Last week I attended a meeting about communications, and one of the topics was accountability. How can we, as communication professionals show, or better still, prove our added value?
Tough question when we apply it to internal communications. What is the ROI (Return On Investment) of internal communications? Five minutes time saved per employee with our cool intranet page that allows people to find crucial information, times 24,000 employees is an x amount of FTEs saved per year? Nice try, often used, but complete nonsense, as these 5 minutes will be used by every individual to do something else. We will not fire one of them as a result of time won on a huge bunch of added up 5 minutes.
OK, we can just show the numbers: 200 news items, 1 million page views per month on our intranet, 12 magazines, 4 town hall meetings, 10 presentations for the Board. Those are just the bare facts, and it is at least something to show.
I would like to introduce a new standard for measurement: the RODP, or Return On Damage Prevented. Think what would have happened if your employees would have been informed by the press, not by their own organization. What damage would be done if nobody was informed about our latest rebranding and logo standards? I am sure there are loads of examples that we could use to create our own RODP scale. I’d love to hear your examples.
No comments... Maybe this says enough. Or are we afraid to be open about this topic. To be clear: I don't have any examples.
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