When leaders ask about the ROI of internal communications, most of us reach for familiar metrics: email open rates, intranet page views, or town hall attendance figures. These numbers feel concrete and measurable, but they tell us almost nothing about whether our efforts are actually driving business value or how to effectively measure internal communications ROI.
We’re measuring activity, not impact, and that disconnect is costing internal communication teams credibility, resources, and strategic influence.
I’ve seen too many teams struggle to demonstrate their value because they’re trapped in an outdated measurement paradigm that prioritizes what’s easy to count over what actually counts. The result? Communication teams that work harder but can’t prove they’re working smarter, and leadership teams that view internal communications as a necessary cost rather than a strategic investment.
The path forward requires fundamentally rethinking how we approach measurement – moving from outputs to outcomes, from vanity metrics to business impact, and from proving activity to demonstrating value creation. This isn’t just about better numbers; it’s about earning the strategic recognition that effective internal communications deserves.
This isn’t a new challenge though – it’s something I have been talking about since 2017 when I published a report with the Chartered Institute of PR into the value and impact of internal communication.
It’s also a topic I regularly cover with clients in workshops with internal communication teams so in this blog post I’m going to share the advice I share with clients to help move things from those vanity metrics to business impact.
The problem with traditional metrics
Traditional internal communications metrics suffer from a fundamental flaw: they measure engagement with communications rather than the business outcomes those communications are designed to achieve. An email with a 90% open rate has failed if it doesn’t drive the behaviour change it was intended to create. An intranet with high traffic is ineffective if employees can’t find the information they need to do their jobs well.
This measurement approach creates several dangerous blind spots. It encourages optimising for the wrong outcomes; we focus on getting people to open emails rather than ensuring they understand and act on the content. It obscures the real value of communication work, making it difficult to justify resources or demonstrate strategic impact. Most importantly, it fails to provide the insights needed to improve communication effectiveness over time.
Let’s be honest, leaders don’t care about communication metrics, they care about business results. When we lead with opens and clicks, we’re speaking a language that positions our work as tactical rather than strategic, activity-focused rather than outcome-driven.
And if we want to stop going round and round in the conversation about having a seat at the table, we need to do things differently.
Five things you need to get started with measurement
Before diving into measurement frameworks and ROI calculations, you need to establish the right foundations. Effective measurement is impossible without these five things in place to start with:
1. Clear strategy alignment
You can only measure effectively if you have developed a communication strategy that aligns with business objectives. Without clear objectives, priorities, and outcomes that connect to organisational strategy, your measurement efforts will lack direction and meaning. Start by ensuring your communication goals directly support specific business outcomes.
2. Ongoing dialogue with leaders
Measure what’s important and meaningful to the business, rather than focusing solely on what matters to the communication function. This requires building relationships with leadership that allow you to understand their priorities, challenges, and language. Don’t be afraid to ask leaders what value looks like to them – that alignment is key to knowing what metrics are important to them.
3. Understanding function maturity
What you measure is sometimes determined by the maturity of your role within the internal communication function, and the maturity of the function within the organisation. A newly established team might focus on basic reach and engagement metrics while building credibility, whereas a mature function should demonstrate clear business impact. Be honest about where you are and set appropriate measurement expectations.
4. Customised approach
One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to communication measurement. You need to identify the right approach for your specific organisation. Is it annual comprehensive audits? Continuous channel metrics? Regular pulse surveys? The answer depends on your organisational culture, resources, leadership preferences, and business needs.
5. Commitment to impact and outcomes
From the outset, commit to measuring impact rather than just activity. This means designing measurement approaches that capture whether communication drives understanding, behaviour change, and business results – not just whether people consumed the content.
The foundation of clear baselines and defined goals
Once you have the prerequisites in place, effective measurement begins with establishing clear baselines that document current state performance and defining specific, measurable goals that align with organisational objectives.
This baseline establishment requires surveying key stakeholders to understand current knowledge levels, behavioural patterns, and communication effectiveness perceptions. What do employees currently know about strategic priorities? How effectively do they feel information flows through the organisation? Where do they currently encounter friction in accessing important information?
These baseline measurements provide the foundation for demonstrating improvement over time. Without them, you can’t show progress, and without progress, you can’t demonstrate value.
Goal definition must go beyond communication objectives to business outcomes. Instead of “increase newsletter readership,” aim for “improve employee understanding of strategic priorities as measured by quarterly pulse surveys.” Instead of “boost intranet usage,” try “reduce time employees spend searching for critical information as measured by task completion studies.”
This alignment ensures your measurement framework speaks to outcomes that matter to organisational success, not just communication function activity.
Understanding the cost of inaction
One of the most powerful ROI arguments focuses on the hidden costs of ineffective communication. These costs are often invisible to leadership because they’re distributed across the organisation and appear as operational inefficiency rather than communication problems.
Consider the productivity cost of employees spending time searching for information that should be easily accessible. Calculate the project risk created by unclear communications that lead to misaligned expectations or duplicated efforts. Quantify the engagement and retention costs associated with employees who feel uninformed about organisational direction or disconnected from strategic priorities.
These calculations often reveal that improving communication effectiveness generates returns that far exceed the investment required. When leaders understand that communication improvement prevents costly problems rather than just creating nice-to-have benefits, the ROI conversation shifts dramatically.
Proving the communication link is often difficult though and this is where alignment around the meaning of value is important – the second thing you need to get started with measurement.
Measuring what leaders actually care about
The key to demonstrating communication ROI lies in measuring outcomes that directly connect to leadership priorities and organisational success metrics. This requires understanding what keeps your leaders up at night and how communication effectiveness can address those concerns.
If leadership is focused on operational efficiency, measure how communication improvements reduce time waste, eliminate redundant work, or accelerate decision-making processes. If engagement and retention are priorities, track how communication effectiveness correlates with employee satisfaction, commitment, and voluntary turnover rates.
For organisations undergoing change, measure how communication supports successful change adoption – tracking not just awareness of changes but actual behaviour modification and sustained implementation. During growth periods, focus on how communication enables effective onboarding, knowledge transfer, and cultural integration.
The goal is demonstrating that communication effectiveness isn’t separate from business performance – it’s a critical enabler of the outcomes leadership cares most about achieving.
Five tips for better measurement
Once you have the foundation in place, these five practical tips will help you execute measurement more effectively:
1. Collect data with purpose
Before gathering any metrics, be clear about what you’re doing with the data you’re collecting. How will it contribute to your content strategy or channel strategy? Is it being collected for a business case or addressing a short-term need? Choose the right measurement tools for your specific situation and ensure every data point serves a clear purpose.
2. Align to leadership value
Listen carefully to the words leaders use and dial into that language. Don’t be afraid to ask what value looks like to them. They often recognise the challenge of measuring communication effectiveness but lack clear objectives themselves. Use their terminology when presenting your measurement results so you’re demonstrating progress on things that matter to them.
3. Focus on outcomes rather than outputs
You can’t rely solely on measuring channels or intranet page visits. If understanding and behaviour change add value to the business, that’s what you need to measure. Ask clear, open questions about the issues that really matter to assess whether you’ve achieved your objectives. If the goal is to reduce workplace accidents by 60%, measure accident rates – communication activity contributes to that business outcome.
4. Do it more than once
A year is a long time in organisational life. While annual surveys can prove useful, much can change over those twelve months. Smaller, frequent surveys are an excellent way to keep up with trends and act on them quickly. There’s no ideal frequency, you need to do what’s right for your organisation. But don’t overload people with surveys; remember that purpose is still important.
5. Use what you discover
Data is only valuable in solving business issues if you act on it. Use what you discover to shape your objectives and agenda, improving the effectiveness of your communications plan. Continuous learning and measurement allows you to iterate and improve. Whether you use insights in reports for leaders or just for your team’s development, the key is acting on what you learn.
Communicating your ROI story
The most important audience for your ROI measurement isn’t the communications team, it’s leadership. This requires translating communication metrics into business language and presenting findings in formats that resonate with leadership priorities and decision-making styles.
Focus on outcomes rather than activities, use business terminology rather than communication jargon, and connect every metric to specific organisational benefits. Instead of reporting that “newsletter open rates increased 15%,” explain that “strategic awareness improved significantly, with quarterly surveys showing 30% more employees correctly identifying key organisational priorities.”
Use both data and stories to make your case compelling. Quantitative measures provide credibility and scale, while qualitative examples help leaders understand the human impact and practical implications of communication effectiveness.
Most importantly, tie everything back to leadership priorities and organisational success. The goal isn’t proving that communications work hard, it’s demonstrating that communication effectiveness drives the business outcomes leadership cares about most.
When internal communications can demonstrate clear ROI using metrics that matter to organisational success, everything changes. Communication initiatives receive the resources needed for maximum impact. Most importantly, internal communicators earn recognition as strategic partners whose work directly contributes to organisational success rather than support functions that consume resources without clear returns.
This measurement transformation doesn’t happen overnight, but it begins with the commitment to measure what matters rather than what’s easy, and to tell the story of communication value in language that resonates with business priorities and organisational success.
