New approach from COI on measuring ROI in the public sector
The COI (working with agency DDB) have published a paper on best practice in measuring the return on investment on marketing in the public sector.
It looked at, for example, the Teacher Recruitment campaign (between 1998-2005) which not only paid for itself; but provided returns of £85 for every £1 spent.
The paper sets out a 10-step process:
1. Map objectives to outcomes and check expected contribution
2. Identify stakeholders and set the scope of analysis
3. Plan to measure campaign outcomes
4. Measure the impact of the campaign
5. Put a value on the impact of the campaign
6. Calculate Payback at present values
7. Calculate costs at present values
8. Calculate Net Payback and ROMI
9. Understand Payback and ROMI
10. (Optional) Advanced Payback and ROMI
Underlining this process are six key principles
1. Start with an understanding of what your campaign is trying to do and how it will work
2. Isolate the impact of your campaign from the effects of other factors
3. Make conservative but realistic estimates of the value of the impact
4. Be transparent; show all your working and list all your assumptions
5. Net Payback is usually more important than ROMI
6. Do not use Payback and ROMI to make decisions in isolation from other measures
The document can be access here: