Insights for nothing and KPIs for free?
Gemma Moroney shares her favourite open source, low cost and free data sources for PR planning.
Gemma Moroney, co-founder, SHOOK
If you’re looking to use data and insight to improve your communications strategy and tactics in 2021, where do you start? With 44 zettabytes (and growing) of data in the world in 2020, and a predicted one trillion connected devices (and 10 trillion data streams) by 2035, it’s clear a lack of data isn’t the problem.
Rather, with so much available, it can feel overwhelming. Just having data is not particularly helpful. There’s a great diagram online that demonstrates the difference between data, information, knowledge, insight and wisdom. The power of data is in what you find in it and then do with it.
I prefer to think of data in terms of one of its original meanings - useful facts – and then you can think about focusing on the only three pieces of data you really need amongst the wealth of information out there:
What your audience think, feel and do now
What would change their mind / behaviour
Whether what you did had the desired effect
There are plenty of free, freemium and paid for ways to find these things out but here are some (not exhaustive) recommendations:
1. What your audience think, feel and do now
Free/freemium: Answer the Public, Google News, Google Search, Google Trends, Mintel, and YouGov Profiles Lite
Paid: Brandwatch, GWI, Hypr, Meltwater, Mintel, Omnibus Surveys such as Vitreous and TGI,
2. What would change their mind / behaviour
Free/freemium: award libraries such as AMEC, APG, CIPR, PRMoment, PRCA, and PRWeek
Paid: Cannes, Codec, Newswhip and Warc
3. Whether what you did had the desired effect
Free/freemium: Answer the Client, Google Analytics and Trends, and free surveys tools such as Google Forms and Survey Monkey
Paid: Adobe, Brandwatch, Carma, Cision, Hall & Partners, Ipsos Mori, Kantar, Omnibus surveys, and Vuelio
I would also recommend these guides on planning and setting metrics that I co-wrote with AMEC and other partners which break the discipline of planning and the process of setting metrics, measuring and evaluating into best practice steps.
The excellent and freely available AMEC framework sits at the heart of both of these. It’s similar to the Government Communication Service (GCS) framework. GCS also provides a wealth of free resources online. There’s a top ten guide on PRMoment.
Plus, of course, you can employ tools to help you do all this, like Guild, Miro, Propel, Trello, and Zoom.
However great your data ‘stack’ is though, it’s (at least until AI catches up) only ever as good as the people who interpret it and what they can do to understand it and bring it to life.
Some of the greatest insights I’ve found have come from speaking to academic experts, reading unrelated books or - shock horror - talking to the target audience. The greatest campaigns have come from blending that thinking with data to shape and deploy creative.
Equally, some of the greatest friends to make are the organisation’s insight team, brand tracking people or NPS experts – they can help find, inspire, share, shape, measure.
Remember too that anyone in the industry has access to the same or very similar tools so tools alone are not going to make you different or better. You need your own take on how to approach client challenges, which the tech stack and tools you have enhance. In my agency’s case this is using behaviour design as a way to define and approach challenges and creativity to bring the work to life.
Finally, whatever tech, tools and models you have there’s one free resource everyone should apply to their work: curiosity.
It’s important both when thinking about the data you have and could get and also the qualitative insight and wider world view you could apply to create a whole picture. Particularly at a time when the sands are shifting under our feet from day to day and trend forecasts and data can become irrelevant overnight, you can’t underestimate the benefit of being canny, connected and creative.
