Reach is not a result
The oldest habit in communication measurement is to add up the circulation or audience of everywhere something appeared and present the total as an achievement. The figure describes how many people could conceivably have encountered the item. It says nothing about how many did, what they took from it, or whether anything followed. It is also the figure most easily inflated, which is part of why it survived so long.
Three layers, three questions
- Output — what was published, where, and in what form. This is countable and genuinely useful as a record, provided it is not mistaken for effect.
- Pull-through — which of the intended points actually survived into the published item, and in whose words. This requires reading the coverage rather than counting it.
- Outcome — what changed afterwards among the people the work was aimed at: enquiries, applications, questions asked, or positions taken.
Reading coverage properly
Pull-through analysis is the layer most often skipped and the one that tells you the most. Coverage that names the organisation but carries none of its points is a mention, not a success. Coverage that carries the points while criticising the organisation may be a better result than neutral coverage that carries nothing, depending on what the work was for.
The limits
Attribution is genuinely hard. Communication rarely acts alone, effects are often delayed, and the people most influenced are frequently the hardest to survey. Honest evaluation states what it cannot show. A report that claims a clean causal line from an announcement to a change in behaviour is usually claiming more than its method supports, and the claim is what gets remembered when it fails.
Deciding before, not after
The practical discipline is to write down, before the work begins, what would count as it having worked and what would count as it not having done. Measures chosen afterwards are chosen from the ones that happen to look good.