Okay, we’re not allowed to flog our own wares on this blog, but I trust it’s okay to flog someone else’s! Since so many of us wax on about the challenges of figuring ROI on communications efforts, I would be remiss not to share a cool new tool that one of our fellow bloggers, Merry Elrick, has created to make this a whole lot easier. Merry kindly walked me through her system a month or so ago, and I found it fascinating, and very different from anything I’ve seen in the PR measurement space thus far.

Merry’s web-based system, called DataDriven MarCom™, is a one-stop portal in which to store all costs related to each tactic in your marketing communications arsenal, along with (most importantly) details of every resulting lead and/or sale from each of those efforts. In other words, for every campaign, you (the communicator) would log-in costs for every ad, every direct mail piece, every media campaign, and so on. Then, as leads roll-in, you work in tandem with your sales department to insert contact information for leads generated by each campaign. The sales person assigned to each lead works it, and logs in the appropriate sales revenues if/when a sale results. (If your company is already working with a CRM package, I believe there is a way to link databases.)

A suite of report options allows you to quickly see which campaigns and tactics are working, and which are not, by comparing the costs of each effort against the numbers of leads and revenues resulting. Since the tracking is done in ‘real time,’ the communicator is able to change strategy and/or tactics quickly when necessary.

Anyway, it’s darned clever! I have to congratulate Merry on her innovativeness, (and bravery in expanding her career as a counselor into software entrepreneurship), and hope others on this blog will give it a whirl. The thinking behind the drill-downs is an exercise in good measurement, in my opinion.