ABSTRACT
Public relations practitioners in the United States first became interested in measurement and evaluation in the 1970s, although discussion of the topic has exploded in the last ten years. The beginning of this explosion of interest occurred around October 10, 1996, when the U.S. Institute for Public Relations, the magazine Inside PR, and the Ketchum Public Relations Research and Measurement Department invited twenty-one leading U.S. public relations practitioners, counselors, researchers, and academicians to a summit meeting to discuss and then define minimum standards for measuring the effectiveness of public relations. The group developed and agreed on a report describing the state of the art in public relations evaluation (Lindenmann, 1997), and in 1998 the group formally became a Measurement Commission under the sponsorship of the Institute for Public Relations. Since that time, the Measurement Commission has met four times each year, issued a number of publications, and held annual Measurement Summits since 2003. At the same time, public relations firms and research firms have developed a number of tools to measure and evaluate communication programs; and discussion of metrics has dominated public relations periodicals and conferences.
