A Professional and Practitioner's Guide to Public Relations Research, Measurement, and Evaluation, Second Edition

Chapter 4

Measuring Public Relations Outcomes

Previous chapters have alluded to the need for public relations professionals’ understanding and ability to measure the outcomes they hope to achieve in their campaign programming. This is not a new topic, yet it has taken on tremendous interest in the last decade of the 20th century as the profession sought to be able to demonstrate effectiveness. Public relations measurement, as noted in Chapter 3, often deals with what academics would call mediating or intermediary variables—things that will impact on the final business outcome but are not necessarily financial in nature. Organizational, brand, or product credibility is one of those variables; something that cannot be seen but can be measured ...