Ask most communication teams to justify their work and you’ll get an open rate, a reach figure, an engagement score, or a slide showing sentiment ticking upward after a campaign.
Ask them what actually changed as a result, and the conversation usually goes quiet. We’ve built an entire measurement culture around the numbers that are easiest to pull from a dashboard, not the ones that tell us whether communication did what it was supposed to do. I think this is one of the biggest unexamined weaknesses in our profession, and it’s largely self-inflicted.
The numbers we chase
Open rates. Click-throughs. Reach. Impressions. Attendance at the town hall. A sentiment score derived from an algorithm scanning a comments field. These are the metrics that appear in almost every communication report I’ve ever reviewed, and they share a common feature. They measure whether something was seen, not whether it worked. An email with a 90 per cent open rate tells you people opened it. It tells you nothing about whether they understood the message, believed it, or changed a single thing about how they behave because of it. We report these numbers because they’re available at the click of a button, they usually trend in a direction that looks defensible, and almost nobody in the room asking for them knows enough to push back.
Many leadership teams don’t know what good communication measurement looks like because we’ve never shown them. We’ve trained an entire generation of executives to think a high open rate equals success because they’re the numbers we’ve consistently reported. We built the trap, then complained when we got stuck in it.
What we’re avoiding by measuring this way
The honest reason so many communication teams stick to reach and engagement metrics is that the measures that actually matter are harder to gather, slower to show results, and occasionally inconvenient. Did the change communication actually reduce resistance to the restructure? Did the safety campaign reduce incidents? Did the leadership message about the new strategy change what people prioritised in their daily work? Those are answerable questions. They require talking to people, tracking behaviour over months rather than days, and sometimes partnering with operations or using HR data that communication teams have never bothered to request access to. They also carry real risk. Sometimes the answer is no, and a reach figure never has to admit that.
I’ve sat in plenty of reviews where a campaign was declared a success because the newsletter had a strong open rate, while the actual business outcome it was meant to support went entirely unmeasured, because nobody wanted to find out it hadn’t moved. That’s not measurement. That’s a report designed to avoid the one question that matters.
Why this costs us credibility, not just insight
Every other function in a modern organisation has had to prove its value in terms the business understands. Finance reports in numbers that tie to outcomes. Sales reports in numbers that tie to revenue. Operations reports in numbers that tie to productivity, output and cost. Communication, largely, still reports in numbers that tie to attention. That gap is a big part of why communication so often loses the argument for budget, headcount, and strategic influence. It’s hard to argue that communication is strategic while handing leadership a dashboard that only ever proves people saw something.
This is also why communication teams get treated as a production function rather than a strategic one. If the only evidence we offer is “people opened it” or “people attended,” we’re effectively telling leadership our contribution ends at delivery. We are asking to be judged as a postal service, then wondering why we aren’t invited into strategy conversations that finance and operations are automatically part of.
What better measurement looks like
Start by separating output metrics from outcome metrics and stop presenting the first as if it answers the second. The most important measurement decision isn’t what you’ll measure afterwards. It’s defining success before communication begins. Reach, opens and attendance are legitimate operational indicators worth tracking to improve execution. They are not evidence of impact, and reports should say so plainly rather than implying otherwise.
One reason teams avoid outcome measurement is the assumption that it has to be a major undertaking, a whole-of-organisation survey with a research budget behind it. It doesn’t. Some of the most useful insight I’ve come across has come from a handful of conversations, a quick pulse check, or simply paying attention to the questions people keep asking. If you speak to twenty people and they describe the same frustration, that’s a pattern worth investigating, no statistical validity required.
There’s also no single best-practice template waiting to be applied. Every organisation defines success differently, so the right approach starts with the business problem communication was meant to solve. And it starts earlier than most teams think. If success isn’t defined before communication begins, there’s no way to know afterwards whether it worked. That’s why measurement isn’t the final stage of communication planning. It’s part of the planning itself.
Then go looking for the data that already exists elsewhere in the business, because it usually does. If you ran a change communication initiative, the adoption data probably sits with the project team. If you ran an internal safety campaign, incident data sits with operations. If you ran a culture campaign around a new value, engagement survey data on that specific value sits with HR. Communication teams rarely ask for this data because measurement has historically been treated as our own separate, siloed exercise. It shouldn’t be. The proof that communication worked usually lives in someone else’s spreadsheet, and building the relationships to access it, or partnering with the insights team who already knows how, is part of the job now, not a nice-to-have. Communication rarely creates a business outcome on its own, but it should always demonstrate how it contributed to one.
Pick one piece of work each quarter and commit to measuring it properly from the outset, even if the answer might be uncomfortable. Report the result honestly, including when it didn’t work, because a track record of honest measurement is worth more to your credibility long-term than a string of reach figures that never told anyone anything.
And when a leader asks for a report, ask them first what decision the report is meant to inform. If there’s no answer to that question, you’re probably being asked to produce a number rather than an insight, and it’s worth saying so before you spend the time producing it.
If measurement genuinely isn’t your strength, that’s worth admitting too. None of us knew how to do this well when we started, and finding someone who does it better is a faster route to credibility than pretending otherwise.
Communication will never earn strategic credibility by proving something was delivered. It earns credibility by demonstrating what changed.
We’ve become comfortable reporting the numbers that are easiest to collect because they’re readily available. The numbers that matter usually require us to think harder, collaborate more widely and occasionally confront results we’d rather not see.
The numbers that don’t matter are easy to find. The ones that do are worth the effort.
