Measurement and evaluation has moved beyond the ruler. Brittany Golob attends the AMEC European Summit in Madrid

The Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE), along with most metrics related to print journalism, has been rendered obsolete, along with most things related to print journalism, by the internet. Despite its reliably simple methodology, the AVE may not even have been the most effective metric in the pre- digital age. Thus, the measurement and evaluation community has recently staged an uprising against the ruler. Replacing AVEs, though a logical step, has been an ongoing challenge.

The International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC), the global trade body for evaluation professionals and organisations, held its fifth annual European summit to tackle that, and other issues facing the communications industry in the digital age.

The Madrid summit harkened back to the 2010 Barcelona summit at which the Barcelona Principles were established. That manifesto laid out the goals and principles of the effects of measurement on business, the value of communications and the need to address social media as an essential area to be measured. In the years since, the public relations and communications industry has attempted to tackle these topics while addressing the way measurement and evaluation is approached within the industry itself.

Rob Flaherty, senior partner and CEO of Ketchum says, “It’s time for this stuff to be centre stage.” He called for a skills rebalancing to bring more people from with quantitative abilities into the field of communications in order to enhance measurement and evaluation practices.

One of the primary ways AMEC and its members are attempting to take centre stage in business is through the standardisation of communications practice and the education of business leaders and of potential communicators in the methods of metrics and measurement. At the summit, the PRCA announced both its assumption of the management of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO), the trade body for communications trade bodies, and the establishment of a measurement and evaluation best practice guide in association with ICCO and AMEC.

“There are lots of guides to evaluation by different national associations,” PRCA director general Francis Ingham says. “But nothing is consistent. They don’t have the punch that is needed to get people to change.” By uniting the three organisations and their 28 national members behind the guide, standardised best practice can begin to be established. “AVEs should be avoided. Measurement should begin at the beginning of the process, be simple and understandable and be a core business function,” Ingham adds.

The resulting document, “The PR Professional’s Definitive Guide to Measurement” is a digital manuscript comprising contributions from around the industry on topics ranging from the value of measurement and evaluation to practical advice to social media.

The guide was designed to be flexible to future modifications, contributions and developments within the measurement of communications. Ingham called it “Deliberately practical, not theoretical” at the AMEC summit. It will be updated twice a year and distributed to the 1,500 members of the three institutions.

Standardisation is not a new concept, however. In 2011, AMEC, the Institute for Public Relations and the Council of PR Firms set up the #SMMStandards Coalition to promote standards for measuring social media. Social media threw the industry into confusion for a time as it struggled to determine how it could and even if it should measure social media communications.

“We should get our act together quite fast because if we don’t team up and get a common standard then others will do it for us,” Andre Manning, global head of external comms at Royal Phillips Electronics, says. That call to arms has been echoing through the community for years. Efforts like the #SMMStandards and the PRCA guide take steps toward achieving what the Barcelona Principles instigated four years ago.

While standardisation is one of the buzzwords within the measurement and evaluation community, the other is education. Education is the golden bullet to integrated the measurement facility into the overall communications offering within a business. Speakers from early on Wednesday evening to late Friday morning presented their advice and made the case for enhanced education about measurement and evaluation.

Education refers not only to educating board members about the need for and activities of measurement professionals, but to allowing standards to delineate the communications measurement role within a business. Part of the effort to standardise the industry is to enable more effective educational practices. Mike Daniels, commercial director of Salience Insight and former AMEC chairman says, “I believe standards will unlock commercial potential” as they will enable the client to understand the benefits of metrics and evaluation to their communications work. Don Bartholomew, senior VP of digital and social media research at Ketchum says standards will help clients understand that they should not measure social media, but they should measure what they are trying to accomplish with social media.

Education though, extends beyond client relations and beyond standardising the measurement function within a business. Chris Foster, VP of Booz Allen Hamilton says the way to bring the needs of the senior managers and business leaders closer to communications is quantitative measurement. Booz Allen, he announced that one of its core measurement and comms strategies is to educate students and instill the relevant skills in new entrants to the industry.

AMEC, in association with Foster and Booz Allen Hamilton launched a Global Education Programme shortly following the summit to address the issues raised in Madrid.

Measurement and evaluation has come far in the 17 years since AMEC’s inception. The industry was affected by the influence of social media communications, but it has since found ways to incorporate new technologies into its toolkit. David Rockland, partner and MD at Ketchum Global Research and chairman of AMEC says measurement is essential to business, but measurement professionals themselves need to make that more apparent. He says, “When you report results, place them in the context of the business objectives of the organization as well as against the goals of the communications program you are measuring.”

The AMEC European Summit and the measurement and evaluations profession has embraced a standardisation of the industry that addresses the issues of business function, education and social media. Though AVEs are gone, the industry is agile enough to take whatever technology has to throw at it next.