I’m in the social justice business. Not the profiteering business. But still. I’ve found that smart cause-driven funders and leaders do still think like businesspeople. They want to know that if they’re spending money on things, they’re getting a return. Public relations and strategic communications work costs money. Sometimes it’s hard to link, say, a piece of strategic communications work to an obvious return. Other times you can do it easily.
Last week 27 U.S. news outlets syndicated a client’s opinion piece. LexisNexis calculates the advertising value of that at $75k. I realized that’s about a 7,500% return on the client’s investment. That’s significant. It made me get my calculator out, and I had a nice little ego-driven revel.
Over the four years I’ve been working with clients on this kind of work, I calculate that the return is high. Roughly 50% of thought leadership articles I write with my clients get published. That’s very high, even for specialists. Likewise, when I do pitch organizations out to journalists, they bite at a higher rate. That’s because I make sure the pitches are good and I’m careful about what we put out into the world.
Meanwhile, when I’ve written communications strategies for organizations, they have helped them deliver. Their goals are further ahead because of working with me. When they’ve partnered with me to figure out how to deliver on complex campaigns, I’ve proven my worth. We’ve delivered the audience engagement they were seeking, faster than they expected. We’ve also done it under budget. When I’ve worked on content marketing strategies, the engagement rates have skyrocketed. I’m a fan of measuring such things. That’s because the numbers do look good but if they look bad, they help us prioritize our efforts and figure out what’s going wrong. I’m thinking more and more like a businessperson!
If you’re concerned that your PR or strategic communications provider isn’t giving you the return on investment you’d like to see, let’s talk. I’m curious what you’re trying to achieve and now, I’m literally in the business of helping.
Why? Well, recently I became a corporation, myself. I filed papers with the state and the IRS, and Matt Davis Communications, Inc. is now a thing. Aka: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”—Jay-Z.
Or something like that. The reasons are complex but in essence I’m doing what somebody smart told me to do. Having worked as a sole trader for four years, my accountants suggested it was time to make the switch. There are tax and accounting advantages to separating your business and personal finances. It also means you do payroll and are better set up to bring on staff. You can get better insurance and are better set-up to contract with larger organizations.
Most importantly, having bootstrapped the business from nothing, I can now report profit and loss over four years and show it all in my books. My wife recently left her last job to start her own business and described overhearing my conversations over the period as like doing an MBA but by eavesdropping. We’re paying for our own health insurance. It’s terrifying and exciting at the same time!
Still, I didn’t start this business because I wanted to “be a businessperson.” I started this business because I like helping good causes deliver. I can also handle helping more than one good cause at a time. I don’t need to be at too many internal meetings to deliver the results people need. Meanwhile, because I’m exposed to best practices across clients, I give better value. Clients will often ask me how other people in the sector are handling a given challenge. I can share what I’ve learned, and everyone wins.
The true bottom line is that most leaders want to partner with somebody they can trust. Yes, they want a return on investment. They want to know that if they work with me, they’ll get results. But building trust goes a little deeper than that. My clients want to know that I’ll tell them the difficult stuff as well as the easy stuff. That I’ll challenge their assumptions if I need to, to deliver. Always, of course, without being a jerk about it. The deepest return on investing in my services is yes, you get results. But we also develop a trusting working relationship. Sometimes my clients even become my friends, which is the highest compliment they can pay me—to hang out without accounting for anyone’s time. Still, let’s take this one step at a time, eh?
—Matt Davis is a communications consultant and writer for a wide variety of clients. He also teaches yoga and lives with his wife and son in New York.
