Putting data at the heart of PR

The mark of a PR professional is that they never stop learning. Continuous professional development ensures we stay at the top of our game. We use it to keep up to date with trends, learn new skills and seek new knowledge. That way we can deliver the best PR advice to our organisation or clients.

Data is at the heart of modern PR practice.  We use data to drive insight and inform our strategy and campaigns. It helps us tell our stories and visualise information to engage our audiences. And data allows us to measure and evaluate the outcomes and impact of what we do.

It’s fundamental to professional PR practice that we do not work on hunches and guesses. We gather the data and combine this with qualitative research. This gives us the numbers to drive targets. It also provides audience insights to refine messages, channels, content and design.

Data is all around

Data exists in many places. Government, businesses and thinktanks are all rich sources of data. They can provide audience demographics, attitudes, behaviours and communication channels. Trade bodies and researchers can help us explore a sector or issue. Closer to home our own organisation or clients hold swathes of information. We have data on customers and clients which can help inform our approach.

We can add to this primary research to give richness and colour to what we know from the data. It tells us about what people know, how they feel, how they behave, what motivates them and where the barriers are.

All this data and research gives us the insight into our audience and topic or issue. We can use it to create SMART objectives and identify strategic approaches.

Underpinning the narrative

To deliver our programme or campaign we need to tell our story and here the data can underpin the narrative. It can help us derive powerful imagery to tell our story and engage the audience. Translating data into visual content is a science and an art. Charts, images and video content can created for traditional media and provide engaging online content.

And our data helps us to track our progress to see the attitudinal changes and sentiment shift. It allows us to measure outcomes such as behaviour change or advocacy. We can identify the impact of what we do.

But we have to be clear on how we will collect this data, what we are measuring, how replicable and accurate it is. Finally, we need to consider how we illustrate this data to senior leadership in dashboards and reports.

Data can be powerful in all aspects of the PR planning cycle and learning to harness it is a key skill.

Ten top tips for getting to grips with data

1. Don’t be scared of the numbers.
2. Dig out the data.
3. Call on experts to help you interpret data.
4. Do qualitative research to create nuance.
5. Create SMART objectives informed by your data.
6. Use the data to create strategic choices.
7. Tell your story with data using great visualisation.
8. Measure what you do.
9. Evaluate to show outcomes and impact.
10. Create compelling dashboards to show impact.

Mandy Pearse is a Chartered PR and Fellow of the CIPR. Mandy will be delivering the one-day Data Driven Communications course on 25 July.

From Monday 13 to Sunday 19 May 2024, the CIPR is taking part in Learning at Work Week. Hosted by Campaign for Learning, this week-long event aims to highlight the power of learning. Find out more about the host of activities that CIPR has to help PR professionals to learn, develop and grow.