The Handbook of Public Sector Communication

27Aligning and Linking Communication with Organizational Goals

Ansgar Zerfass and Sophia Charlotte Volk

Introduction

With recent decades' rapid expansion in the communication industry, rising budgets, and an increasing number of communication channels, communication practitioners are being pressured to give a detailed account of how communication activities benefit organizational goals (Watson, 2012). In today's competitive and increasingly transparent political environment, managers of public sector organizations, authorities, and politicians demand decisions based on “hard facts” rather than on intuition or experience when they invest in communication (Melkers & Willoughby, 2005). Proving accountability and increasing internal efficiency and effectiveness have become ongoing challenges for the public sector at large (Taylor, 2009).

Measurement and evaluation enable communication practitioners to demonstrate the value of their activities to their organization (Stacks & Michaelson, 2014; Watson & Noble, 2014). However, despite more than 40 years of widespread discussion and intense cross‐industry collaboration, practitioners have not yet achieved consensus on the basic measures and best tools for evaluating communication performance (Macnamara, 2018). The question of how to portray the value created through communication continues to be rated the most important issue by communication managers working in all types of organizations (Zerfass, Verčič, Verhoeven, Moreno, & Tench, ...