Without evaluation and monitoring it is impossible to assess how effective your media relations campaign is.
Monitoring and evaluation help to focus your activities and resources, and show tangible results of success. Press cuttings, statistics and achievements can also be circulated to key audiences – for example, funders, government or other academics.
When considering media evaluation you should:
- monitor the number of press releases you have issued and take-up rates, broken down by local, national, trade press and broadcast media. If your project is constantly in the news consider investing in a media management system, which will collate these statistics automatically
- subscribe to a press cuttings service or use your organisation’s account, to ensure that all coverage is captured and can be monitored
- analyse coverage by how effective you have been in getting your key messages across or by how positive, negative or neutral coverage has been.
The Association of Media Evaluation Companies also has information on the purpose of media evaluation, how to brief an agency and how to use media evaluation to best effect.