Advertising placement on federal and many regional channels is mostly possible through specialized agencies, that should be requested a ‘TV post-campaign’ evaluation. It is done on the basis of TV monitoring data analysis (TV–Index from Mediascope Company). This system helps to evaluate the following: foundations and NGOs TV advertising volume (in monetary and quantitative terms), the placement structure (on which channel, in which program, at what time the advertisement was released), as well as how many people were covered by the advertising campaign.
Unfortunately, an advertisement or news story will not be included in TV monitoring if they were placed at a small regional or thematic TV channel. Or if they were made in a number of formats that are not monitored — commercial stories, reports, editorial materials, advertising in scrolling text lines (except for sponsorship), advertising or fundraising through SMS services in the information panel, Product Placement, logos and titles on ad unit screensavers. Therefore, this data have to be added manually to the report.
Likewise similar data (budget, cities, areas, period, etc.) on outdoor advertising placement and effectiveness, press and radio advertising can be obtained. This will also require the involvement of specialized research or advertising agencies.
Using advertising or research agencies services as third-party contractors you can also evaluate the effectiveness of online advertising. For example, Internet monitoring of the Web index allows you to evaluate the audience of websites and their socio-demographic profile, the volume of Internet advertising of foundations (in monetary and quantitative terms) and the structure of placement (on which websites, for what was the period the advertisement). Experts of the Better agency point out that in order to be able to assess the result, it is necessary to put a counter on advertising materials before the campaign start, and after it you will be able to see its coverage.
Figure 1. Internet-monitoring. Examples of data usage
Figure 2. Display history searched with “Deti-babochki" phrase
As mentioned above, industrial research does not monitor all media, formats or budgets and does not cover PR activity. In addition, the most social projects, as a rule, stipulate no separate article for the professional solution of this problem — an appeal to advertising agencies or research orders. Fortunately, there are tools and opportunities to analyze media coverage on your own or for small sum of money.
To evaluate the PR involvement you can refer to the Medialogia system. This is a database of several tens of thousands of media and millions of social media accounts. Using this base you can form a report by keywords or brands. Medialogia allows you to evaluate not only the frequencies of mention, but also the attitude to the problem (positive/negative), the visibility of coverage. The system allows you to track the dynamics and thus evaluate the degree of social impact and the changes that have occurred.
There are highly specialized services to monitor only Internet sources. They include YouScan, IQ Buzz or Brand Analytics among others. Upon expiry of the free trial period, the cost of using will be 8500/month and above, depending on the service. They classify social media sites, online media, forums, reviews, and blogs in real time. With their help, you can determine the tone of the discussion, divide the content into types and categories, formulate trends, and evaluate engagement by the number of likes, reposts and comments. By the way, this type of monitoring is called Social Listening.
To analyze topicality and ‘popularity’ of problems, one can use the following free services wordstat.yandex. ru/ or trends.google.ru/. They analyze the queries and, therefore, make it possible to assess the interest of people over time (although Yandex may be analyzed only over the last 2 years), by regions, linking to the informational or seasonal flights, looking through the context (word groups with the required word or brand). For instance, if in Yandex Wordstat you will try to trace the interest of people towards “Deti-Babochki” Foundation, that renders assistance to children with genetic dermatosis, you may note a slight growth of interest at the end of February and in March and a large outbreak of queries in May. In the first case, rare diseases day is marked on February 29 (or February 28 in common years), and the international month of ichthyosis awareness is marked. It is hard to search the diseases themselves by names because they are too complicated for remembering and are hard to be found through queries. But, evidently, the input of the “Deti-Babochki” Foundation to the agenda of the topic discussion information field can certainly be traced.
Another important aspect of the media coverage and social impact is the analysis of data of the ‘in-house’ media (it is sometimes called ‘owned media’), that is the website traffic and the response on the website and in the social network accounts. There are also specific instruments to be used for this purpose, and the majority of these are free or easy to access.
The website traffic may be traced with the help of Google Analytics and Yandex Metrika. In order to do this, it is necessary to install website traffic counters which record each hit. The Better agency experts recommend installing both counters on the website for comparative analysis. These counters register the source of the transfer to the website, time spent by the user on the website, URL of the hit pages and other parameters. In future all this information can be looked through in the form of visual reports and diagrams in various sections (Geo-target, device type, source and channel of transition). The data, depending of the result, may be interpreted by the degree of social impact of the activity implemented.
The social media sites have long been quite affluential media. And, without doubt, they are actively used for promotion of social projects, communications with the public and charity recipients. Each social media site has its own free instrument for collection and analysis of statistics: number of hits, likes, comments, subscribers, post coverage etc. In case of paid advertising placement in social media sites or individual posts promotion, it is also possible to evaluate statistics of coverage and response using the social media services. All this data and its dynamics allow to evaluate and forecast the project impact on the public opinion buildup.
Third party services (from RUB 200 and higher) may also be used to analyze the social media coverage of the project. They are, for instance, Livedune, Popster, Datafan. They allow evaluating not only the key metrics, which are available in social media sites but also their derivatives related to the speed of accumulating likes or content popularity.
Summing up, it needs to be noted that as of today, the role of the social interaction projects in the information area building on the selected topic seems underestimated. Moreover, as mentioned above, the contribution of such projects in the change of social and psychological pat-terns of the society through the mass media may be even more significant than the implementation of specific events. In this regard more and more experts recommend to involve the media efficiency analysis as one of the obligatory parameters for evaluating social projects and programs and their impact.
The article has been prepared using materials of the Better agency (the Dentsu group) and the Gladway Foundation for the Development of Media Projects and Social Programs. Materials were obtained as part of implementation of the project “Development of social economic efficiency evaluation algorithms for NGOs projects" with the support of the Presidential Grants Foundation in 2020–2021.