So today I went to an IABC Workshop called Evaluation Bootcamp lead by Caroline Kealy. For those of you unfamiliar, the IABC is the International Association of Business Communicators.
The session had absolutely nothing to do with social media but it was brilliant nonetheless. I am so pleased to find out that I'm not alone in the canoe with the hole. Regardless of the size of the communications departments we're all facing the same problems - time! The communications department at my organization consists of me, myself and I and I'm running into the same problems as companies with communications departments with hundreds of staff. Which is both pleasantly surprising (because I'm managing to survive) as well as a little disheartening (it may never get better).
A consent theme during the workshop was that many of us in communications have the evil time monster gnawing at us. We have only enough time and resources to create and launch our programs/initiatives but no time to evaluate their success. It brings to mind the idea of Santa's elves building toys, wrapping them up beautifully, throwing them out the window and starting again.
What Caroline pointed out in her talk is that we need to be vigilant when building our communications strategies to incorporate elements that are easily measureable and create benchmarks in the planning phase, thus making evaluation less of a tedious task.
AGREED!
The best part of the workshop was the easy to use templates Caroline provided and the links on her website, Ingenium Communications.
Evaluations is not such a big scary word anymore. Strategic development on the other hand ...... don't get me started ☺
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