Posts filed under ‘Evaluation tools (surveys, interviews..)’
Measuring the “Soft Issues” for Investors
One company that is a good example of “intelligent measurement” is Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, Inc. an investment research and advisory firm (disclosure: there are no links between the authors of this blog and Innovest). This company specializes in analyzing “non traditional” drivers of risk and shareholder value, including companies’ performance on environmental, social and strategic governance issues.
Innovest’s research is focused on those factors which contribute most heavily to financial performance. Environmental and social performance measures are used as leading indicators for management quality and long-term financial performance, not as commentaries on the intrinsic ethical worth of the companies. At the heart of Innovest’s analytical model is the attempt to balance the level of environmentally and socially driven investment risk with the companies’ managerial and financial capacity to manage that risk successfully and profitably into the future.
Environmental assessment criteria:
In total, the Innovest EcoValue‘21™ model synthesizes over 60 data points and performance metrics, grouped together under six key value drivers – Historical contingent liabilities, Financial Risk assessment, Operating risk exposure, Sustainability risk, Strategic management capability and Sustainable profit opportunities.
Social assessment criteria:
Over 50 individual performance indicators are addressed in Innovest’s IVA™ rating model. The principal value drivers are Sustainable Governance, Stakeholder management, Human Capital management, Products and Services, and behaviour in relation to oppressive regimes or exploitative labour markets in emerging markets.
The measurement process is complex, intensive and time consuming. Once the interview/data gathering process is completed, each company is rated relative to its industry competitors. Companies are rated against the Innovest performance criteria, and given a weighted score, as well as a letter grade (AAA, BB etc.). Each of the factors has an industry-specific weighting, based in part on a regression-based factor attribution analysis examining recent (5 year) stock market performance.
This approach is intelligent measurement at its finest. The methodology is rigorous, and the outputs have enormous strategic value to investors, and management of any capital intensive company trying to understand the correlation between investment in traditionally regarded “soft” management issues and shareholder value.
Which why Innovest commands a high price for its reports and is generally regarded as the leader in its field.
Richard
LIFT06, WIKI and Evaluation
The LIFT team have put up a wiki page to gather feedback from people who attended LIFT06. A wiki is a relatively new tool that allows anyone to add or modify content to a web page. For evaluating an event such as LIFT06, this is an excellent way to gather feedback.
For evaluation purposes, testimonies and anecdotes collected through such feedback mechanisms can be equally convincing as quantifiable data collected by surveying and content analysis.
Glenn
Measuring Networks
This is an interesting tool from trackingthethreat.com that provides a graphical overview of the Al Qaeda network. The data is collected from thousands of open source reports, documents & news stories which are put together to establish the network linkages.
I write about this tool as it’s one of the first I have seen that attempts to measure a network. In communications, it is interesting for an organisation to assess the links between their key stakeholders. The theory is that a stakeholder group has more influence over an organisation if it has multiple links with other stakeholders. The structure of the stakeholder network is a good indicator as to where the power and influence is centered – and this helps organisations in prioritising their communication and relationship building activities with stakeholders.
The theory and practice of the importance of stakeholder networks is growing. If you are interested, read this article (pdf) from Ann Svendsen of the Collaborative Learning and Innovation Group (Simon Fraser University, Canada) where she explains how organisations actively assess and work with their stakeholder networks.
I learnt about the trackingthethreat network tool from the information aesthetics blog that looks at novel approaches as to how data can be visually represented.
Glenn
LIFT06 and Blog Monitoring – Part 2
As an indication of the level of interest and noise concerning LIFT06, I’ve looked again at the number of blog posts that mention LIFT06. In the first graph below from Technorati, we can see the some 70 posts mentioned LIFT06 on 3rd February, the last day of the conference. The second graph from BlogPulse of Intelliseek shows out of all blogs posted globally, what percentage mention LIFT. We see a jump from .001% on 1st February to .008% on 3rd February. I presume these charts are compiled based on posts that tag with “LIFT06”, so they probably do not register all posts. Nevertheless, the jump is quite significant.
Glenn
LIFT06 and live dialogue
An interesting trend I’ve been observing at LIFT06 is the online dialogues that are taking place during the LIFT06 conference in Geneva. Not only are there some 20 people blogging as the presentations are going on, but participants are also carrying out a realtime discussion using IRC and putting their thoughts into a collaborative writing document through a tool called SubEthaEdit. I’ll be interested to see what we can learn from these immediate reactions and comments about the conference.
Glenn
LIFT06 and Blog Monitoring
As part of the evaluation of LIFT06, I am looking at what the attendees are blogging about concerning the conference. This chart from Technorati shows the number of posts that mention LIFT06 – it will certainly peak over the next days of the conference. From an evaluation point it’s limited in its use but it provides an indication of the interest and noise concerning the conference.
Glenn
New to PR Evaluation?
Evaluation of public relations / communications program has been an interest of mine for some time. For those that want to learn more, there are many excellent resources available online. Here are a few I highly recommend:
- Guidelines and Standards for Measuring the Effectiveness of PR Programs and Activities from the Institute for PR. This is the hymn book from which we are all singing – it provides key standards for communication measurement that most PR professionals follow.
- PR Measurement on the newPR Wiki. A discussion space with useful resources for those interested in PR measurement.
- Presentations from the 2005 Measurement Summit. Very interesting presentations from the US Public Relations Measurement Summit, a key annual conference in PR evaluation and measurement.
Glenn
intelligent measurement 