If a local business or nonprofit has ever gotten a nice mention in the paper and later received a report translating that coverage into a dollar figure, worth complete with a multiplier tacked on for good measure, it’s worth knowing that the number likely means very little. That practice, called an Advertising Value Equivalent or AVE, has been formally rejected by the field’s own professional standards body for more than fifteen years, yet it’s still handed to plenty of small businesses and nonprofits as if it were real ROI.
An AVE prices the physical space a story occupies, an article’s column inches or a segment’s airtime, as though it were a paid ad, then multiplies it because editorial coverage is trusted more than advertising. According to AMEC, the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, that approach measures the size of the box a message came in, not whether anyone actually opened it. A glowing feature and a single damaging sentence buried in a critical article can occupy nearly identical space and generate nearly the same AVE number, even though one helped the organization and the other hurt it.
In response, the field built something better. In 2010, AMEC convened measurement experts in Barcelona and produced the Barcelona Principles, now in their third revision, which set real standards: measurable goals set before a campaign starts, outcomes weighted more heavily than raw output counts, and AVEs explicitly ruled out as a measure of communication value at all.
Alongside that standard sits the PESO model, developed by consultant Gini Dietrich, which organizes every channel, Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media, so nothing gets judged by press clips alone.
According to MSGPR, the Lufkin communications and PR firm serving Deep East Texas since 1991, what actually deserves tracking are outcomes, not vanity output. Share of search shows whether more people are searching a business’s name after a PR push. Referral traffic shows whether anyone followed the coverage back to a website. Review velocity, the pace of new reviews after a placement, is one of the most underused signals available to a small organization, and none of it requires expensive software, just deciding in advance what to check.
For a Deep East Texas nonprofit, that might mean checking donation-page traffic and branded search volume the week a feature story ran, rather than simply reporting “we got great coverage” and stopping there. That single shift, from counting clips to tracking outcomes, is the difference between a report that sounds good and one that would survive real scrutiny at a board meeting.
Mid-year is a natural time to ask whether this year’s PR reporting has actually told anyone anything true. MSGPR’s full guide walks through the complete measurement framework and how to build a simple dashboard using free tools. Reach the firm at 936-637-7593 or msgpr.com.
Read MSGPR’s full guide here: How to Measure PR: The Barcelona Principles and What to Track Instead of AVEs.
