To be effective in evaluating your communication strategy, I believe you need to consider evaluation when you’re putting your communication strategy together. And I also believe you need to consider evaluation in its widest context. It’s not just about evaluating how well you achieved your communication objectives, often referred to as summative evaluation; it’s also about monitoring how well you’re going as you’re communicating. This ‘formative’ evaluation can be the most important thing you can do to manage risks for your organisation or business.

Here’s how we build evaluation into each step of a communication strategy:

·         set communication objectives—with measurable performance indicators

·         identify who you want to communicate with—and determine what sort of relationship you’d like to have with each target group and how you’ll know when you’ve achieved this

·         design clear messages—pre-test these messages with a sample of your target groups

·         choose communication methods—that reflect what your target groups said they wanted and build in a process to keep checking you’re delivering what they said they wanted

·         allocate communication roles within your organisation—and include a process for making sure people are clear about their roles and are performing them to an agreed standard

·         commit resources to implementing your communication strategy—and include a budget for monitoring and evaluation; make sure you have a means of justifying the resources allocated based on your evaluation

·         agree on an action plan for implementing your communication strategy—one that includes monitoring and evaluation activities

And here are my five tips for evaluating your communication strategies, as recently presented in a panel session at the Cooperative Research Centres Association conference in Sydney:

·         build evaluation in right from the beginning of communication—include clear objectives and measurable performance indicators

·         don’t leave evaluation until the end of a project, program or CRC—some of the most useful evaluation happens as you go; for example try pre-testing that publication with a sample of your target audience before you spend all that money on design and printing

·         set targets that are achievable and measure progress towards those targets regularly

·         if you’re going to do evaluation, be prepared to accept negative feedback as well as positive

·         don’t forget to feed back the results of any evaluation to the people who participated—and tell them what actions you’ve put in place as a result of their feedback