4 Incorporating measurement and metrics
This is an important step that many people either deprioritise or miss altogether, but is worth doing up front. It’s likely that some of your measurement efforts will require an understanding of the situation both before and after your intervention, in order to see what changed.
Activity 4
For each of our intended outcomes AND for our required activities, how will we measure what we’ve done?
For the latter, these are usually easy measurements.
Did we produce a campaign? Did people see it? Did the Environment Minister notice, or take minor action in some way to confirm they noticed (perhaps they Tweeted something)?
For the former (our outcomes) these may be harder to measure, but they are often even more important.
Did we improve public perceptions? Did we increase public demand, or effectively amplify their views? Did the Environment Minister take legislative action?
Now think about how you might measure each of those things.
Set up methods now to measure these outcomes. Establish baselines before you begin to effectively track your achievements. (A baseline is an initial measurement used for later comparison, so you can see what difference you made.) Also list some of the types of uncertainty that may affect different measurements. If you have two different metrics, and one is much more reliable than the other, that may be useful information.
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Example 4
For the public communication campaign for young people on social media, there are plenty of digital tools available to us to measure our impact. For the school’s outreach, we could count the number of schools, posters and prize-giving events, and measure whether or not the Environment Minister attended. We could also monitor the Environment Minister’s social media accounts to see if they started posting more about the climate emergency. We could even monitor political activity in the elected House, to see if the Environment Minister made a political comment or statement to their colleagues, or perhaps mentioned the need to do more in the news. Was legislation drawn up, was there a vote, did it succeed?
Through measurement planning you can see very clearly how public interest communication can contribute to very real and very important public interest outcomes.
