How do you demonstrate ROI from your internal communications?
As Internal Communications pros we’re often stretched, juggling multiple competing priorities and struggling with ever-limited budgets to do more, more, more. It’s tough out there. It’s even more the case now, in the face of an increasingly gnarly economic climate. Many Marketing & Communications teams are having their budgets slashed, despite the real, deep value that we bring to our organisations. So, how do you demonstrate your worth even in the face of these challenges?
How can internal communicators show their value?
Demonstrating return on investment, or ROI, is so important – and it’s a perennial challenge for lots of IC pros.
One answer is to beef up your approach to measuring your performance – although that’s obviously far easier said than done. If measurement feels like an impossible challenge for you, you’re far from alone. It’s a common concern – in the Gallagher State of the Sector report for 2023 22% of respondents highlighted ‘lack of analytics and measurement’ as one of their biggest challenges. This figure has remained relatively stable in previous years’ reports – so the headache clearly isn’t going away.
Finding effective, straightforward and powerful ways to demonstrate your impact – and your ROI – to senior leaders and beyond is a must for internal communicators. There’s also a sneaky added benefit to effective measurement: rigorously examining and measuring your comms means you’re more likely to focus on activity that really delivers against your objectives, making your comms even more impactful. Luckily, we have a few handy hacks to share.
But first, some good news…
Demonstrating your ROI to your senior leaders doesn’t have to be as tough as it sometimes feels. After all, good IC is important to so many parts of any organisation.
Are your senior leaders concerned about recruitment and retention? IC can help, by nurturing your unique and inspiring organisational culture. What about employee engagement and productivity? Again, high-quality internal comms has a proven role to play in maintaining high levels of employee engagement.
Health and wellbeing? Learning and development opportunities? You can have all the shiny good stuff in the world, but if the word doesn’t get out there then no one will access the support that’s available to them.
I’m sure you get the point. We all know that IC teams do a huge amount of heavy lifting across all areas of an organisation: we’re the glue that holds it all together. It’s just a question of finding the right way to show that to our leaders.
So, to do that, we need to make sure we’re gathering the right kind of data to tell our stories effectively. With a straightforward, systematic approach to measuring Internal Communication it becomes that much easier to approach senior leadership and show that we are delivering above and beyond when it comes to ROI.
So, what’s stopping us from doing that right now? What are the barriers to good internal communication measurement, and how can we overcome them?
What are the barriers to good internal communication measurement?
As the Gallagher ‘State of the Sector’ report for 2023 showed, one of the biggest barriers to effective IC measurement is a lack of clear communications objectives and business targets.
After all, how can you demonstrate your success if you’re not quite certain what that success should look like?
This comes down to a fundamental question about the purpose of Internal Communications. To stick with Gallagher for a second: in their recent report, respondents stated that the two most important functions of IC were to create ‘an inclusive workplace where employees feel valued and energised’ (74%) and to build ‘clarity around [the] strategy and create a sense of ownership’ (67%). Do those priorities resonate with you? And if they do, how are they reflected in your team’s objectives?
If you’ve got a clear communications objective, it makes everything – creating the comms, deciding which channels to use, and measuring your impact – that little bit easier. But how to set a good objective?
What are the ingredients of a good communications objective?
There are a few ways to think about objective setting so that it becomes an easy, fundamental part of the way you work, not a stressful added-extra.
First, remember the ever-present acronym ‘SMART’ – a good communications objective needs to be:
Specific – you know what you’re trying to do;
Measurable – you know when you’ve done it;
Action-oriented – focused on activity you can take ownership of;
Realistic – you can do it with the resources and time available to you;
Time-bound – you start with a clear end point in sight to keep you motivated and focused.
That’s a great formula to start with, but powerful objectives also need to be clearly linked to wider strategic goals. After all, ‘drive 30% higher average page views on the intranet in Q2 than Q1’ is nicely specific and measurable (if you’ve got those Q1 figures). And there’s action you can take there, in terms of how you create your digital content. In fact, it ticks all the SMART boxes. But what’s lacking is a sense of why it’s going to help you make progress on your strategic priorities.
It’s very tempting to think of measurement for IC as just being about collating pageviews and analytics after each campaign. But those figures don’t tell you how your audience felt about what you’d done – or what your activity was helping you to achieve in the long term.
So, to build on your SMART formula and build objectives with richer purpose behind them, think of the bigger-picture priorities your stakeholders have. Let’s imagine your HR team wants to do more to support staff wellbeing this year. IC has a major role to play – perhaps in publicising the range of resources available to your colleagues.
A good communications objective will be linked to this bigger strategic priority, while focusing on concrete activity that you can do as a team to make a difference. You could start off with an objective that says you will ‘increase awareness of Employee Assistance Programmes’ in Q2. But how will you do that? And what will that increased awareness actually mean?
The phrase ‘know, think, do’ is great here: what do you want your audience to know, think or do differently because of your comms activity? This will help you create an objective that allows you to focus on generating a strategic shift, something like: ‘Generate X% more visits to our Employee Assistance Programme intranet page in Q2’.
The ingredients of a good objective are simple. But, like making a perfect omelette, there’s an art in the simplicity of writing a good objective. One that will be a useful guiding star for your team’s activity – and allow you to demonstrate your impact clearly to your stakeholders (or as we call them in H&H, ‘people who care about what you’re up to’).
Once you’ve got a clear and strategic objective, you’re one step closer to measurement success. You just need access to all that lovely data.
What should internal communicators measure?
Access to benchmarking data is one of the next biggest headaches for IC pros who want to measure their internal communication.
How can you show what difference you’ve made if you don’t have the data to show where you started from?
Benchmarking sometimes sounds a bit scary or official. Something that proper data-heads do. It doesn’t have to be this way. Benchmarking basically means that you gather some data now that you can use for comparisons later down the line.
It can be difficult to set benchmarks if you haven’t been collecting them regularly as a team. Or, if your channels are set up so you can’t easily access up-to-date metrics on performance or individual campaigns. These can be major headaches and they are hard to overcome when you’re looking to build a more robust approach to measurement. Which makes it tempting to just give up.
However, having a set of benchmarks allows you to give yourself data-specific objectives to work towards. And that specificity really helps you to show the kind of impact you’re having as an IC team. So, it’s important to find some quick and dirty ways to set yourself some benchmarks. Start with the basics and build from there.
How you can find that data or create it yourself?
Creating benchmarks for yourself doesn’t have to be stressful, over-complicated or expensive. If your channels are set up so you can track some basic analytics, you can easily start setting benchmarks today.
The basic categories of data you might want to collect are:
- Potential reach: how many people could potentially view your content. If you’re in a company of 2,000 people, but 500 of them can’t access your intranet, then your intranet’s potential reach would be 1500.
- Actual reach: once you’ve published a story, how many people actually see it? So, if something you publish gets 750 unique views, out of a potential audience of 1500 people, you know 50% of your potential audience actually saw your article.
- Interaction and engagement: this is where it gets more interesting. How are people engaging with the content you posted? Are you getting lots of repeat visits to the page, or lots of likes and comments? You can start looking into how engaged your audience are and get a sense of whether you’ve really grasped their attention.
- Audience satisfaction: to get into more detail about how your audience feel you can use other tools to explore their views on IC at your organisation. Quarterly or annual surveys focused on your internal communications are a great way to do this – you can get a much deeper understanding of what makes your audience tick.
I’m prepared to bet cold, hard cash that you already collect lots of this info. The question is, have you started using it for benchmarking yet?
Try to get into a regular rhythm of collecting data about your main channels. From this, calculate the average page views per month (you can also do this with any other metric, such as the average number of ‘likes’ you get on a post). And then keep track of those average views. You’ll start to see how they change over time.
And this average figure becomes your new benchmark. Once you’ve published a new piece of content – let’s say an article, to kick off a new campaign – track the pageviews you get over the first week or month of its life, and compare this with the average for that channel. Lo and behold, you’ve got yourself something to compare your progress against, which is really all that a benchmark is.
Now you can state with confidence that your article advertising your Employee Assistance Programme performed 10% better than the average for your intranet. This gives you data about what ‘good’ looks like for your channels – so you can be certain when a piece of content or a campaign is performing well. Which means your data has become much more meaningful.
Which begs the question – what do you do with that data once you have it?
What should I do with the data?
One of the final barriers to measuring internal communication is knowing just how to use the kinds of data you’ve gathered.
It can be very tempting to stick it all in some kind of dashboard and have done, but that would be a shame after putting in the work to create well-formed objectives and gather the data in the first place.
The biggest concern for most of us is about demonstrating our ROI as IC teams. So naturally you can use any data you’ve collected to show your leaders and stakeholders how well you’re performing. This is especially great if you’ve been able to gather data that shows that you’ve made a significant impact on other strategic priorities, such as employee wellbeing or DE&I. With clear objectives, robust data and solid benchmarks you’re well on your way to showing off how your team contributes to the wider business strategy.
But there are other things you can – and should – use that data for. Most importantly as a way to help you improve the quality and focus of your internal communications. Collecting data on email open rates might show that emails sent at certain times outperform your other all-employee emails. What can you learn from that? It will help you refine your channel strategy around how you use all-employee email.
What about if you realise that content shared on one specific topic never seems to get the enthusiastic or positive response you hoped for? Well, you could use the opportunity to talk to your audience to find out why they’re not engaging with the content. You could get some insight into what might work better, or learn that it’s just not a topic that your internal audience are interested in.
All of this info will help you home in on what really works well for your team, and what you can do to improve, meaning that you’ll continue to increase the impact you have on your organisation. But without the data in the first place, it’s harder to know where you might need to improve, or what the issues are.
How will measuring internal communications benefit my organisation?
Measure for measure
You should now have a few ideas for ways to unlock your internal communication measurement.
These simple things, like setting internal benchmarks and crafting focused objectives, can make it a much less daunting task to approach.
One of the biggest barriers for busy IC teams of course will always be having the time and headspace to focus on measurement. It’s something we all know is vital, but it’s hard to carve out the time for it amongst other competing priorities.
However, spending a bit of time on measuring your internal communication will pay off enormously as you celebrate your worth with your leaders and other stakeholders. The data will help you make a clear case for your value – and, as an added bonus, it’ll also help you and your team to continually improve the work you do. What’s not to like?
If you’d like to chat to us about how we could take some of the headache of internal communications measurement off your shoulders – like paracetamol in agency form – give us a bell.
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