By Mike Wellman
How great would it be to have the title of Chief Communications Officer and a 200+ team of able communicators to help you create an impact at your organization? How about a fleet of Ferraris while we’re at it? It sounds nice, but sadly many of the Communications professionals we work with continue to feel under-resourced and underappreciated. That doesn’t mean that we need to always sing Rodney Dangerfield’s tune, though! (Am I the only one who loves this video?)
The good news is that the communication demands of today are accelerating positive changes in the structure and skill set of many Communications teams, and job titles are evolving to reflect the nature of the important work we do. Smart communicators are asking CEC for help in making the case for more resources now, in a time of great change, when they know their organizations are more likely to listen. Here are three useful tips on making an effective case for more people, money, or, access:
- Tip 1: Make a data-based argument for resources. Many CFOs resource Communications by considering the amount dedicated by smaller competitors to the function and requiring a formal case to justify additional funding. If you feel vastly under-resourced, then you may benefit from data suggesting that those at companies with half your revenue have a larger budget than yours. CEC members, find out if this is the case for you by tapping into our Online Resource Allocation Benchmarking Tool.Often, resources are only half the battle in positioning yourself to make more of an impact, and maintaining or gaining access to key business leaders is a smart pursuit for many. To this end, some have benefited from taking a look at what the reporting lines at other organizations look like. Check out our findings in that area below:
Not unexpectedly, larger organizations are more likely to have Communications reporting directly to the CEO (70% for those with $10Bn+ in annual revenue) than smaller organizations (40% for those with under $5Bn in annual revenue).
- Tip 2: Tie your vision to business outcomes that matter today. Are you familiar with the range of metrics that your company tracks today? If, for example, web utilization or NPS are getting a lot of attention, then you might ask yourself whether you can design your communication ideas to support those outcomes. Third-party studies that demonstrate the impact of communication on business outcomes can be helpful as well. (CEC members, consider the Mobilization Audit for internal communications activities or the Brand Performance Assessment for brand-building activities and our associated studies on employee engagement and branding as a good place to start.) If what you’re looking to do requires more customized measurement, try to choose a metric that’s as closely tied to audience action as possible.
- Tip 3: Start doing more, right now. As the saying goes, success breeds success. But where can you find the time? Start shifting your attention away from low-value activities and focusing on those things you think will have a greater impact. Try using your company’s strategy as a way to explain why you’re saying “no”—who can argue with that? Begin measuring small successes now and plan to use that data later.
on 22 April 2010
Respond
Am interested in what the current ratios are for communicators to employees – particularly for companies going through signficant transformation. A figure I heard some time ago was 1:1000 but that was for a business as usual situation.
Thanks
on 22 April 2010
Respond
Susan – Great question, and I think one that is fairly pertinent to many companies these days. On page 3 of the study on employee engagement referenced above, you’ll note that the % of CEOs planning major changes within their organization rose from 65% to 83% between 2007 and 2009. The median communications FTEs per 1000 employees for the same time frame actually decreased from 1.4 to 1.0 during that period. (Those studies, by the way, can be found on our website)
Does that mean that communications staff are less needed when change is occurring? I don’t think so. If I had to guess, I’d say that would reflect a lack of appreciation for the function and expectation generally for your peers to do more with less, which isn’t uncommon for many corporate functions. When the business is undergoing major transformation, I think the tactic that tends to work best is the second item because it focuses on a pressing need moving forward. If you’d like to talk more about our diagnostic capabilities and previous data analysis, I’d be happy to do that offline. – MW
on 26 April 2010
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The problem with the suggestions in Tip 2 is that they are NOT business outcomes. Business outcomes almost invariably boil down to revenue and expenses. The whole point of business is to drive revenue up and costs down, thus creating profit. If you can’t connect your comms activities to one of these two points, you are not connecting to a business metric. You may be connecting to a marketing metric, or an HR metric, or something else, but for it ultimately to mean anything, it has to boil down to dollars, euros, whatever — just like a real business.
on 27 April 2010
Respond
Mark – Thanks for your comment, and I’ve certainly appreciated conversations we’ve had in the past regarding communications metrics. I actually… tend to agree with you and had originally included in my draft for this post a more detailed example for Tip 2 that I think would be beneficial here.
If, say, your company already knows that x% of unique visitors to an external product website lead to y$ of incremental sales for the firm and you know that your social media efforts increase the number of unique hits to the website (through trackbacks or surveys), then tying your activities to that would be one way of using existing organizational knowledge of what creates business value to demonstrate how you create value. Of course, in that example, that would be a conservative, but not perfect, instrument. To your point, the weaker the connection between those other metrics and business outcomes, the worse that case will be. Items like NPS, employee productivity, time spent completing an activity and website use tend to be fairly strong metrics to link to if appropriate.
This comment may be getting a bit longer than the original post, but I also think at some level that many still-important communications activities can’t be linked directly to revenue or costs because they’re either long-term in nature (aiding business transformation which will accrue long-term benefits) or fall under the category of being related to cost-prevention (like community relations or crisis mitigation efforts meant to prevent large shocks to the business). I’ve heard some interesting stories for others defend the value of those sorts of activities (including one company that gives a presentation on “headlines you didn’t see” to senior management), but I’d be curious to hear more.