Chapter 7: How to evaluate the impact of your new narrative

All good communications plans build in evaluation as the final step.


Top tips:

  • Think creatively about your measures – simple metrics alone may not capture what you need
  • Think long-term – narratives take time to embed, so while it’s good to monitor constantly, clear achievements may take a while to spot
  • Create your own bespoke research activities to double-check that your narrative messaging is cutting through to your audiences

Once your narrative has been crafted, shared and consumed, it’s important to evaluate its effectiveness. All good communications plans build in evaluation as the final step.

That is also true for the establishment of your new narrative. However, you may need to adopt a more creative and intuitive approach to measuring success than in a traditional campaign.

All good communications plans, campaigns and activities are built upon SMART objectives – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely goals. These are established upfront, measured throughout, and checked again at the end to assess whether hard targets have been met.

This might involve, for example, achieving sign-ups to a new online service, event ticket sales, increased voter registrations, improved job application numbers or new subscribers to garden waste collections.

Identifying a benchmark “current level”, setting a new target level, and agreeing a time duration by which to achieve it can make evaluation very simple and transparent.

Evaluating a narrative can be more difficult as you are dealing with attitudes and behaviours and not just the practical outcomes of a communication programme.

When looking specifically at the evaluation of narrative you need to understand and measure the reach and impact of your story and how the behaviour of your organisation – and people’s attitude toward it – might have changed and improved.

To build up this picture, you could start with some initial measures such as:

  • The number of people the story is delivered to
  • The number of channels used to deliver your story
  • The percentage of people who can recall the headline point of your story
  • The number of people who confirm that they understand your story
  • Audience segmentation – ensuring that all parts of your community receive the new narrative
  • The number of staff who can repeat your story and its key messages
  • How and where other partners, organisations and the media are using your narrative
  • Assessing whether your narrative is being used accurately or whether it is being misused in any way

Showing a return on investment is the Holy Grail of communications evaluation and, while it may be a difficult one to prove for your new narrative, do consider if it can be measured when you are setting your objectives at the start.

Try to build in both quantitative and qualitative impacts to give depth and breadth to your evaluation – think web pulse surveys, polling your email subscribers, and online focus groups.

Share the results of your evaluation internally and externally to help build greater understanding and transparency to your storytelling work. Telling the story of the story is a way to embed the story itself.

Turn your narrative lessons and insights into a case study for your own management team and staff, plus external organisations, to view and learn from.

Make sure to celebrate your successes. If you don’t tell your key audiences what you have achieved then your hard work may pass them all by.

If it didn’t go as well as hoped for, look closely for the reasons why – speak to the audiences who matter most to understand why your story didn’t land or resonate with them.

Creating and delivering new narratives takes time and won’t be delivered overnight. Manage the expectations of those around you that your organisation is in this for the long haul.