Stop measuring the easy stuff just because it’s easy

These are important signals for communicators, but they aren’t the kind of bottom-line metrics that leadership craves.

Catherine Hernandez-Blades, independent board director and three-time Fortune 500 CMCO, described the sinking feeling of giving a great presentation on your metrics to leadership and having someone — usually the CFO — chime in with, “So what?”

“It doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t value communications,” Hernandez-Blades explained during a presentation at Ragan’s Communications Measurement Virtual Conference. “What it typically means is that we’re not speaking the language of the business. We’re speaking the language of communications, and we’re expecting those leaders to translate it, when we would be much better off if we did the translation ourselves before we walked into that room.”

Hernandez-Blades said that communicators first must figure out what KPIs the C-suite is measured against in their own work. From there, they need to work backwards.