Use these measurement tactics to protect and grow your comms budget

This is part two of our communications budgeting series. Read part one here.

Advocating for a communications budget is both art and science, requiring you to connect needs to goals through correlation modeling, tactfully ask for what you need and collaborate with strategic partners across other functions.

This process is also a reminder that knowing how to measure, and what to report back, is fundamental to proving your work matters.

1. Cull data to prioritize the highest-return activities.

Speaking the language of open rates, click-throughs, website visits, engagements and survey results are table stakes to bring to the budget conversation. But that doesn’t mean you give them all the same weight.

“’ We got eight Facebook likes’ is not impressing anybody,” said communications leader and Ragan Advisory Board member Amanda Ponzar. “If what you’re doing doesn’t matter, cut it.”

While most comms leaders are overworked and overextended in multiple directions, her culling process uses data to make a case that prioritizes the highest-return activities.

“If you don’t know how to start measuring what you’re doing, begin with a clear call to action in each communication and test the outcomes,” Ponzar advised, explaining that she tracks performance from paid social, email marketing and other channels to determine over time whether those channels are worth investing in.

Internally, this exercise may show that employees aren’t logging into your newsletter platform but are reading their Teams messages, for example, and create an opportunity to free up dollars currently allocated on ineffective channels.

You can start this process by looking at open and click-through rates, and then modeling the correlation between those numbers and other campaign results. Ponzar shared an example of this process from a past nonprofit role, drawing a correlation to a fundraising campaign:

Audience: 50,000

Open/view %: 8,991; 17.98%

Clicks/Click %: 1,145; 2.29% 

Correlation modeling: Funds raised over 3 days (the day the email was sent & two days after): $85,729 

2. Learn how to source manual baselines.

While securing budget is largely about communicating growth and ROI, having something to measure against is crucial.

One of the top requests from members of the Ragan community is more industry benchmarks from partners like PoliteMail, but these benchmarks are ultimately most useful when you have an organizational baseline to compare it to.

“Having an industry benchmark is one thing, but understanding where your organization historically has been is sometimes more of a manual capture,” explained Shannon Iwaniuk, a senior communications leader at a global life sciences company.

An automated approach that pulls together data from 13,000 frontline associates won’t be customized to the complexities of your org structure.

“You may have to collect some data manually because not all the systems are integrated,” Iwaniuk continued, naming a popular internal email SaaS tool as an example. “Not all of that data is exportable into a foresight dashboard.”

In such instances, manual data capture and analysis would require you to:

• Identify your key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, response rates and bounce rates.
• Pull data from a set historical period to establish trends and draw a distinction between normal patterns and outliers in performance.
• Segment and break down the data by factors like departments, job level and location to understand which segments engage more than others.

From here, you can determine average open or response rates to establish a baseline and then set benchmarks around it. The gap between that baseline and those benchmarks, along with the reportable progress over time, provides valuable context to your budget case.

3. Track the ROI of external partnerships.

The nature of budget conversations can feel so delicate that communicators can have a hard time argue for the budget to tap external support unless the suggestion comes from on high.

But suggesting a project or campaign be outsourced to an internal comms agency can alleviate pressure, set an expectation for return that you’re able to hold the partner accountable to, and demonstrate your measurement acumen in the process.

“At times, I’ve engaged internal comms agencies for ‘surge capacity’ to augment my team when volume or complexity threatened to overwhelm team resources and our ability to deliver at the highest standard,” Iwaniuk said. She sustained this effort by:

• Ensuring it was based on a set monthly amount (or number of agency hours with an accompanying rate card)
• Taking time to review the Statement of Work (SoW) and ensure it was specific on deliverables, rounds of review and acceptable margins for overbilling (usually 10% without a change order to the scope)
• Setting the expectation that the agency would only bill actual hours worked, and roll any overage over to the remainder of the Sow

“This ensures you are only paying for what you get and saving resources for potential use on future projects not yet defined,” explained Iwaniuk. “Always have a list of ‘nice to have’ projects so that if you get near the end of the term with hours remaining, you can add those projects easily and effectively.”

With the proper approach, external partnerships can also secure additional budget from partners.

Ponzar explained how she built communication dollars into memorandums of understanding (MOUs) and regular contracts.

“I was able to secure designated grant dollars for certain projects and for others, build communication dollars into MOUs and regular contracts,” explained Ponzar. “Over the years I’ve also been able to secure external funding from clients or partners for native advertising on shared topics, or to conduct targeted marketing that was mutually beneficial.”

For one campaign in early 2024, the client/partner gave Ponzar $43,000, which she used for marketing. This increased fundraising by nearly 14%, earning an additional $143,000 over the prior year for a total of nearly $1.2 million. The funds raised recouped the partner’s investment, and then some.

Ponzar also recommends that communicators speak up when their organization plans to increase fees to its clients or customers.

“Advocate that some of that new fee revenue is allocated to comms for awareness-building activities for those clients, which helps you as well,” she added.

This approach has resulted in Ponzar sometimes receiving a percentage of the increase, around 1-5% of the contract allocated for comms, while other times it was a set dollar amount.

4. Remember that how you allocate spend will change.

Ultimately, Iwaniuk sees the opportunity to measure with budget in mind as an exercise in demonstrating reach and effectiveness.

“The moral of the story is to always have a plan for how you would increase the reach and effectiveness of your comms support as measured by increased traffic on internal channels, increased reach and effectiveness of leader comms, and ultimately overall increased engagement on employee surveys,” she said.

That said, most budgets will be flat YoY or modestly up in 2025. Iwaniuk guesses that 1-3% will be the maximum increase.

Remember that how you allocate spend can change—especially at the end of the year, when there’s often a mad dash to spend favorable budgets before the window to bill for the year closes.

“Keep some larger projects in sight that you can quickly put remaining budget against if your month-over-month utilization of spend is light,” advises Iwaniuk.

Even if your budget is flat or down YoY, keeping an open mind about things that don’t have to continue can free up budget to add headcount or outside agency support.

“If you can engage outside support modestly in the beginning and are mindful of how you use that spend while also demonstrating metrics to your leadership of the ROI it brings, it can pave the way for increased spend,” Iwaniuk reasoned.

Justin Joffe is the editorial director and editor-in-chief at Ragan Communications.  Follow him on LinkedIn.

Additional resources on securing comms budgets, including our forthcoming budget report, are available exclusively to members of Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council. Learn more about joining here.

How are you measuring your ROI to make a sound budget case? Let us know in the comments below.