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Other evaluation tools
In order to evaluate the real impact of your media strategy it is
necessary to go beyond clippings and media content analysis. Some of
the other evaluation tools can be employed by your organization itself
and others should be used in collaboration with outside consultants or
specialized research firms.
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order to measure changes in your organization’s
participation levels and the attendance of your events it is
simply important to keep good records. Maintain a database of
the people involved in your activities or who attend regular
meetings. You can have sign in lists at meetings or simply
count the number of people at events. These can be press
conferences or media events, or could be other events such as
public budget hearings for municipalities or ecological
clean-up actions. The most important thing to observe is a
change in these numbers. If one of the objectives in your
media strategy is to get more people involved in your
activities through publicity you will want to see if there has
been an increase in the number of participants since you began
to implement the strategy. If not, you may want to readjust
your media plan. |
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NOTE: |
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When measuring indicators don’t forget you are looking for change. Start your measuring before you begin to implement your media strategy so that you can tell if you have made a difference. |
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indicator that your organization can track for itself is
policy change. If your organization works to affect policy of
some kind, it is most likely that specific changes in national
or local policy are included in the objectives in your media
strategy. This means that one of your “measures of
success” will be whether or not the changes your
organization has been working for have been made. Tracking
policy change requires a lot of reading, since in depth policy
issues are most often covered in print media. Weekly magazines
and editorial pages of newspapers are useful in following
policy developments. It is also important to keep track of
what laws are being discussed or enacted at the governmental
level. A certain group of municipal leaders may be
implementing a media strategy to pressure the government to
change policy on the use of municipal public land. In that
case they would track what leading opinion makers are saying
about the subject in the press and what legal changes are
happening in the government structures. |
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Public
Opinion Research |
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Telephone
polling |
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Face
to face surveys |
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Focus
group studies |
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Interviews
with key informants |
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Measuring
public opinion about your organization or the issues important to your
organization often requires outside assistance. Measuring public
opinion can be done through a variety of research methods. Research
firms can be contracted to conduct public opinion surveys or polling.
Individual consultants or state research institutes associated with
universities or other public institutions can also be employed to
undertake survey work. Make a judgement as to whether or not you have
the capacity within your organization to conduct the research and
whether or not the research will be perceived as more credible if it
is conducted by a third party. When planning public opinion research
make sure of the following:
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Clearly identify what it is that you want to know. Develop a main research question and several follow up questions related to it. These should be related to your indicators and “measures of success.”
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Decide whether you are looking for quantitative or qualitative information. This may be decided in consultation with a third party if you are using one.
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Describe your target group for the research, the group you want to gather information from. This should be related to the audience you targeted with your media strategy.
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Establish a timeline for when you want the research to start and finish and by when you need the results.
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