The end of the year is a time to celebrate the holidays with friends and family. It’s also the perfect time to celebrate all the amazing work you have accomplished throughout the year. Check out our tips for end of year PR reporting.
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As public relations practitioners, we strive to deliver actionable results. This requires us to ensure that KPIs (key performance indicators) are clearly outlined at the start of every campaign and that all strategies and tactics align directly to our original goals and objectives.
The Scooter Media team compiled a few tips to ensure that you put your best foot forward as you showcase your work from the year and plan ahead for 2019:
- Revisit your original plan – All strong public relations plans start with sound research, clear target audiences, strong goals and SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-bound) objectives. When you’re pulling your end-of-year report together, don’t forget to revisit what you said you would achieve with your public relations campaign. Ensuring that your outcomes ladder back to your objectives will help you clearly define your successes and identify areas for improvement.
- Make a checklist of all communication channels – Whether you are utilizing several agencies and/or vendors to help execute your communications plans, or you are overseeing or serving as the communications team for your organization, be sure to make a checklist of all of the channels you leveraged for the year. Often times, agencies and vendors will provide monthly or quarterly activity reports. Filing these documents into a folder will help make your end-of-year reporting much easier. Don’t forget that some social channels have a limit to how far back you can pull data, so we always recommend tracking activity month-to-month instead of waiting until the end of the year. Not only does this ensure a wealth of information is available to compile a report from, it also helps you identify areas of improvement in real-time.
- Actionable results lead to strong recommendations – Sharing data can be insightful, but providing an analysis and recommendation is really where reports can provide value. After you have a chance to pull together the data and activity for the year (the “what”), identify some trends (the “so what”) and be sure to make recommendations based off of those findings (the “now what”). Actionable reporting will help you truly showcase how you’ve moved the needle against your objectives and identify opportunities for improvement.
End of year PR reporting is essential for all things in the business world. Ensuring that proper time and resources are allotted to reporting can help ensure that the value of our practice is conveyed. It can also help you secure additional resources for future campaigns and programs, refine programs from past experiences and provide valuable research to inform how your organization communicates with target audiences in the future.
For more great public relations tips and tricks, visit the Scooter Media blog.
