Evaluation in communication

By: Sudipta Roy-Choudhury, Communications Officer, Canada Revenue Agency

Why do evaluations anyway? You’ve already finished your activity or task, you’ve spent so much time in planning and executing and you are feeling done with the project and ready to move on to the next challenge! Why look back?

Here’s why – evaluation offers accountability; it allows us to gauge the results based on the time, effort and expense used to achieve them. It’s a great way to find shortcomings and improve for the future. Importantly, it can be a rewarding exercise to realize you may have achieved or exceeded your goals! What’s not to love about a tangible feeling of accomplishment!

Evaluation is guided by the goals and objectives you set early in your planning. This is why it’s important to define clear, measurable benchmarks in your communications plans, activities or strategies. Evaluations are most effective when it is an ongoing, systematic process.

We have many tools ready for your use!

• Key Performance Indicator (KPI) – it’s a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. KPIs not only provide targets to achieve and milestones to assess progress, but also insights that ultimately help in making better decisions. Make sure you add KPIs in the evaluation section of your communications plan!
  • KPI tool instructions (accessible only on the Government of Canada network)
  • Performance indicators explanations (accessible only on the Government of Canada network)
  • KPI tool (accessible only on the Government of Canada network)
• Urchin Tracking Module (UTM): Code you can add to your URL links that give a bit more information about the link itself. This helps track the performance of each link you publish. We use the parameters of Source, Medium, Content, Term and Campaign which tells us how much traffic we saw, where our traffic is coming from how is it getting to us ? To create a link that includes UTM is as easy as filling in the information in the UTM Code Generator. This quick and easy step gives us so much information – we cannot not be using it! You can take the following tools and adapt them to your needs:
  • UTM Guide (accessible only on the Government of Canada network)
  • UTM Code Generator (accessible only on the Government of Canada network)
  • Add a Topic to the UTM Generator (accessible only on the Government of Canada network)
  • UTM Examples (accessible only on the Government of Canada network)
• Evaluation Report: This report will help you track your communications products and their performance over time. There are built-in suggestions for communication products and performance indicators that you can select from specific to your requirements. It includes a section on Program Outcomes where the final results are recorded. These statistics will demonstrate the big-picture effect of your communications products.
  
  • Evaluation Report Instructions (accessible only on the Government of Canada network)
  • Evaluation template (accessible only on the Government of Canada network): This template will help summarize your results
  • Sample Evaluation Summary Template (accessible only on the Government of Canada network)

Now that you have all the tools to get started, you need to get your whole team on board! Here’s a sample information session deck (accessible only on the Government of Canada network) that we use to train all communications advisors on evaluation.

Feel free to use the resources above to get started on this exciting journey of Evaluations! It’s the key to unlocking the queries behind: Should we? Should we not? when it comes to communication strategies and helps us be better prepared for the future. We are in a dynamic era where change is the only constant. What has always worked in the past may not be the best indicator for future success. Evaluation is essentially forward looking and understanding the results of communication plans allows us to prepare for the future and support strategic alignment.

For more information or to book a virtual live Q&A session on evaluation, please contact intercomms@cra-arc.gc.ca.

Check out these excellent tools and resources on evaluation:

• GC Task Success Survey (accessible only on the Government of Canada network)
• Daily Averages in Adobe Analytics (English only)
• 10 Tips to Improve the Deliverability of your Emails
• Digital Analytics Community of Practice (accessible only on the Government of Canada network)