Client
The European Court of Auditors (ECA) is an institution of the European Union. It has been established to audit the EU’s finances, and thus contribute to improving EU financial management and promoting accountability and transparency in the EU. The goal of the ECA is to inform political stakeholders and the general public about how and why the EU budget is spent. EU spending is a highly sensitive topic, so the ECA’s communications approach must combine rigorous attention to detail and a tone of voice which is appropriate for both its political and public audiences.
Objectives & Challenges
The European Court of Auditors challenged Onclusive to build a measurement solution that would support real-time optimisation of up to twenty individual campaigns a year. It had to be capable of delivering strategic insights and proving the contribution of communications to the ECA’s organisational objectives. The solution needed to operate at speed and scale, but it also required a sophisticated approach to understand how ECA messages were connecting with diverse stakeholder groups across the political, financial and public spectrum.
Our strategy
The challenge for Onclusive was to define a project plan to meet the demand for a European-wide, native language analytics system which would deliver accurate and reliable data to support decisions for twenty individual communications campaigns, in close to real time. In response, Onclusive developed an analytical framework for the consistent measurement of ECA’s presence throughout European media, and a second layer of granular qualitative analysis to understand the drivers of ECA’s communications outcomes and performance against objectives.
This project was awarded at the AMEC Communication Effectiveness Awards.
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“Media monitoring helps us to assess the impact of our work and to better know our clients at the EU, national and regional level. It thus also contributes to our goal of applying a more targeted approach in our communication activities to increase our reach.”
Matthias Beermann, spokesperson of the European Court of Auditors
Outcomes & client benefits
Our consistent methodology allowed ECA to benchmark performance on an aggregate and individual campaign basis. Importantly, our analysis delivered measurable improvements in the ECA’s communications performance. The share of articles in tier one target media increased to 11% and achieved an average media impact score two times greater than articles in non-target media. Improved performance outcomes were attributed to individual campaigns to highlight the contribution of specific media activities.