Too often communicators craft messages and communications strategies that sound good to them, their organization and their stakeholders. Then after deploying those plans they wonder, why didn’t the target audience respond? The simple answer is, your target audience may be very different from you, and they almost certainly aren’t as aware of or interested in the topic as your organization is. The more clearly you can define the audience, and the more you test your messages, messengers and calls to action with them in advance, the more we know those messages will resonate. This simple step of testing messages in advance of communicating them separates the most successful communicators from the rest.

Our services include:

• Target audience definition and refinement
• Qualitative and quantitative internal and/or external surveys, focus groups, one-on-one interviews,  listening tours and more.
• Brand awareness studies
• Evaluating the effectiveness of communications strategies and testing potential new strategies or messaging
• Measuring pre and post-campaign changes in stakeholder awareness, comprehension, action and behaviors.

We put our extensive communications expertise to work to craft values-based, actionable messaging platforms that advance change and build brands. And we test these messages – or those that our clients develop internally – thoroughly before they are finalized. We are pleased that one of our clients recently titled their final messaging platform “Messages That Work.”

Our services include:

• Messaging architecture development, with a special focus on values-based / framing messaging for our social issues clients
• Testing messages, messengers and actions
• Identifying the optimal way to frame issues to engender the most support
• Message training for spokespeople, leadership and boards

Your employees can be your organization’s greatest ambassadors. But unless you definitively know their points of view, preferred methods of communication and organizational challenges you won’t be able to fully engage them. An internal communications audit allows leadership to hear directly from the organization on what is working and what isn’t, and how to best motivate and engage the staff.

Our services include:

• Assessing employees’ understanding of the organization’s mission, programs and progress.
• Understanding how well communications are flowing within an organization, and what communications tools are working well (or not).
• Identifying new or improved uses of technology which may enhance the client’s ongoing communications, making them more efficient and impactful.
• Establishing or reviewing corporate social media policies and practices.
• Benchmarking staff’s awareness and engagement levels prior to launching new internal communications initatives.

.

The days of counting clips to assess a communications’ programs success are long gone.

Today it is not enough to know how many media outlets cover your organization, issue or campaign – we need to know if the right communities received and acted upon the messages. We need to measure the conversation, the tone, the trends and the results. And we need to know immediately when coverage breaks, so we can quickly report and respond.

What we don’t do is silo traditional and social media, because your target audience doesn’t either. We offer integrated coverage tracking and analysis across all media platforms, and we measure the impact of that coverage on the people who matter most to you.

Our services include:

• Comprehensive media coverage analyses that clearly identify the coverage trends, tones, spokespeople, drivers of coverage and favorability towards an organization or issue.
• Post-campaign media coverage summaries that track audience reach and engagement, message pull-through and more.
• Traditional media audits, where we speak personally and confidentially with key journalists to assess their attitudes towards your organization and news.
• Daily (or more frequently) delivery of key coverage directly to your desktop – so you never miss breaking news.
• For our social issues clients, an analysis of coverage by prevailing frames.

.

Only communications research – designed and led by seasoned communicators – can tell you if your investment in a program, campaign or initiative really reached and moved your target audience. We research and evaluate multi-million dollar annual awareness campaigns, one-day social media driven events and everything in between for our clients – so they can definitively prove the work’s ROI.

Our services include:

• Measuring changes in outcomes (post and during campaigns) – changes in stakeholder awareness, comprehension, action and behaviors
• Analyzing message pull-through in traditional and social media
• Determining a campaign’s effectiveness through the lens of the client’s own stated objectives and audiences.

Our evaluation work always includes solid recommendations for ongoing communications strategies that will advance the program’s goals.

Understanding the landscape of existing knowledge on a topic brings everyone up to date on the latest findings, and sets the stage to best ask and answer new research questions. As third parties, we offer unbiased observations on the existing body of knowledge, and identify gaps for potential future research.

Our services include:

• National scans and synthesis of existing research on a particular topic or issue, including gaps analysis.
• Lit reviews and internal material reviews
• Media coverage analysis