Alternative Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Intranet Sites

When you measure hits on inter/intranet sites, you are measuring overall volume of usage -- how many times parts of your site have been opened. However, hits don't distinguish between the opening of an entire page or a single illustration. There are many additional ways of measuring usage. However, measuring the "userability" of a site is just as important in order to improve usage numbers. But the first place any communicator should start when measuring the effectiveness of electronic communications is to identify the original objectives for putting something on-line. Conducting some baseline audience research upfront to make sure your electronic solutions will be as effective as possible and then measuring afterward to see if the intended objectives are being met.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2000). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Log Analysis

Alternative Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Publications

If you want to go beyond the usual limits of a traditional readership survey that tells you how well received a publication is, first clarify your objectives. Then you might include additional "impact" questions on your next survey, conduct in-depth focus groups with readers, and conduct some objective, "audience-free" measurements of the publication to see how well those objectives were met.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (1998). Articles>Management>Communication>Assessment

Are You Spending the "Right" Amount?  

To back up a request for more budgetor defend the existing one, you need to know exactly what you’re spending--and what you’re getting in return. But how can you tell if you’re spending too much on communication? This article suggests five approaches to weighing up the cost versus value of your communication activities.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2006). Articles>Management>Financial>Assessment

Assess Your Publication's Value and Impact

The next time your boss asks you, "So what has the publications done for us lately?", have some of the following measurements to hand over.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2000). Articles>Business Communication>Newsletters>Bandwidth

Avoiding Global Misunderstandings  

When we think of miscommunication across national boundaries, the mostmemorable blunders often relate to problems with translation. Butthere are far more subtle pitfalls thatcan occur. Here, Angela Sinickas shares some of the common mistakes that can lead global communications to miss the mark.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2004). Articles>Business Communication>International

Review: Balanced Scorecard Step-by-Step: Maximizing Performance and Maintaining Results

Paul Niven's book is invaluable for communicators whose companies are implementing a Balanced Scorecard, and it can also provide a great deal of useful information on setting measurable goals for a staff function like communication to ensure it aligns with a company's strategy. The book provides easy-to-understand summaries of how various business processes work for communicators who want to better understand their businesses.

Sinickas, Angela D. Communication World Bulletin (2003). Articles>Reviews>Communication>Assessment

Benchmarking: Ugly Truths and Unpredictable Outcomes

A walk through a benchmarking project, sharing some of the behind-the-scenes stories of benchmarking gone right, and gone wrong. So, here they are, complete with tales of terror, moments of madness and even some back-room horse-trading.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2000). Articles>Management>Communication>Assessment

Budgeting for Communication Research

To determine what amount to budget, discuss with an outside consultant the ballpark ranges for the types of research you want to conduct. Use the high-end numbers, plus estimated expenses, as your first budget recommendation. After the budget is approved, ask the consultant for a written, detailed proposal that will match the final amount that was allocated.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (1999). Articles>Management>Financial>Research

Choosing the Right Metrics to Benchmark

The assumption that financial analysts make is that low numbers on efficiency (communicators per employee, for example) would be better than high numbers. Unfortunately, that doesn't take into account that low-cost communication may have low impact on the bottom line. If your organization wants to track communication efficiency metrics, then I'd suggest tracking effectiveness measures as well.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (1999). Articles>Management>Communication>Assessment

Communication, Culture and Surveys  

Interest in corporate culture has been on the increase ever since studies over a decade ago found a link between certain cultural aspects and successful business outcomes. Buthow can you measure the bottom-link impacts of culture in your own organization?

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2000). Articles>Business Communication>Cultural Theory>Surveys

Cultural Differences And Research  

Before conducting research beyond your own country’s borders, it’s important to consider a number of cultural differences that have significant implications for the success of the research. Angela Sinickas outlines some potential issues to consider.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2005). Articles>Research>International>Cultural Theory

Defining Benchmark Questions for Great Results

Part of the challenge of determining the questions to ask during benchmarking is to match the questions to the purpose of the study and the outcomes you are trying to achieve. Below is a breakdown of some of the issues regarding benchmarking questions that need to be addressed before beginning a benchmarking exercise.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2002). Articles>Management>Communication>Assessment

Evaluating and Managing Surveys

While surveys aren't the only research tool available to HR managers, they are the most useful one when 'hard' numbers are needed on how many people see things a certain way and when it's important to track differences among subgroups or improvement over time.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2004). Careers>Management>Assessment>Surveys

Finding a Cure for Survey Fatigue  

A downward trend in survey response rates is often blamed on the fact that people simply become tired of taking surveys. Butthere are ways to avoid the malaise setting in, says Angela Sinickas, a key one being making sure thatpeople feel their opinions are actually being listened to. Here she shares three common causes of survey fatigue and how to deal with them.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>Methods>Surveys

Focus Groups or Survey?

This month's column is a quiz. I'll set up some scenarios, you choose which research approach you think is best. At the end, I'll defend why I think my own answers are right!

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2000). Articles>Research>Methods>Surveys

Focus Research on Your Most Valuable "Capital"

The entire concept of human "capital" seems to have arisen during the last several years of booming economy and scarce availability of skilled employees. When any resource is scarce, it's valuable. Now with the highest rates of layoffs being announced in the U.S. since 1991, let's hope the mindset of management is not on the order of getting the most out of the human "liabilities" they're forced to retain.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2001). Careers>Management>Assessment

Get The Credit You Deserve From Surveys

The wonders of technology have opened up easy-to-use on-line survey creation and analysis. Yet if you take the numbers the surveys provide at face value, you may be under-representing your audience's true responses. The following examples demonstrate how to phrase questions for more accurate results.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2002). Articles>Research>Methods>Surveys

Getting the Most Use Out of Research Results

All too often companies conduct a survey and do nothing with the results. This problem can be avoided by making sure that management is committed to acting on the findings before you even conduct the research (the topic of this month's column) and developing highly actionable research tools (covered last month).

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (1999). Articles>Research>Methods

Getting the Most Use out of Research Results

All too often companies conduct a survey and do nothing with the results. This problem can be minimized through developing a highly actionable survey in the first place (the topic of this month's column) and making sure that management is committed to acting on the findings (to be covered next month). Here are some suggestions for developing a survey that leads to highly actionable results.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (1999). Articles>Research>Methods>Surveys

Measurement at the Speed of Business  

Who has time to do communication audits anymore? Only the lucky few. The author shows ways to find out everything you need to know, just as fast as you need to know it.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2005). Articles>Research>Methods>Surveys

The Pitfalls of Financial Benchmarking

Recently I spent two hours with a management consultant trying to help her identify appropriate metrics for benchmarking a client's communication function. Some of the initial financial measurements that were being considered raised some concerns.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (1999). Articles>Management>Communication>Assessment

Practitioner's Perspective

The biggest challenge for auditors is to make sure that they're measuring the right things. All too often communicators measure only their outputs—the messages and channels they're producing—without connecting them to the outcomes of using these outputs.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2003). Articles>Business Communication>Assessment

Unraveling the Mysteries of Sampling

The number of surveys to send out depends on how many employees you have and what rate of response you are likely to achieve. If you have a relatively small number of employees, you might need to send out surveys to everyone. If you have over several thousand employees, you would need only 500-600 completed surveys to have fairly reliable results for your population as a whole, assuming the respondents accurately reflect the demographics of the entire group. So, if you expect to have a 100% response rate, you would mail out surveys to a random sample of 600. More realistically, if you typically have a response rate of 50%, you'd need to survey 1,200 people (600 divided by 0.5).

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2001). Articles>Research>Methods>Surveys

Построить идеальныи каскад информации удается далеко не всегда  

Каковы, на Ваш взгляд, наиболее эффективные каналы передачи информации в современных компаниях?

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2006). (Russian) Articles>Interviews>Business Communication