Work.

Proving the effectiveness and value of PR activity for Guide Dogs.

Guide Dogs is one of the UK’s leading sight loss charities, and the world’s largest assistance dog organisation, providing a wide range of services with and without dogs to support people living with a vision impairment.

Like all charities, Guide Dogs is almost entirely funded by donations and so needs to ensure that awareness of its brand and campaigning activities remain high and positive in the public consciousness, whilst achieving the best possible return on its PR and marketing investments.

Charlotte Speedy, Director of Communications and Influencing at Guide Dogs, contacted Metricomm to learn more about our ability to quantify the links between earned media output and brand engagement, which we achieve by correlating Metricomm’s media audience data with YouGov’s CharityIndex brand tracking data, along with other independent data sets including Google search, website visits, data relating to donations, etc.

Working closely with Lucy Owen, Insight and Customer Research Manager, Metricomm scoped a media effectiveness benchmark analysis project that would enable Guide Dogs to better understand how its investment in PR influences the charity’s desired outcomes, including volunteering, fundraising and increasing the number of people willing to raise and care for a puppy in training. To add more context to the findings, it was agreed that we would conduct comparative analysis of another comparable large charity.

Metricomm uses audience data as the starting point for impact evaluation, which is far more reliable than the volume and sentiment metrics used by traditional media monitoring companies to demonstrate ‘effectiveness’.  It quantifies how media coverage impacts both consumer behaviour and the tangible business and commercial outcomes that senior executives care about. Metrics are consistent over time to illustrate what ‘business as usual’ looks like, as well as to showing and measuring the impact of campaigns or crisis situations.

Taking the period August 2024 to December 2025, Metricomm conducted daily time-series analysis to evaluate what ‘business as usual’ looks like for Guide Dogs’ media outcomes and put key campaigns such as Sponsor a Puppy and Shared Spaces into context.

Our findings quantified the extent to which media coverage contributed effectively and consistently to brand building and consumer behaviour. It influenced key consumer metrics, as measured by YouGov CharityIndex, including advertising awareness and consumer satisfaction amongst others. The combination of Metricomm and YouGov daily data revealed that earned media coverage is a strong short-term catalyst, driving higher volumes of website new and repeat visits, as well as increasing the rate of donations conversion.

The analysis also identified a period of optimum performance, when PR was evidently strongly integrated with other advertising and marketing activities. This increased the rate of growth for Google searches for Guide Dogs by a factor of eight, reversing a negative growth rate in total direct website users and quadrupling the rate at which new direct users were attracted to the website. It also had significant impact on a range of CharityIndex outcomes, including net impression, net quality and awareness.

YouGov advertising awareness is an excellent indicator of when consumers report seeing an ad for an organisation. It accounts for all types of advertising, encompassing TV, programmatic and OOH and allows the impact of advertising to be compared with the contribution made by PR campaigns over time. The benefits of integrated campaigns have long been recognised within the marcomms community and now the potential of PR to increase advertising effectiveness can be measured in more detail.

These insights, together with Metricomm’s identification of the most effective media titles and the key topics, themes and issues that had the greatest impact on the audience, informed the PR and communications team at Guide Dogs of the types of coverage that are most effective at influencing behaviour, enabling them to focus energy and budget on the activities that really work.

Through its proprietary methodology and media audience data, Metricomm was able to quantify the effectiveness of Guide Dogs earned media coverage in directly influencing:

• Size of media audience
• Google search
• Guide Dogs website visits
• Donations conversions
• YouGov CharityIndex metrics
  • Attention
  • Awareness
  • Buzz
  • Impression
  • Reputation
  • Recommendation
  • Value
  • Satisfaction
  • Consideration
  • Word of Mouth

In addition to the above, we compared the performance of Guide Dogs PR activity against that of another leading relevant charity, in terms of media effectiveness, size of audience, and the key topics, themes and issues that were generating the greatest impact for the latter.

During our debrief to the Guide Dogs team, that included the heads of insight, PR & Comms and strategic planning, Head of Media, Janine Mitchell, praised the findings and Metricomm’s unique ability to quantify the impact of media coverage on consumer attitudes and behaviour, and key business outcomes, stating that there is “nothing in our industry that would give us better insight as to what is working, and what is not.”

Director of Communications, Charlotte Speedy, echoed these comments by saying: “Thank you! We’ve been talking about actually getting evaluation that digs deep into the impact of PR and the value of it, and this provides it. This feels like the first time we’ve seen some really linked aspects to our work and what the value of PR is, and that’s so helpful for both the PR team and wider marketing colleagues.”

If you’d like to chat about how Metricomm can help you in repositioning the value and role of earned media within the wider marketing mix, please email hello@metricomm.com or complete the form below.