7. Evaluation

The most important question to consider when evaluating the publicity plan, is how did it help the organization achieve it’s objectives?

To find that out it is necessary to ask such questions as:

“Was the activity or program adequately planned?
Did the recipients of the message understand it?
How could the program strategy have been more effective?
Were all primary and secondary audiences reached?
Was the desired organizational objective achieved?
What unforeseen circumstances affected the success of the program or activity?
Did the program or activity fall within the budget set for it?
What steps can be taken to improve the success of similar future activities?”
(Wilcox 195).

We can answer these questions by using such methods as “computerized news clip analysis, survey sampling, quasi-experimental designs in which the audience is divided into groups that see different aspects of a pr campaign, and attempts to correlate efforts directly with sales.”

We should consider the “measurement of audience awareness, comprehension, and retention of the message and the measurement of changes in attitudes, opinions and behavior.”

For our campaign in specific we can track our total amount of media placements, hits on our website, and benchmarking. We can also trace how we did publicity wise by measuring audience attendance at our events (Wilcox 197). It is also essential for us “to determine whether the audience actually became aware of the message and understood it.”

We can measure audience awareness and attitudes at events by providing surveys. We can measure the “audience attitudes and opinions before, during, and after” the publicity campaign. This will also provide us with graphs that show “percentage difference in attitudes and opinions as result of increased information and publicity”
(Wilcox 203).

We can also use the surveys and focus groups to see if we had met our objectives. We can have an evaluation sheet at the end of the meetings “with a 1-5 scale or poor to excellent” to get feedback.

Originally by
Lisa Damast
CM 301
11/9/05