Evaluation

Interesting piece in PR Week about the evaluation of PR campaigns and how long agencies can or should keep using the advertising value equivalent figure as a measure of success. The piece repeats all the reasons I’ve always mistrusted AVE as a measure – just colonising space in a paper for an article is no guarantee that anyone reads it, agrees with it or acts on it; it doesn’t offer a means of measuring social media comment; and for obvious reasons it can’t measure one of the key activities of a good PR – keeping bad stories out of the papers. How much might it have been worth to the BBC if the PR response to the Ross/Brand row had been niftier and those acres of press coverage about declining moral standards hadn’t been printed? How could you have measured it if it had happened?

Evaluation gets even harder when the campaign you are evaluating is trying to generate long-lasting behavioural/attitudinal change, as many of the campaigns run by government are. It takes years to achieve real social change – it’s taken decades for drink-driving to have become socially unacceptable, for example.  No client is going to pay for tracking research over a decade to prove whether or not they achieved their objective.  And no agency could wait that long to be paid. Who decides that social change has taken place?  As an agency, how do we demonstrate that the change was due to us and wouldn’t have happened anyway? Ultimately we’re forced back on easy to measure indicators: the delivery of materials on time/  budget, target take-up rates of info packs or testing kits among certain sections of the audience, an agreed level of media coverage measured through AVE or WOTS (weighted opportunities to see – which can generate their own meaninglessly surreal statistics, apparently there were 1.4billion WOTS for stories about bird flu in this country (pop 60m) during the last time we had a health scare).  On the occasions when I’ve been sitting on the client’s rather than the agency’s side of the process, I’ve always had my doubts that I’d be able to really measure the success of what I was being offered. COI were making a big noise about their new evaluation process, Artemis, a while ago – does it work?

You cannot hope to bribe or twist…

I’m currently part way through Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News,  which highlights what he describes as a crisis in journalism, and the role that  PR and political manoeuvering plays in it.  So I was  interested to read the report in today’s PR Week about a Reuters Institute study on the same subject, What’s Happening to Our News, which decides that, all things considered,  PR isn’t a cancer eating at the heart of journalism (so that’s alright then…).

I recognise a lot of what Davies says about a crisis in journalism, driven by cost-cutting and staff shortages, and the demands of  a 24-hour news machine.    I think his section laying into  PR is  actually pretty weak.   He’s much stronger on the evils of political manipulation of news and in particular the role of the CIA and the Bush administration’s machinations in the  ‘war on terror’.

What Davies doesn’t touch on (unless it’s in the bit I haven’t read yet) is the  effect the media has on politics.    Outside Whitehall it might appear that the politicos are pulling all the strings.  Inside it often feels quite different (this was touched on in Digby Jones’ evidence to the select committee.  A second  name check in a week for Lord Jones!)   Far too often serious political issues are reduced to their simplest possible essence – who’s “in” and who’s “out” ? Was that a gaffe? Who’s been disloyal to the leader?  Who’s making a leadership bid?  I can’t think of anything less likely to encourage intelligent  debate than the Today programme’s habit (thankfully ended) of wheeling in Nick Robinson to deconstruct political interviews immediately they’ve happened, to decode what the politician actually meant when he said X (Nick usually thought he meant Y, but sometimes he grudgingly agreed that he meant X but that X wasn’t what the Party needed to hear)  The issue of the damage caused by a cynical, confrontational media constantly trying to find out “why is that lying bastard lying to me?” was explored in John Lloyd’s book What the Media is Doing to Our Politics , which makes a good companion piece to Davies.

The title of this post, by the way, is the first line of a ditty I used to mutter to myself after a particularly difficult call:

 You cannot hope to bribe or twist,                                                                         thank God, the British journalist.                                                                                   But seeing what the man unbribed will do,                                                       There’s really no occasion to.

I’ll show you mine, if…

Google reader turned this up in my inbox this morning – a  post from American media strategist BL Ochman about the difficulty of finding out what other people charge for a job.  As she says: 

“You are more likely to know what your best friend eats for breakfast or how many times a week he or she has sex, than how much money they make.

Despite all the Web 2.0 talk of transparency, openness, and honesty, you’d be hard pressed to find out what most new media consultants charge.”

Her point is that there is no  reason why consultants should be secretive about the rates they charge – so why does no-one ever say?  It would certainly be helpful to know.  One of the things I found hardest when I set myself up was knowing how much to charge for different pieces of work.  It’s really hard to know if you are pricing yourself out of a market, or seriously under-charging.  Unless you’re lucky enough to know  friendly freelancers who work in your field and are happy to discuss their rates, you have nothing to compare yourself to.   If you get it wrong,  and I really under-charged a couple of clients at the beginning,  it’s hard to get the rate back up to where you want to be for repeat business.  In my experience the conversation about fees always feels as though everyone concerned  is somehow embarrassed to be speaking about something so tawdry.  Is that a particularly British thing - or is it just me? 

As a  reasonably well-established freelance myself now, I understand the fear of being undercut by some young whipper-snapper who knows my rate and sees the chance to snaffle my business.  But in my experience price is not generally the deciding factor in whether or not I get a job. That has much more to do with experience, track record and contacts.

I worked for the Government Equalities Office earlier this year, as the  Equality Bill was being prepared.  One of the things they want to do is make it harder for companies to hide what staff are paid . They also want to encourage companies to publish their  gender pay gap.  This would make it easier for new entrants to an industry to tell whether what they were being offered was fair (it suddenly seems a long time ago that there were jobs around to apply for!)   Openness seems to me to be a good thing, but if you’re a freelance there’s not much information to go on.  The best thing I’ve found is the PR Week salary survey, but that’s tied very closely to agency roles which don’t necesarily equate to other types of work.  So, should we all come clean?  And if I show you mine, will you show me yours?

Reality Bites

A friend and fellow freelancer told me a story yesterday which made my blood run cold.  Two days before starting work on  a new contract, her client demanded that she cut her fee by 40%. 

She was able to walk away from the work.  As recession snaps at our heels, I do wonder if gazundering on this scale is going to become more widespread, and if it does are we just going to have to put up with it?  Personally I haven’t found my rates being queried, but I am finding it increasingly difficult to get companies to pay within a reasonable time.  Worst so far was a very well known company who took 75 days to cough up from receipt of my invoice – this means that work I did in June/July I got paid for in October.  Fortunately I wasn’t relying on it to pay the mortgage! 

Ian Monk at PR Week has been looking at the issue of late payment for small business for quite a while now and has reported on some real horror stories, including business being closed by cashflow problems, which make my experience look mild in comparison.   I appreciate that the economy is hurting everyone, self-employed or not, but if we’re doing the work surely the very least we should expect is to be paid for it on time?

In case it’s useful to anyone, here is the Better Payment Practice campaign with advice about late payment legislation for small businesses.  And here is a report on FreelanceUK about how useful the legislation is proving in practice…