Internal comms goals: what to measure before you write your plan
Ask most internal comms teams what they measure, and you'll most likely get a number that describes an activity but doesn’t illustrate its impact. You might know how many people opened the newsletter or logged into a town hall, but does that tell you whether anything changed because of it? No.
Often, that's because the goal was overlooked from the start.
Most plans start with a channel list and a calendar, not an answer to the question that matters – what needs to be happen, in the business, once the communication has landed. And it’s worth answering this before any campaign gets built, not after it's launched.
Gaby Terpougoff, AB’s Associate Creative Director, explains how a strategy-led campaign has more impact. Give it a read.
Start with the change you want to see
A useful comms goal rarely sounds like a comms goal. It sounds like it has come from somewhere else in the business: fewer incident reports involving a piece of equipment after a safety campaign, lower call volumes to HR once the share plan goes out, a leadership team that can walk into a room three weeks after a strategy launch and hear it described back accurately.
None of that shows up in an open rate. It shows up in whether the behaviour, understanding or confidence changed. And it’s usually the part that gets bolted onto a comms activity last.
Open rates and attendance figures aren't a problem. They confirm people saw something, which is great! The issue is when reach gets reported as if it were proof of impact.
Take a town hall. Two hundred people logging on tells you the invite worked. It says nothing about whether they believed the strategy or could repeat it to their own team the next morning. Getting that second number takes more effort. It's also the only one that tells you the session did its job.
Agree the measure before the plan
Our top tip: agree what success looks like with whoever owns the business problem before a single email gets drafted.
Once you agree on the desired outcome, the measure usually follows. You measure a change in behaviour by observing the behaviour. A change in understanding is measured by asking people to explain it back – not by counting who clicked through. And a change in trust, the hardest of the three, tends to surface in the questions people stop asking, rather than in anything a dashboard can report automatically.
So, where to start?
Don’t panic if your current measurement is mostly based on reach. It's a decent place to start. Just don’t leave it there.
Before next year's plan goes live, work with whoever's sponsoring the work to agree what ‘change’ actually looks like, and only then decide what you'll do to make it happen
Our internal communications strategy guide covers how to make measurement work in one of its seven key steps. You can access it for free.
Find out more: Our guide to conducting an internal communications audit covers how to find out what's happening before deciding what needs to change. And if the outcome you’re trying to influence is ultimately a business outcome, it’s worth being clear about the connection between communication and performance. We explore that in more detail in the business case for internal communication, which looks at how internal communication can contribute to the outcomes the business actually cares about.
Get in touch if you and your IC team want to measure what matters in your 2027 internal comms strategy.
