1. Setting Communications Objectives, 2. Key Messages, 3. Target Audiences
4. Communications Methods, 5. Aids to Communications Planning
6. Cost of Communications, 7. Monitoring and Evaluation, 8. Case Studies


Monitoring and Evaluation
Opportunities for monitoring and evaluation should be built into all communications effort, both at the planning and implementation stages. This will provide the necessary feedback required to ensure that communications continue to be appropriate and relevant to target audiences.

Precise evaluation of the success of communication effort can be difficult to achieve. This may be because it could be many years before the successful achievement of the intended outcome will be apparent, in which case it will be very difficult to attribute any particular effect to any specific cause. It may also be because the cost of accurately evaluating the communication (eg. the cost of market research) is too expensive in relation to the cost of the effort as a whole. Despite these difficulties, monitoring and evaluation is possible, providing SMART communications objectives have been set.

Some examples of SMART communications objectives:
• Five corporate sponsors found for local partnership initiatives by December 2000.
• 200 visitors to our stand at the London Cycling Festival in June.
• A feature in 'The Evening Standard' which contains all our key messages before September 2000.
• An article in 'Thames Gateway News' on the importance of wasteland as a habitat before end of 2000.

The success of media coverage is notoriously difficult to quantify, for a measurable target is not necessarily a meaningful one. Some useful measures of media outcomes are:
• 'Opportunities to see' - based on circulation or rating data;
• 'Equivalent advertising' - how much it would cost to place an advertisement of that size;
• 'Key message hits' - the frequency with which these appear in target media.

Another method of evaluation is measuring the amount of column centimetres per newspaper per month, in order to assess current awareness of an organisation such as the London Biodiversity Partnership. This can be problematical, as there may not always be a direct relationship between column centimetres and communication effort. The significance of pictures compared to text is difficult to assess, although research indicates that picture captions are the most widely read text in newspapers after headlines.

Whatever the method of monitoring or evaluation used, care must be taken to ensure that meaningful results are obtained and that communications effort is adjusted accordingly. The cost of monitoring and evaluating communication effort should always be built into communications planning at the start of any project.


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