Speakers at the latest PRmoment Masterclass, The Intersection of Data, Planning and Measurement, shared their best practice tips for conquering the measurement conundrum in the PR sector.

Held on 6 February 2025, the first PR Masterclass of the year featured talks from experts in their field of data and measurement, alongside practitioners both agency and in-house who shared their journey.

Attendees were treated to the latest wisdom and insight on the world of data and measurement within PR, some of which were shared on LinkedIn. But, here we run down a few (not all) of the insights: 

The opening session on ‘how to build a PR evaluation framework’, delivered by Marianne Morgan, insight and evaluation lead at Information Commissioner's Office outlined that frameworks shouldn’t be intimidating. She offered this advice:

“If you work in the public sector like me you might come across the GCS Evaluation Cycle, it's a framework [UK government comms] uses."

She gave two key takeaways:

• Follow the Barcelona principles as your rules

• Use a ready-made framework as your structure, and use your creativity to tell the story of the impact delivered

Daniel Stauber, marketing science manager at Meta, looked at ‘trade-offs and pitfalls of different measurement approaches’ also compared measurement to a sports injury. But, using this Stauber made analogies about different approaches to measurement like quantitative and qualitative solutions. This caused him to ask:

• How do I know what's the best mix between those recommendations?

• How do I know which one is working better than the other?

• What are the signals we use along the way to make adaptations to the plan?

Stauber said: 

“I think there is a beautiful comparison that a lot of decisions we make in life have a problem of attribution and measurement, of knowing what's the root cause of the impact and what was ideally the one thing that led to what we are encountering. Data has done a great job of being very inaccessible by coming up with lots of jargon like cost per impression, cost per acquisition and so on. Part of me wants to demystify this a little bit, and don’t be fooled. Measurement is not easy, but it's not like that because of jargon or spreadsheets or competing approaches. It’s because there’s not one solution and lots of different approaches.

Meanwhile, discussing ‘what data do you need and where do you get it from’ Lucy Hart, executive strategy director at The Romans said:

“It’s quite typical when we do evaluations to just dump numbers on slides, and I find that unhelpful because it's the relationship between whatever the brand is and the audience which is what we are interested in and that cannot just be quantified by looking at logical numbers alone. We have to understand how our work makes people feel, respond and behave. I like to think that when a CEO walks into a room and wants to talk about the PR work they’re team has done, they don’t ramble off a load of numbers off a slide. It will be one headline figure, so they can back up the work created was impactful.”

From The Romans PR to Roman mythology, Richard Bagnall, co-founder at CommsClarity drew inspiration from the Roman god Janus in his talk on ‘how to build a data and measurement infrastructure within your PR team’. Janus had one face that looked to the past and another to the future, which he felt was pertinent to note when building the infrastructure in your team.

“I'd urge you all to lean into it, because measurement and evaluation matters. These changes in technology matter. Read about it and come to events like this. Make sure that you can speak about it with as much authority as anybody else. If you can be the most informed person in the room, that would be a great place for you to be in. But, remember that AI isn’t going to do the thinking for you. This is down to us.”

With a slide deck that every physical attendee got their phone out to take a picture of, Jonny Bentwood, global head of data and analytics at Golin, outlined ‘which PR data tools are best’. Bentwood said: 

“When I talk about my data stack [I described it] like a jigsaw and there's lots of individual pieces in the jigsaw but you can't just have one of them. You need to actually look at how all the different pieces fit together, because if I'm trying to measure evaluation, I've got to have loads of different things at once. Different things are needed.”

Some tools he referenced are:

• Julius

• Dynata

• Claude

• Blackbird

• Sticky

• Muckrack

• Cyabra

He added: “It doesn’t need to cost a lot. When you get your data stack, charge your clients for it and then that pays for it. If you want us to do the best work we need the best data in our stack to do it.”

Double continued: 

“Your best data is your client’s data. The simple truth is that annoys people, because the creative team have found some hot data bt your client has spent loads of money on data and it tells a completely different story. Now, you have an option whether you bite your creative tongue or use the data your client has. The thing you can do to mitigate this is that with the incredible resources [PR] has to pool this data, we can argue with clients at the start of the journey to not commission their own but build creative with us. It’s a great selling point.”

After a networking lunch, attendees returned to hear Katreena Dare, director at Ketchum enlighten us all with ‘why you must look up your data funnel’. She offered these tips:

• Think about who has the intent

• Bring diversity into your data interrogation

• Let the data guide you

• Be curious about the anomalies

• Be honest about your sources and let people decide from themselves

Answering a question on bias, and whether trusted sources exist within AI, Dare said: 

“I don’t think they do [exist]. It’s about finding it in lots of places and having that mutual view across all of it, not just going to Google and forgetting that the first thing that comes up is AI. We deal with this all the time, people pay for SEO so their opinions come up first. It’s finding the most neutral source and that tends to be industry publications, and I really enjoy finding out about what peer-reviewed research is saying and combining that with Google, TikTok and bringing it all together so you have a much richer picture.”