Expanding Evaluation to Progress Strategic Communication: Beyond Message Tracking to Open Listening

ABSTRACT

Management writer Tom Peters noted that what gets measured is what gets done in organizations. Therefore, measurement and evaluation models and approaches provide insights into strategy. Furthermore, the most widely used approaches to evaluation are based on program logic models that identify objectives, planning, and inputs, as well as seek to track outputs, outcomes and impact, thus affording insights into the origins of strategy and strategic intent as well as its implementation. Given increasing focus on emergent strategy and participatory or networked strategy in place of internally predetermined strategy that is unilaterally focused on an organization’s goals and objectives, this article critically reviews widely used models for evaluation of communication to identify how well they support and enable broader contemporary approaches to organizational strategy and strategic communication. This analysis shows a narrow organization-centric focus on evaluating organizational messaging (one-way communication) directed at achieving organizational objectives in traditional evaluation models and calls for a more open, dynamic, and expanded approach to facilitate two-way communication. Furthermore, in showing the important role of formative as well as summative evaluation, this analysis identifies a number of ways that evaluation of communication can inform organizational strategy and transform strategic communication.

Notes

¹  Although this adage is often attributed to Tom Peters and used in his recent writing, in the popular book, In Search of Excellence written with Robert Waterman, the quote is attributed to organizational theorist Mason Haire (Peters & Waterman, 1982, p. 268).

²  The International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) launched a new evaluation framework at its international summit on measurement in June 2016 based on wide consultation with academics and industry.

³  The book that first outlined this approach was titled Realistic Evaluation (Pawson & Tilley, 1997), but subsequently the authors settled on the term realist evaluation “because it has become the preferred nomenclature of other authors” (Pawson & Tilley, 2004, p. 3).