How to Measure the Effectiveness of Communication

This article was co-authored by Gale McCreary. Gale McCreary is the Founder and Chief Coordinator of SpeechStory, a nonprofit organization focused on improving communication skills in youth. She was previously a Silicon Valley CEO and President of a Toastmasters International chapter. She has been recognized as Santa Barbara Entrepreneurial Woman of the Year and received Congressional recognition for providing a Family-Friendly work environment. She has a BS in Biology from Stanford University.

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Effective communication is very important in business. Whether you're trying to communicate something to peers/employees or you're trying to create a successful marketing or informational campaign, you want to do it well. Taking time to measure those communications can help you establish what's working and what you need to reconsider.

Part 1 of 3:

Establishing Boundaries for What You'll Measure

Start by deciding what area you're going to look at: internal communications and external communications are the two main categories. Next, target a specific area within the category you want to evaluate, such as emails, social media outreach, a marketing campaign, or an informational campaign.
Look at external communications to decide whether marketing campaigns or informational campaigns are effective. Examine internal communications to check whether you are getting through to your employees and changing behavior as needed.
You could also look at how effective information campaigns are by requesting responses from your target audience, for instance.

Being effective could refer to the fact that you engaged your audience and encouraged them to interact with the company.

For instance, in the preparation phase when you're developing the message, you need to have your facts straight, have appropriate data to present to your audience, and present the information in a manner that makes sense to the audience. In the implementation phase, who you're reaching and how many people you're reaching is important. In the impact phase, the number of people who absorb the message or change their behavior is essential.
All of these parts contribute to how effective the communication is.

You might also want to engage customers in conversation or increase sales.
For instance, if one of your goals is to engage customers and you want to measure external communication on social media, then you might devise a formula to check how many posts received responses and what kinds of posts were the most popular.

A baseline is like having a control group in a research study.
For instance, an informal baseline could be a single person asking a random sampling of people within your company how much they know about an internal policy. If the person finds that almost no one knows what the policy is, that gives you a starting point.
For a more formal baseline, you might use an informational survey to establish how much your audience knows about a given topic.
A baseline evaluation can also determine the audience's values that might affect communication, as well as the audience's attitude towards a particular subject.

Ultimately, your milestones should help you meet your objectives, which should help you meet your overall goal.
Maybe you're ultimate objective is to engage 50,000 more customers on social media in a year. You can break that down into smaller milestones, such as "Name a social media chair," "Increase social media engagement," and "Create a specific social media personality for the company." Other milestones could be to "Get 3,000 followers in the first month," or "Make 20 posts in the first 2 weeks."

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Deciding on a Type of Evaluation

With this type of analysis, it's simply a numbers game. You can see how many people have accessed an internal file. You could ask people to reply to an informational email to establish they've read it.
On social media, you could count how many people have followed your company, liked certain posts, or left responses.
For a coupon campaign, you can count how many people have used the coupon and ask for zip codes to establish the areas you've reached.
You can even use data you're already collecting for this purpose, such as looking at how many people visit your website after a particular outreach campaign. In addition, make sure to collect data all along the process of evaluation not just at the end, as then you'll be able to measure it against your milestones as you go along.

Make your survey a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. For instance, ask questions where the audience can respond by choosing a number on a scale of 1-10 but then ask for feedback on those questions, such as "How interested are you in buying this product? 10 is you are very interested, and 1 is not interested at all. Please tell us more about your answer."
Alternatively, you could ask whether an ad makes the person more or less likely to buy the product. For example, try, "Does this video make you more or less likely to purchase our product in the future?" with the answers "Less likely," "Neutral," and "More likely."
A survey can be used to test your audience's knowledge of your communication, ask about the person's feelings and response to the campaign, or learn how it changed the person's perception of the company.
This type of evaluation is beneficial for all types of communication at any phase in that communication.

This could include technical experts, marketing experts, board review, or legal review, just to name a few.
This works best for the preparation phase of communication. While you can use it for internal communication, it makes more sense to use it for external, as it's about perception.

For example, you could ask something like, "What do you think of Rainbow Company's new advertising campaign?"
Alternatively, you can talk to people in your workplace to determine if people have read and absorbed recent information you've given them.
While you don't have to take a formal approach to how you ask these questions, you could take a formal approach to how you analyze the responses. That is, you could categorize them as "mostly negative," "neutral," and "mostly positive," and then check how many responses you have for each one.

This also works outside of sales. If you're running an informational campaign, note if your audience's behaviors change in response to the campaign through observation. For instance, if you ran a campaign to educate a local population on the benefits of a free nutritional clinic and more people start showing up, your campaign was likely effective.
This works best for external communication, and it is focused on the results phase.

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Implementing Your Evaluations

Hopefully, you're meeting or exceeding your milestones and your data reflects that. If you are, you can continue on with your campaign as you've been doing, as it seems to be working.
If not, you'll need to re-evaluate what you're doing.

For example, if you're not having luck engaging customers on social media, you may need to change how you approach it, such as making your responses to customers more personal and engaging. Alternatively, you may decide to move those resources elsewhere to a more effective campaign.

While it is your employees' responsibility to meet these milestones without rewards, a little external motivation can do wonders for morale!

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How can evaluate your communication skills? Community Answer

You can try to understand how well you speak by the reaction of the listeners. If they are smiling or looking like they are understanding you, it might mean you speak in a way that you are understandable. When you express care, and the other person shares something with you, you are empathetic enough. It depends upon the reactions and replies of those you speak with to know how effective you speak and where you can make your communications better.

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