Linkedin Twitter Facebook Instagram
Let's Talk
Case Study

Tourism Ireland

To support its objective to increase overseas tourism revenue, Tourism Ireland needed clear strategic data and actionable insights to help demonstrate value, understand where to improve, and inform decisions

Industry       Tourism

Services       PR Measurement

Website       https://www.tourismireland.com/

Client

Tourism Ireland is responsible for marketing the island of Ireland overseas as a leading holiday destination. It was established as one of the “six areas of co-operation” under the framework of the Belfast Agreement of Good Friday 1998.

Partnering with CARMA has allowed us to build and embed a robust, strategic measurement programme. CARMA’s expertise creates trust in the programme and helped us bring along key stakeholders and get buy-in across the team.

Emma Gorman
Tourism Ireland’s Publicity & Brand Partnerships Manager

Challenge

  • A busy team juggling multiple initiatives with political, public and economic stakeholders who need to understand the impact on tourism.
  • Historically fell back on AVEs to demonstrate value by manually uploading coverage to a database, reporting on volumes and AVEs.
  • Publicity’s role at the top of the funnel is to generate awareness, drive interest and facilitate planning/bookings. They needed a measurement framework that enabled them to make informed decisions about communications strategy.
  • Frustrated that AVEs did not reflect their work’s strategic significance and needed CARMA’s expertise to replace it.
  • Gathering data globally from 20 markets, in 14 languages was complex and time-consuming.

Solution

  • To educate the teams that measurement is a fundamental business-strategy tool we ran a series of workshops on industry best practice, case studies and insights presentations.
  • Developed a customised measurement framework and bespoke scoring methodology specific to Tourism Ireland’s objectives that helped to implement best practice and frame Publicity as a strategic communications discipline.
  • To facilitate tactical work, CARMA created market and campaign dashboards to track initiatives, campaigns, and media visits as a central source of truth.
  • CARMA’s strategic reports give management understanding of global impact of initiatives, benchmark against defined, understood, and trusted KPIs, and identify opportunities.

Outcome

  • The global set of well-defined KPIs is improving comms by identifying messaging gaps and activities to invest in.
  • Global trends inform strategy, and arm the team with insights to adapt.
  • Objective-driven KPIs are informing investment. Tourism Ireland’s Publicity Programming Fund was intended as a one-off, using KPIs to demonstrate value and impact is helping secure future funding.
  • Significant resource savings prompted one team member to note that time spent on measurement has dropped from 75% to 25%, allowing her to focus on the ‘day job’.
  • Winning the Silver award for Step Change – the best improvement of a measurement journey and Bronze for Best multi-market reporting at the 2022 AMEC awards.

Speak to our industry experts for your media intelligence and communications evaluation needs