"There are still too many examples of either a complete failure to measure or of measuring clicks rather than impacts"

Early summer and the grass court tennis season arrives. A nation pins its hopes on one player, who wins the early rounds, gets through to the final stages and...well, that depends. Sometimes the player has everything in his locker to beat his main rivals and sometimes he comes up short.

That’s tennis. But is it internal communication, too? The comparison isn’t completely daft (not quite, anyway). Because this is also the time of year when we at the Institute of Internal Communication get our best annual shot at gauging the state of the art in IC. We are at the judging stage of this year’s IoIC Awards, our annual awards competition that has come a very long way since the days since its early incarnation as the Editing for Industry awards. True, editing is still involved. It remains an important skill, perhaps never more so in an era of unprecedented content generation. But a long road has nonetheless been travelled and while some of the terrain would remain familiar to an IC practitioner active in the 1980s, much has changed.

This year’s competition is just as much about IC campaigns in the round, about event-driven communications, about game- changing innovations, about apps. Plenty of publications still – the long-proclaimed death of print looks as premature now as it would have seemed hard to imagine a generation ago – but a great many of them are now delivered on multiple platforms.

So what is the state of the art in IC in 2015? Seen through the refracting lens of the IoIC Awards, I’d say that it’s about a sector that has kept up to date with changes in technology and that knows how to harness many of the possibilities that these afford. To this extent, what can be seen through that lens is encouraging. However, the sharp and detailed field of vision presented by the awards also highlights a persistent and disappointing blot on the IC landscape. It is to do with evaluation, with the effort made to understand the impact of those campaigns, those events, those game-changing innovations, those apps.

Measurement is not a new concept. It isn’t a new stick to beat practitioners with. But apparently this is a case where the beatings must continue until understanding improves (for anyone concerned that I’m advocating the adoption of Dickensian-style thrashings as a training method, relax, I’m not...but I do feel the need to bang on about this for a bit).

I think our sector has more or less got the message about IC’s link with the organisation’s greater purpose and the business plan. Sometimes the connection is rather tenuously established but it’s almost universally there in the awards submissions. However, there are still too many examples of either a complete failure to measure (a one-line reference to say ‘the client liked it’ or ‘feedback has been terrific’ isn’t enough – really) or of measuring clicks rather than impacts.

With the advent of online analytics, it has never been so easy and so undemanding of thought or effort to quantify output. But that isn’t enough, either. We surely unearth evidence every day in our working lives that not everything that can be measured counts (a page impression is not an idea understood, as a presenter said at IoIC Live in Brighton in May). It’s also true that not everything that counts can be measured (I’m paraphrasing Einstein here – there are worse references...). The challenge for IC practitioners – and, indeed, for anything producing anything for a reason – is to understand that difference.

Steve Doswell is chief executive of the Institute of Internal Communication