RSA – owner of the MORE TH>N brand – is a leading, FTSE 100-listed, British general insurance company. Formerly Royal & Sun Alliance, the company rebranded in May 2008. RSA decided it wanted more detail from its media evaluation. The RSA Communications Team’s key objectives for media evaluation were:
1. Prove PR effectiveness to senior stakeholders through the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
2. Identify key media outlets and journalists with a view to more effective targeting in future
3. Achieve more, and better quality, coverage than identified competitors
1. MML’s Reports are included in the monthly status updates which RSA sends to its senior stakeholders, providing tangible proof of the effectiveness of its PR activity. The format of the Report Cards, especially the KPI table, was particularly effective in giving stakeholders an overview of the work carried out by the PR Team.
2. The individual spokespeople table provided by MML proved highly valuable as the company was able to effectively identify the most appropriate journalists to target. Jon Sellors, UK Head of External Communications at RSA said, ‘the feedback regarding spokespeople has led to an improvement in the engagement of stakeholders, and RSA found that its spokespeople became more willing to invest time speaking to journalists in national and trade media outlets.’ This improved attitude has helped increase the company’s beneficial coverage, as RSA employees were seen to be offering their expert opinion to the media on a more regular basis.
RSA was able to track the volume and tone of coverage with major media outlets and this was used to monitor the strength of the relationship between RSA and the media outlets tracked. It benefited RSA’s PR strategy because it focused attention on some media outlets more than others, thus increasing the media exposure of the company.
3. Before evaluation, RSA had worked under the misconception that its competitors were more effective in generating higher volumes of coverage and in producing a higher quality of content. However, between January and May 2009, RSA appeared in more items and prompted more beneficial coverage than its competitors each month, thereby providing substantial evidence that their perception was completely unfounded. MML’s Reports provided an accurate insight into the market, further proving the PR Team’s worth to stakeholders and Team Members. Jon Sellors said, ‘Media Measurement provided us with valuable, comprehensive media evaluation that demonstrated that RSA was the leading general insurance company.’
