Are you measuring and evaluating your programmes?
Top 4 tips from a Communiqué Awards Judge
Jeremy Clark, Former Co-Chair of the Judges for the Communiqué Awards; Founder and Chairman of Clark Health Communications. (note: this article is a shortened version of an article that first appeared in 2022)
1. Think evaluation from the very start. You must be thinking of measurement and evaluation when you are conceiving, designing, developing, agreeing the budget, getting sign off, implementing and then reporting on your communications and education programmes.
Why does this matter? As an industry we need to be doing work that is focused on making a genuine difference; a change in patient behaviour, an update to medical practice or a change in health policy. Knowing what this is and how we are going to measure it at the start is critical for the success of the program.
2. Know your baseline. When planning any campaign or programme you must have some clear data showing where you are starting from. Without a baseline or meaningful benchmark, it’s almost impossible to demonstrate any impact or real patient or professional outcome.
Every healthcare or pharmaceutical company has access to a wide range of data and insights on customer and stakeholder views and behaviour. So, work with your colleagues and/or clients to find and review this information and use it as the solid foundations for your campaign planning and, of course, the benchmark for your evaluation.
3. Be objective about objectives. The Communiqué entry kit https://communiqueawards.com/entry/entry-kit/ provides clear guidance on what the judges want to see in the ‘objectives’ section of the entries they review, and in recent years we have awarded marks specifically for objective setting. This guidance can be applied more broadly to programming.
Objectives should be short, ideally SMART, bullet points explaining what impact they were aiming to have, ideally at the level of a patient or HCP behaviour change or health outcome with a goal that is built around the benchmark data described above.
4. Focus on measuring ‘outcomes’ not just activity. Even if there are some clearly written objectives it sometimes turns out that they focus mainly on ‘doing stuff’: “Our goal was to deliver a great meeting” or “engage with our audience”. These can be helpful outputs to measure that provide important insights into the audience response and help improve implementation, but the danger is that only these things then get evaluated with no attempt to show a real impact.
As described above, we would consider a strong outcome to be a measurable and sustained change in patient behaviour or outcome, an update to professional practice or a change in health policy. However, the key thing is to be clear what the need is in your specific situation and set a goal around that.
Once you have set a clear ‘outcome’ focused objective, the measurement of that outcome does require thought and planning from the very start of the project or programme, it can’t really be bolted on at the end. It may also require a bit of innovation in what measures are used, through what channels and at what point in the project.
The HCA’s Standards and Best Practice Committee’s, Evaluation Working Group recognises that there are remaining challenges and opportunities in healthcare communications evaluation and invite you to join them on 30th January at the launch of a new Evaluation Value Proposition, where these will be discussed.
Sign up here: https://bit.ly/3GHmXmA