For years, PR professionals have complained: we don’t have enough resources to do the job properly. According to Cision’s Inside PR 2026 report, two-thirds of PR managers cite resource pressures as a major concern. Meltwater’s State of PR report echoes that finding, with 24% of respondents naming budget constraints as their primary issue. Not surprising if, according to the Meltwater report, 4 in 10 PR professionals believe that leadership has a limited understanding of what their PR team actually does.
The root cause is a tagline I used back in the ‘90s – Management is from Mars; PR is from Venus. If you haven’t read John Gray’s book I’m not surprised, but the point is that two different groups of people can live and work together but speak different languages. In the world of business communications, management tends to measure success in numbers, charts and graphs, and we tend to use words and pretty pictures to tout our accomplishments and brag about things that management doesn’t understand.
If leadership does not clearly understand how PR contributes to business results, your budget will be seen as an unnecessary expense rather than an investment because no one is going to fund anything that they don’t see the value of. So why do we find it so difficult to quantify PR’s Impact?
First and foremost is a lack of consensus on what leadership expects PR to contribute to business results. As a result, the measures of success don’t demonstrate leadership’s desired outcomes. Good metrics should be baked into every project from the start, complete with a benchmark. The worst thing you can do is to compound the problem by tacking on vanity metrics like AVEs or “reach” at the end.
Quantifying Impact isn’t that hard; you just need to measure the right things.
The Cision data reveals another measurement problem: muddled priorities. Cision asked respondents to rank their top three priorities for 2026. The results were revealing:
- Brand awareness – 73%
- Driving sales and revenue – 55%
- PR measurement and ROI – 49%
Let’s put on our CEO or board-member hats and examine those priorities one by one.
1: “Brand Awareness” is not a useful goal
To the nearly 3 out of 4 of respondents, I have some advice: brand awareness is an easy thing to increase—and a terrible metric to rely on. Plenty more people became “aware” of the Tesla brand following its founder’s involvement in DOGE, but the company still lost $15 billion in brand value. And I’m sure the PR team at Tylenol wasn’t thrilled with the awareness generated by the President telling people not to take it. Bottom line is that generalized awareness without trust, or positive positioning is meaningless at best and damaging at worst. More importantly general awareness numbers don’t help CEOs make decisions—and they don’t justify budgets.In fact, many PR teams today spend more time trying to avoid spikes in awareness, especially after controversial statements—than trying to generate it.
I’m not saying that PR can’t contribute to desirable brand awareness. But only if:
- There is consensus between you and leadership on which audience needs to become aware of whatever it is you are pushing.
- You are clear on what message, position, theme, or product you need to become aware.
- You have an accurate baseline level of awareness before you begin.
- You have a realistic timeline in which to increase that awareness.
To be honest, I’ve come across very few organizations that have the necessary numbers and knowledge to accurately measure any increase in awareness. And yes, you can certainly make assumptions-based web traffic or engagement or whatever numbers you have at hand, but you still need to make sure everyone with budget authority finds your proxies acceptable.
2: PR Rarely Drives Direct Revenue—so stop trying to prove it does
PR’s greatest contribution to the sales/ revenue funnel today is to minimize opposition, plug leaks in the funnel caused by bots, disinformation, misinformation, influencers and opponents and competition. And it’s very hard to measure what doesn’t happen. A better alternative is to measure revenue saved. In many organizations, PR’s purpose is to do things advertising and marketing either can’t do, can’t afford, or doesn’t have time for. For example:
- reaching new audiences that you don’t have the budget to reach via paid media.
- reinforcing messages at critical moments
- defending reputation when competitors or critics strike.
- increasing understanding, and trust
If you try to prove PR’s value by attribution, you are essentially in the middle of a sword fight armed with a stick of butter. What you can prove is your contribution. Focus on what PR can do to ease or shorten the sales cycle, essentially measure contribution, not attribution. For example:
- how many new or different audiences were reached
- how engagement with your content increased
- how key messages were reinforced
- how understanding or trust shifted
If you’re tearing your hair out at this point and saying that the only way you can get budget is to somehow tie results to revenue, read these case studies and get in touch. But it helps to have the following:
- A short sales cycle
- Strong market research data show what has impacted sales in the past.
- Access to advertising and sales performance data
- Media analysis that identifies which messages, messengers, and visuals actually drive results.
3. Measurement is not a priority, it’s part of your job.
Saying something is a “Priority” assumes that you have other options. You don’t. The biggest red flag in all this data is that among Cision’s respondents they see PR measurement and ROI as a separate priority, rather than the foundation that supports the first two. Ever notice that the folks in Finance or Sales/Development seldom get their budgets cut? It’s because they have historical data that shows improvement – or if there’s no improvement, they have data to show what went wrong. AND all that data is tied to organizational performance, not to prior month’s progress.
If all you have to show to senior leadership is month over month progress – you are making a possibly erroneous assumption that they think what you did last month was valuable and made a contribution to the success of the organization. Needless to say, that isn’t always the case. You cannot credibly demonstrate progress on awareness or contribution to revenue without solid measurement baked in from the start. Metrics are not something you tack on at the end of a campaign to decorate a report. They are part of strategy and without metrics built in at the beginning, you won’t have any credible results. Until PR aligns its measurement with business expectations—and stops treating ROI as an afterthought—this problem will persist. And no new tools will fix it. And you will never have the resources you need.