Work smarter not harder – using PR tech to be even more effective and efficient

June 14, 2022

There’s been a lot said and written about the talent shortage in PR in recent times but what has largely been left out of the discussion is the role tech can play in helping to make PR practitioners more effective and efficient.

  • Better manage your time… there’s an app for that
  • Better target your pitches… there’s a tool for that
  • Better measure your value… there’s a platform for that

The Communication Dividend is a data analytics platform that is designed to help solve the measurement conundrum while also helping comms professionals to be more efficient and effective.

The measurement solution allows comms professionals to bring together all the metrics that matter onto one cloud-based dashboard in real time. Equally, the platform is about giving practitioners a tool that both saves time and moves them from being data collectors to insight generators.

How long every month, quarter or year do comms professionals spend developing reports to show senior executives the outcome of activity? Often transcribing data into excel before visualising in PowerPoint to create reports that get skim read at best.

In my experience in agencies, these reports are often done after-hours and are not in scope of the project or retainer fee. In other words, they are being done for free.

They also largely focus on media metrics. Despite all of the talk that PR is more than media, we often report back on what is easiest to measure.

We see a better way.

The Communication Dividend brings together all data from across an organisation. And what we quickly see when this happens is businesses today hold a lot of data. The challenge is getting access and breaking down the silos.

From a comms perspective think about the PESO model. Across paid, earned, social and owned there are lots of data points that communication can impact:

Paid – Google ads, Facebook ads

Earned – Media coverage

Shared – LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram

Owned – Web analytics, Podcasts, CRM

By bringing these metrics into one dashboard in real time we can not only save time but also empowers communicators to identify trends, correlations and impacts to provide tangible and valuable insights based on real data.

Data-driven communication then becomes a reality. The comms team has moved up the value chain and can prove itself as a value creator, not a cost centre.

The age-old adage ‘work smarter not harder’ is critical for comms professionals now more than ever. The global pandemic has demonstrated the value of communication. Now, as a profession, we need to continue to show the value of our contribution on the business bottom line.

Paul Cheal and Deb Camden