A dashboard of communication metrics is a great way to share with senior leaders the progress being made on achieving key performance indicators. Like a report card, it can synthesize a great many smaller scores into overall trends that can be absorbed at a glance.
How we’re different
Some firms have their own template for a dashboard that they will use for every client. We tailor our dashboards for each client, using approaches that are already familiar to company executives reviewing other types of organizational results. For example, for a company that uses a balanced scorecard for its overall results, we use a balanced scorecard for corporate communication results. For a financial services client that uses investment indexes as part of its work with customers, we create a communication effectiveness index. We use a customized approach for each client.
Sample Projects: Dashboards
Communication Index
For an investment services client, every year since 2007 we have created an updated index of different types of internal communication results. The concept behind the index is that there are multiple types of metrics measured in different ways that all can be converted to a numerical number of points so they can be combined into a single overall score. A perfect score would be 100 points; an average score would be 50. For survey measures, if the client scored at about the average for our data base, that element would half the available points. If their score matches the highest one in our database for that element they get the maximum number of points. For online usage metrics, the scale is changed to make comparisons based on the past year’s usage numbers. For other metrics, other unique scales are created. The end result is a single table that shows how many points were earned in each category and the total overall score.
Earned Media Report
For a global package delivery company, we examined the three different reports they were receiving from different agencies on earned media results, one from each of three geographic regions. They reports covered many of the same metrics, but calculated them differently. Two reported monthly results, one reported quarterly. They defined and calculated different metrics differently, so they could not be compared with each other. We then developed a new set of parameters that all three reports were to follow so that the corporate PR function could make comparisons on performance results that could be used for planning purposes. They still had three different agencies, but they reported results in a way that were meaningful and useful to our client.