How Do You Measure Success?

One of the things that is constantly debated in public relations is how to measure the success of a campaign. Now, more than ever, we have to prove our worth as practitioners in order for our clients to appreciate our value to their business.

Last semester, I worked on a campaign to fight poverty in Athens-Clarke County for my capstone public relations class at UGA. There were countless times throughout the grueling semester that we wondered if we were truly making a difference to this daunting problem. We conducted student focus groups, interviewed faculty and attended community meetings to try to figure out what we could do to help. The best solution we could come up with to the problem, from a PR front anyway, was to create an umbrella organization to unite the efforts currently on campus working toward this cause. The presentation to our client (or should I say clients: we had a full classroom of attendees!) went very well, they loved our ideas and were very excited to take what we had come up with and move forward. And then the 21 students who created this initiative graduated and left Athens behind, hoping that the best would come of their plan.


So why am I bringing this up now, months after graduation and after I have moved far away from Athens? Because this article on UGA's Grady College web site popped up in my Google Alerts a few days ago.

Our presentation opened with the quote, "the greatest danger is to let this initiative die out." This article is proof that it won't die out, because there are people who care and are dedicated to carrying out our initiative. If that isn't a successful campaign, I don't know what is.