What approaches can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of public relations programs?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

A public relations audit is used to assess an organization's image among the public or to evaluate the effect of a specific public relations program. A communications audit may include a content analysis of messages, a readability study, or a readership survey.One approach to measuring the effectiveness of publicity-based public relations is to count the number of exposures in the media. To determine which releases are published in print media and how often, an organization can hire a clipping service, a firm that clips and sends news releases to client companies.Counting the number of media exposures does not reveal how many people have actually read or heard the company's message or what they thought about the message afterward. However, measuring changes in product awareness, knowledge, and attitudes resulting from the publicity campaign helps yield this information. To assess these changes, companies must measure these levels before and after public relations campaigns. Although precise measures are difficult to obtain, a firm's marketers should attempt to assess the impact of public relations efforts on the organization's sales. For example, critics' reviews of films can affect the films' box office performance.