‘Coulda, woulda, shoulda’: What can PRs learn from a midpoint evaluation?

Our team [at Companies House] has always been keen on evaluation. It’s how we prove our value to our organisation and how we keep things interesting for ourselves. We come up with a theory of how something might work, we try it and at the end we analyse it to see how it performed. But then what? Sure, we use that evaluation to inform what we do next time but we were often left with that feeling: 

“You know what we could have done…”

“If I knew this earlier, I would have made a change.”

“Should we have done xyz instead.”

And the channels we use are all changing so quickly, can we be sure that the insight will be as valuable next time around?

Beyond monitoring

Obviously, if we’re running social ads the algorithms will tell us if something is under performing or doing particularly well. But that’s just a drop in the ocean of performance.

And if you’re running low cost or no cost campaigns you don’t always have the AI in an ad centre to alert you if something is under or over performing.

We wanted to do more than just monitor what was happening during our campaigns. We wanted to pick a moment to stop, look around at what was happening, see if we were on track to meet our targets and make informed decisions about what we could do to make our efforts go further, faster.

The midpoint evaluation in action

For us there are no hard rules around the midpoint evaluation. Depending on the length of a campaign, we might not use it at all. And it doesn’t strictly need to be at the midpoint, if you’ve got an event within your campaign that might offer an opportunity to take stock, do it then.

On a longer campaign we’ll often do multiple midpoint evals. It can help us keep the organisation up to speed on where we’re at, check to see if there’s any new information or priorities, and it can stop us throwing good money after bad if something isn’t performing how we expected it to.

It can help us make real-time adjustments based on any trends we’ve identified or unforeseen challenges like breaking news, keeping campaigns relevant and engaging. 

In our ‘Power of We’ employer brand campaign we set out to reinforce our overarching commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). One of the objectives of the campaign was to promote and raise awareness of our EDI strategy and employee networks.

After analysing our midpoint data, we saw that clicks through from social media to our EDI strategy were lower than expected. We decided to instead link to blog posts written by our colleagues. We identified this would be more engaging for our audience as it told the story of our EDI strategy in a more relatable context but still fulfilled our objective.

This change of tack helped us to reduce our average cost per click on traffic ads from £0.75 per click at the midpoint to £0.32 per click by the end of the campaign. Overall the campaign produced great results and contributed to a 65% increase towards our diversity public target and we we’re delighted that it won best use of insight and evaluation at the UnAwards 2023!

Another example of the mid-point in action was during an educational campaign aimed at those considering incorporating a new limited company. We wanted to engage with prospective directors and raise awareness of the role’s responsibilities, with a four-part bitesize webinar series. 

After seeing low sign-up rates for the first webinar, we looked at how we were promoting them. Despite putting budget behind social media ads, we looked at the source tracking and saw that ads had generated only a few registrations. We decided to stop using social ads and instead focused on taking a more direct contact approach using email. We designed a drip feed newsletter campaign to drive webinar sign ups. This meant we could send a series of messages and reminders in manageable chunks of information, keeping the webinars and content engaging and at the forefront of our audience’s mind, reminding them not only to register but also attend. 

Identifying the issue with webinar sign ups early on meant that we could stop spending budget on social ads that weren’t delivering results, experiment with an owned channel at no extra cost and reallocate our budget to areas where it would show better value for money. It also helped to refine our channel choices for different activities and increased registrations from 143 for our first webinar to 1,013 for the final one of the campaign.

A whole team effort

As anyone working on campaigns knows, it takes a lot of collaboration, skills and creativity to run engaging and impactful campaigns. 

A mid-point evaluation provides an opportunity for everyone involved to share their insight and ideas on what’s working and where improvements could be made. By collectively analysing how a campaign is going, team members can share diverse perspectives and refine strategies collaboratively. It helps to spark creativity, gives us the confidence to take risks and creates a collective wisdom. It's like everyone putting their heads together to ensure the campaign and journey is a shared success. 

Our use of mid-point evaluations has really helped to improve our work and refine strategies. While our team has always valued evaluation to show how our work makes a difference and ensure a culture of continuous improvement, the mid-point evaluation has provided a valuable pause for reflection, turning 'coulda, woulda, shoulda ' into 'look what we've achieved’.

Anna Ellis and Jocelyn Keedwell are senior campaign managers at Companies House. The team won the UnAward for best use of research and evaluation in December 2023. This post was first published at comms2point0, the website owned by Creative Communicators founder Darren Caveney. Read the original post, which was titled ‘Coulda, woulda, shoulda: how we turned hindsight into insight with a midpoint evaluation’.