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Proving Your Worth: Demonstrating ROI to Leadership
September 2006 | Volume 4 Issue 9
This issue of CW Bulletin will give you some unique ways to measure the ROI of your communication efforts and then demonstrate the findings to your organization's leadership. Learn how to manage communication like a business asset, to integrate ROI analytics into your planning process for better results, and more.
Natasha Spring
Executive Editor |
Features
NEW MEASUREMENT APPROACHES
by Diane Gayeski, Ph. D.
As communicators, we are increasingly under the gun to demonstrate the return on investment for our work. But using ROI formulas that attempt to pin down hard financial gains may actually reduce our potential credibility and influence. There's a new language and strategy for communicators that can help us move from being messengers to managers of corporate assets.
COMMUNICATION ROI
by Jim Shaffer, IABC Fellow
I've never met a senior business leader who didn't want to make more money.
Nor have I met one who didn't appreciate that communication breakdowns lead to mistakes, accidents, shoddy service, high costs and low productivity. Business leaders, especially CEOs, are eager to rid themselves of value-draining dips in performance that prevent them from hitting their numbers. As a communicator, if you can do four common-sense things well, you can not only help senior leaders to avoid these breakdowns, but you can also demonstrate how to maximize the power of communication for better business results.
ROI ANALYTICS
by Merry Elrick
I once had a client, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, who called me one fateful day with some bad news. There had been a terrible clerical error. The US$300,000 marketing communication budget, which had taken weeks and months of planning to produce, had been submitted as a US$30,000 budget. It had been accepted as a US$30,000 budget. Someone had dropped a zero along the way, and it had been set in stone.
EMPLOYEE CONTRIBUTION
by Chris Anderson and Alix Edmiston
How do we shift our communication focus to address the challenges of globalization and advancing technology? And how do we prove to senior management that successful communication is the key to navigating this new business environment? In a word: relevance. Our communication must be simpler in content, but more detailed in terms of implementation and process.
Columns
by Natalie Canavor and Claire Meirowitz
Writing the Winning Proposal: It's serious business for communicators
Operating a business on any level, from one-person band to global organization, is so competitive today that delivering excellent proposals can be critical. So we want to offer some guidelines and ideas, drawn from our own experience and from some people who've spent a lot of time thinking about proposal writing.
by Daria Steigman
Business Development 202: Getting your name out is key
Many years ago, a Washington Post columnist wrote an op-ed about how famous he had become. Taking the train back from New York after a conference, he was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who recognized him and greeted him by name. When he arrived back in Washington, feeling pretty good about himself, his wife observed that he'd forgotten to remove his name badge.
As the columnist discovered, few of us attain rock star status in the business world.
by Steve Rubel
Reinventing the Media Interview
The media interview seems like a pretty cut-and-dry experience. Reporter calls source. Reporter interviews source. Reporter uses portions of the interview in a piece and a lot more as background. Those of us who have been in PR a long time or have been interviewed by the press frequently know the drill. However, the media interview as we know it is going through a radical transformation, and it's starting not with the reporters but with bloggers.
Case Studies
Communication in the News
Related Resources
Related Resources provides additional articles and resources for understanding this month's topic of demonstrating ROI to leadership. You can also find some of these links alongside each corresponding feature article for quick reference. Links include:
- "If You Can't Measure It, Does It Exist?," by Chris Mykrantz
- "The ROI of Effective Employee Communications," by Toby Ward
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