Anyone out there doing work on this?

We’re delighted to welcome Aarti Shah to PRWeek as our new San Francisco bureau chief. Aarti joins us from the world of academics; she recently got her Masters degree in Social Sciences from San Francisco State University. Before that, she was an associate editor for Inside Defense and an assistant editor for the Austin Community Newspapers. Aarti’s contact information can be found here.

I’ve noticed (via my eyes, rumors, or directly from the source) that some agencies are in the process
of changing their Web sites. Good. If I might make a suggestion, please try to offer more case studies, more easily accessible contact details (for everyone - don’t fret about poaching. If your agency is great, no one will ever want to leave), and more content about the local offices. I already know one agency that is seriously planning to do the latter.

Often times, we plan our editorials in the beginning of the week before the issue comes out, based on the important news out there. If there’s a PR hook (pet food crisis, automotive sales figures, Delta emerging from bankruptcy), we’ll pursue it.

However, we want to get back to editorials on more substantive PR issues out there: things like measurement, procurement, marketing issues, etc. We’d love suggestions re: what you want to read, either by e-mail or in the comments below.

This was cross-posted in the comments section at Steve Cody’s blog RepMan.

Steve - thanks for your comments. I thought some background might be useful. As you know, we launched this survey three years ago, but today’s research bears only some resemblance to its first iteration. Over the years, we have sought the input of agency, in-house, and academic leaders.

In the beginning, we hoped to rank all agencies by reputation among their clients. So we conducted a survey asking clients which firms they worked for and how they rated their performance on a number of attributes. We did not have a set number of agencies - we just invited clients to rate any agency they worked for.
The problem that we ran into was in the sample sizes. The largest agencies had adequate (if not entirely convincing) sample sizes, while the smaller firms had samples so small they were basically meaningless.

We also had no idea how fragmented the market was until then. That first year some 600 clients rated more than 400 agencies. This was an interesting industry snapshot, but got us no closer to really understanding trends in client preference and needs. Agencies had no real substantive data that could be used to any meaningful degree.

Complicating our process was our firm belief - then and now - that in order to have a credible survey, we could not use client lists supplied by agencies, as other surveys have done. That was the case then and that is still the case now.
Last year we narrowed our research pool to agencies that we believed could achieve adequate sample sizes. But we still needed to crack the model, because the numbers were still inconsistent from firm to firm, especially among current and past clients.
During last year’s survey process, Millward Brown, our research partner, identified a database called the ERI panel that we used this year in fielding the survey (and used partially last year). This helped us meet our goals of surveying 50 current and 50 past clients for all 14 agencies that participated. These agencies all purchased data packets with their full results.
Our success in reaching these sample sizes - which is truly a breakthrough for this survey - now gives us hope that we might be able to expand it next year and ongoing. But at the end of the day, we have to have an adequate sample size for each firm for it to be meaningful. By virtue of their size, large firms are at an advantage in this.
We are, however, not resting there and continue to work with Millward Brown in the hopes of expanding the survey, provided we can reach our sample goals for each participating firm. As we start work on this in the fall, I will give you an update on how that exploration is going.

Thanks again for the feedback. I’m happy to discuss further when I’m back next week.

But the greening (greenery?) (greenanity?) doesn’t stop there. We’re going to continue blogging at the Target Green blog.

I’ve started posting mini-roundups today.

Julia Hood and I will be heading to San Francisco tomorrow for our Target Green conference. Please follow along on that blog for updates. And, if you’re pitching news this week, it should go to michael . , who is guest news editing this week.