Measure stakeholder engagement to move from activity to impact

In these years, Public Affairs teams face increasing requests to measure and document their efforts and effectiveness. This is notoriously hard in Public Affairs, where "success" can look very different from one situation to the next. Sometimes a PA team manages to sway an outcome in favour of their organisation. Other times, success means stopping or changing a piece of legislation. And sometimes it simply means avoiding the worst-case scenario, even if the final outcome still isn't favorable to your organisation.

These kinds of wins are hard to report on, and they tend to stay anecdotal. Public Affairs professionals should absolutely still include them when reporting to C-level stakeholders and boards, but these years more measurable, tangible information is expected alongside the stories.

This raises the obvious question: what do KPIs actually look like in Public Affairs? What can we actually measure?

Why activity counting isn't the answer

When it comes to setting up KPIs, many Public Affairs teams start by counting their activities: meetings held, hearing responses submitted, policy papers written.

This does, of course, prove that something happened on the team. That you didn't do nothing. And the chances of success are most likely higher if you do something, compared to nothing.

However, it's a common mistake to confuse activity with strategy. Part of the problem is that activity is simply easier to see than impact. A calendar full of meetings is tangible proof that the PA function is working, in a way that a shifted attitude or a quietly avoided problem never quite is. But once that becomes the benchmark - whether set by management or understood by the PA team itself - the natural response is to optimise for it: more meetings, more touchpoints, more visible proof of motion. Not because anyone sets out to do the wrong thing, but because it's the easiest way to show progress when no one has agreed on what "progress" actually means. The result is a full calendar that doesn't necessarily move anything forward.

The number of activities says nothing about quality or direction. So while counting interactions is a place to start if you are completely new to working with KPIs in Public Affairs - which we have written about before - it's important to look further.

Strategy as the foundation to secure quality and outcome

To ensure that activities contribute to the goals of the organisation, it's important that they are always grounded in the broader strategy.

Effective stakeholder engagement starts with a clear ask - a specific purpose that ties each individual interaction back to what the organisation is actually trying to achieve. Without that, even a well-run PA function ends up optimising for the wrong thing, because there's no shared definition of what it's working towards.

Honest alignment between the PA team, management and the wider business strategy about what success looks like is a good place to start. Only once that's in place, does it make sense to talk about measuring, because you can't track whether something moved in the right direction if you never agreed on what the right direction was. 

Activity will always be easier to count than impact. But impact is the only one of the two that actually tells you anything.

How to measure

Once the foundation is established and direction is clear to everyone, the next step is figuring out how to measure your actual achievements. At Ulobby, we find that the best way of doing this is by evaluating and rating stakeholder relationships on a regular basis - e.g. after each interaction.

The questions you should ask yourself after each meeting: Did the relationship deepen? Did the stakeholder's position move? Did they leave better informed, or with a better impression of your organisation?

We usually see our clients measuring relationships on two variables: How good is the relationship and what is the stakeholder's attitude towards our case.

Rating each interaction this way turns something that would otherwise stay a gut feeling into a number you can track over time and compare across stakeholders, issues, or even teams. 

A common objection to this approach is that it's subjective; that two people might rate the same meeting differently. That's a fair point. But it's no different from stakeholder mapping, which also rests on judgement rather than hard data. While it might not be a perfect measure, it helps PA teams focus on what really matters, and it says more about efforts and developments than other ways of measuring. The value here is not in achieving perfect objectivity; it's in creating a consistent, comparable signal that lets you track direction over time, instead of relying on memory and gut feeling alone.

Getting started

To get started implementing KPIs in your Public Affairs team, it is important to do it right, but also to be realistic. How mature is your set-up? What resources do you have available?

It's important to note that assessing stakeholder relationships is not only relevant for large organisations with big PA setups. Even small teams can work with this if done the right way - even a one-person Public Affairs function can rate a handful of key relationships on a regular basis. 

But if you are new to any type of KPIs in PA, you might want to take it step-by-step, starting with the basics before adding rating on top.

None of this works, though, without somewhere to actually log it. Systematic logging is what turns individual observations into a dataset you can act on. Without it, every interaction and every rating lives in someone's inbox or memory, and disappears the moment that person changes roles.

The bigger picture

The shift from activity to impact won't happen overnight, and it won't remove the anecdotal, hard-to-quantify wins that are often central to what Public Affairs does. But it will give you something to put next to those stories: a documented, comparable measure of whether your stakeholder relationships are actually moving in the right direction.

That's not just useful for reporting upward. It's also useful for the PA team itself to see where the effort is paying off, and where it isn't.

At Ulobby, we are building features like this directly into our platform, so you and your team can easily keep stakeholder relations, information, and measuring part of the same system. 

Are you curious to see how a stakeholder relation management system works? Reach out to hear more.

‍