of
my 4.0/5.0
the business has been acknowledged
contribution to
the
performance of
the business

DO: E.G. E.G.

E.G. Reduce 1. Online survey Online survey question:
spend on travel
2. Cascade - I’m aware of the need to reduce spend on 75% yes
and expenses –
feedback survey travel and expenses (Yes/No/Not sure)
to reduce end
of year costs 3. Finance team
Business Metric:
You could also track the actual spend on travel and
expenses to see if it reduces. 15%
Reduction
Analysis and Insights
Once you have collected your data – as mapped out in your framework – you will need to analyse
it to identify how effective your communications were, the impact you had on the business goals
and what you can learn going forwards. Two simple ways to analyse your data include:
1) Look at the data over time – Simply note the scores for each question. Ask yourself:

▪ Are they higher, lower, or about what you expected?

▪ Can you compare them to historical data or averages?
▪ If there are any significant outliers in the data – investigate why this is. Do some
follow up interviews or a focus groups.

2) Look at the data by ‘segments’ – You can sometimes extract more interesting information
from your data if you look at it separated out into groups. For example – perhaps respondents
in customer-facing roles responded differently to those in back-office roles? To do this basic
level of analysis – you will need to know the appropriate demographic information (which
you should build into the design of your research upfront):

▪ Grade – which is the least and most positive? Which is If you are able to – always try to
the most and least engaged with your content / capture some demographic data
activity? with your measures and metrics
▪ Location– which is the least and most positive? Which e.g. Grade, Function/Division, and
is the most and least engaged with your content / location/country. Check with HR
activity? what level is appropriate for your
▪ Department – which is the least and most positive? organisation.
Which is the most and least engaged with your This will enable you to segment
content / activity? your results and look for usable
▪ Outliers - If there are any extremely low or high insights.
scores - ask yourself why this might be. Follow up
with some one-on-one interviews or focus groups to
find out why.

BE CURIOUS - It is by being curious about ‘why’ the results are the way they are – that you can start to
learn and create new hypothesis you can test in further research. All of this builds your ‘data-mindset’
and makes you a more strategic thinker and communicator. If you’d like to learn more about how to do
this – sign up for the IoIC’s Data for Internal Communicators course.
Reporting
Thinking about how you will present your data and insights BEFORE you finalise your
measurement approach, means you won’t miss capturing that ‘killer quote’, brilliant photograph
or buzz in the room through a word cloud.
Key elements of a campaign evaluation report:
▪ Dashboard – A one-page summary to use with stakeholders – that describes the
overall effectiveness of the campaign, key insights and recommendations.

▪ Methodology – A brief explanation of how you captured your data (survey response
rates and timings etc).

▪ Detailed results – By business goal/communication outcome – share both

quantitative and qualitative results, measures and metrics for each outcome.
Comment on whether you feel the outcome has been achieved or not.

▪ Analysis insights – What you learned from looking at your data by market, grade,
location etc. Did you find any interesting correlations? Which was the
strongest/weakest business unit or management grade?

▪ Recommendations – What are your next steps? What will you stop, start or
continue?

N.B while it’s tempting to share all your data in your measurement report this is not often the
best idea. Try to focus on demonstrating the impact of your work (i.e. the achievement of your
outcomes) and what you have learned (the insights from your data analysis). Everything else
is noise and can be shared in the appendix.

Barriers to consider
1. Timing – Consider whether it’s appropriate for you to be doing research about your
communications right now. Be considerate of how employees are feeling. Avoid running
research at the same time as bad news is being shared, significant increases in workloads,
busy periods etc.

2. Survey fatigue – You do not have to survey everyone all the time. Get used to doing small
sample surveys. Survey Monkey has a great tool to help you figure out how many survey
responses you really need – just enter the total number of employees your communications
were aimed at (population). If you’d like to learn more about how to do this – sign up for
the IOIC’s Using Data to Demonstrate the Value of Internal Communications training course.

3. Technology – Not everyone has access to technology that enables them to measure views,
clicks and hits. Please use the information in this factsheet to help you design your own
measurement approach that works for your organisation and the tools you have access to.
About the author
Creating a Campaign Measurement Strategy has been written by independent practitioner
and trainer, Chris Crofts (Kinetic Internal Communications Ltd).
Chris has over two decades of experience in internal communication at large, multi-
national organisations and has led the global IC functions at Aviva and Diageo. Chris
started her working life as a statistician for the MOD and is passionate about helping IC
pros to become more strategic through the use of data and insights. Chris runs the IoIC
Data for Internal Communicators course.

Further reading
‘How you can measure internal communications’ – A community article on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/advice/3/how-can-you-measure-internal-communication a quick read that
gives you an overview of the why, what and how of internal communications measurement. Internal
Comms Pros are encouraged to add their own advice and experience to the article.
‘Internal Comms Conversion: A Framework to Measure Communication Using Five Powerful Data
Points’ – This video, although linked to an analytics platform (Swoop) – talks through a measurement
framework that helps you calculate an ‘engagement score’ for your communications content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_8lprjC18Y&t=1240s
The Government Communications Service has a wealth of resources freely available for all
communicators working in the Government – and is open to the public. They have created a section on
evaluating internal communications which talks through how to create an evaluation plan that covers
inputs, out-puts, out-takes, intermediate outcomes and final outcomes:
https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/guidance/internal-communication/evaluating-internal-communications/
They have also created a detailed document that sets out their recommended approach to
measurement: The GCS Evaluation Cycle - https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/publications/gcs-evaluation-
cycle/
‘Auditing Organizational Communication’ by Owen Hargie & Dennis Tourish provides a much more in-
depth look at communication measurement and analysis methodologies, with practical examples,
watch-outs and techniques.
‘Successful Employee Communications – A practitioner’s guide to tools, models and best practice for
internal communication’ by Sue Dewhurst and Liamm Fitzpatrick has a simple chapter on measurement
and evaluation with a clear model to follow, case studies and ideas for data collection.
‘Exploring Internal Communication – Towards Informed Employee Voice’ edited by Kevin Ruck, provides
a more academic overview of measurement, analysis and evaluation as well as explaining the ICQ10
employee survey questions for measuring the effectiveness of internal communications in general.