PR and communications professionals are by now accustomed to reporting on the results they secure. But not all reports are created equal.
Getting stuck in a reporting rut, or only reporting surface metrics like volume and sentiment can mean reports that are less effective than they could be. Do not let your reports be an afterthought. With some planning and attention, media reports can be a useful tool in determining how to secure more coverage, improve relationships with journalists, and help your organisation to meet business goals.
Make them pretty
Looks are not everything, but if you want people to actually read a report, put thought into how it is designed. Use a balance of graphics and text.
A report that is nothing but charts with no added context leaves readers to draw their own conclusions, and a report that is nothing but prose may well be set aside “to read later when there’s time” which may mean it is never read.
Identify what the most important points are to communicate and then design a report that flows well, looks attractive, and includes a summary, charts, some written detail where it makes sense, and that takes audience and purpose into account.
Include a summary page
Having a page that summarises all coverage from the quarter or year provides an “at a glance” indicator of how you are doing. The design of a summary page should be clean and easy to digest.
The content summarised will likely vary depending on what your organisation’s PR and communications goals are, but some examples are metrics such as total volume, the percentage of organic versus proactive coverage, overall sentiment, and quality of coverage scores.
A summary page can also include a few sentences that highlight factors that affected coverage during the reporting period. For example, if your organisation expanded into new markets, changed key leadership, or rolled out a new product, include mentions of coverage about those events on the summary page. Draw attention to any key coverage drivers, positive or negative.
If competitor share of voice is a part of your media monitoring efforts, you may also wish to note any important coverage they secured during the reporting period.
Think of the summary page as a way to convey the most important pieces of information gathered during the reporting period. This is prime space, so prioritise what you include here accordingly.
Choose the right charts
Anyone who knows the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” understands the value of a chart. But selecting the right chart means understanding how different types of data are best conveyed.
For example, if you want to demonstrate how overall coverage increased over the course of a quarter, you will need a chart that shows volume over a period of time. A pie chart shows percentages. So, while you could render the chart to show what percentage of the volume happened in each month, a better selection would be a bar chart that shows the volume numbers for each month.
This provides useful detail, and anyone reviewing the report can quickly see the total volumes for each month.
For example, if you secured 57 articles in January, 90 in February, and 110 in March, a bar chart with properly labelled x and y axes would show exactly that. It is easy to quickly see exactly how much coverage was secured each month. A pie chart would show January, 22%: February, 35%; and March, 43%. Although that shows coverage increased, it feels vague. How much coverage does that 22% reflect? Is it 16 articles of a total of 73, or is it 57 out of a total of 257?
Selecting the right chart is not just about providing useful information quickly. A good chart conveys data at a glance and answers questions.
If a chart generates more questions about the information it is supposed to be explaining—rather than the effort that went into securing the coverage—it might be the wrong chart for the data.
Provide some narrative detail
Use the pages following the summary to provide details about coverage. Delve into sentiment analysis by looking for the “why.” If there was negative coverage, use the narrative to provide context. Key message inclusion, prominence, headline mentions, spokesperson quotes—there are many metrics that are more helpful to have some narrative detail explaining them, to provide an additional framework about coverage secured.
Comparative analysis from prior reporting periods can be very helpful to include. If volume has jumped between Q1 and Q2, narrative detail can delve into why, and whether the coverage was expected, what the overall sentiment is, and where the coverage was secured. A positive piece in a high-reach outlet may be of more utility to an organisation than a shorter, neutral piece that is syndicated and carried in hundreds of small outlets. Providing an explanation of these details can give readers a much better understanding of how your PR efforts are being received.
Understand your purpose
There many reasons an organisation might wish to develop a quarterly or annual report. Some businesses use reports as a way to determine the effectiveness of their PR efforts, or to design effective strategies going forward. Others may use a report as an internal tool to adjust resources and attention. Some nonprofits might use media reports as evidence of effectiveness in drawing attention to a cause or programme. Reports ultimately are about showing results, and this data is invaluable for forward planning and can influence decision-making.
Each of these are valid reasons to provide an analysis of media coverage, but because the end use of the report is different in each case, the content of the report will need to reflect data that meets the purpose.
If you are distributing a report to key stakeholders with the objective of raising funds for a nonprofit, you will need to understand what motivates them to give. This is the essence of understanding your purpose.
You do not want to depress fundraising efforts by distributing a negative report to an audience that responds better to good news. However, if your donors are more likely to contribute when things are dire, a report that shows everything is fine and going well may have that effect.
If your stakeholders are using quarterly and annual reports to guide business decisions, showing how key performance indicators (KPIs) and return on investments (ROI) were either met or missed will ground the report and prove its usefulness as a planning tool.
Understanding the purpose of the report is essential in generating a document that people will use and respond to. It is about providing data with the right framing and context.
Know your audience
Similar to the above understand your purpose is to know your audience. To whom will the report be distributed? Who are the important stakeholders? Is this a report that will be distributed internally, or will it be posted on the company’s website?
The audience for your report will be an important consideration for how you lay out the report, what you include, and how the content is framed.
A report designed for internal consumption can include more detail, whilst one bound for publication on the corporate website should be clear of any proprietary, confidential, or potentially competitive information.
Media analysis is sometimes not viewed as containing potentially proprietary information. After all, a synopsis of media coverage is about what has already been published.
However, if you are effectively tying your media outreach and analysis to business goals, your PR reports can absolutely contain information that should be closely held.
Conclusion
Quarterly and annual reports that summarise PR and communications efforts can be extremely useful to gauge success, and by tying results to business objectives you elevate raw data to actionable intelligence. By putting a bit of thought into the design and content, you can generate well-designed quarterly and annual reports that are read and understood and ultimately used to achieve measurable impacts.
