AMEC Virtual Summit session, presented by José de Buerba, Head of business intelligence, World Bank

The World Bank was established after the end of Word War II to support the reconstruction of Europe and Japan. Its mission today is to end poverty, and build and share prosperity around the world. As part of that scope, it has committed to providing $160bn to help countries around the world fight the pandemic.

While the work of the World Bank has clear goals, measuring the impact and effectiveness of its communications function – which in 2019 alone issued 820 press releases, posted 1,400 blog articles and was active on 160 social channels – has proven to be a real challenge.

It recently introduced an ‘insights and measurement’ function, led by José, to standardise the approach to impact measurement across the World Bank’s diverse and decentralised organisation.

José describes his first two years in the role, explaining how a standard measurement model similar to the AMEC framework has been introduced to provide structured evaluation with a clear focus on outcome and impact. Outcome measurement, he explained, makes a clearer connection between campaign and longer-term impact towards the organisation’s core mission.

This standardisation helps combat the challenges of the decentralised organisation, providing a holistic and visual picture of how engagement is working across channels. He notes that it enables conversations on how to allocate resources, whether channels are the right ways to connect with key audiences and what is working…or not.

To measure outcomes, José talks about the World Bank’s use of its owned channels for surveys. The findings are made available to everyone involved in communications for the World Bank on a dashboard that can be sliced to deliver insight any aspect of the audience profile.

The challenge is that evaluation and reporting takes time and everyone is busy, so José introduced a simple, three-step scorecard for mapping communications against the framework of audience, activities and KPIs. The single-page Word document captures lessons learned, high level objectives, outcomes and comms outcomes across digital, social and media activity channels.

This is José’s key take away – just because the organisation is large and complex, doesn’t mean the measurement function has to be.