We're looking at new ways to calculate ROI for PR spending. Any ideas other than the traditional AVE?

In my experience, the responsibilities of a PR department vary by company as well as where the functional area resides, but in general PR manages the company’s reputation with external audiences. The function should support the ease in which the company retains and prospects customers, vendors, bankers, investors, employees, board members etc. It would be misleading to measure PR on a standalone basis without considering its impact on the other corporate departments it supports such as marketing, human resources, treasury, investor relations, government relations, etc. This is similar to the points covered in the paper Valerie recommended.

Measuring a company generated PR campaign is very different than establishing a value or return on reputation management because negative as well as positive impressions need to be measured. I have previously tried to apply negative AVE to negative publicity and positive AVE to positive publicity; however, the analysis wasn’t very informative about the effectiveness of PR dollars or predictive of future results. Bad things happen to good companies, and although events vary in significance, most are unexpected. A better measure is the speed in which external perceptions recover and operations return to normal after a negative event compared with the significance of the event. The ROI on PR could include recoveries from the loss in business, disruption to operations, stock valuation, management’s time diluted by the distraction, etc. all of which can be assigned dollar values.

Hope this helps.