Re-energizing a Major Travel Service’s Media Measurement With Advanced Qualitative Metrics
The Client
A major not-for-profit membership organization providing travel and related services to members, with a communications team focused on promoting membership value, thought leadership, and community engagement initiatives.
Fullintel transformed the effectiveness of a large travel service’s media measurement – formerly a brief, quantitative-only look at the organization’s monthly media coverage – through a combination of expanded quantitative metrics and deep qualitative insights, to provide 360-degree context around every mention. This included Fullintel’s Media Impact Score (MIS) and a flexible sentiment methodology to accurately value the organization’s thought leadership and community engagement initiatives.
The Challenge
The client's previous media measurement activities were reviewed monthly and quarterly but had grown stale, leaving the communications team unable to demonstrate the true value of its work. Distinct problems stood out:
Quantitative-only measurement
Reporting focused solely on metrics such as number of mentions, earned media placements, spokesperson mentions, and reach with no qualitative context behind the numbers.
An indecipherable impact metric
The client used a competitor's proprietary impact metric that was difficult to decipher and consistently failed to deliver the results the team expected.
An approach that had grown stale
As time progressed, the existing methodology couldn't provide the depth of media measurement and intelligence the organization needed.
No way to value thought leadership
The organization needed to meet internal goals around growing its membership and increasing brand awareness among non-members through effective PR campaigns, but its measurement approach couldn't assess the value of thought leadership or community engagement initiatives toward those goals.
The Solution
Fullintel recommended a new media measurement approach combining deep qualitative metrics – including prominence, a comprehensive sentiment methodology, and Media Impact Score applied to key sources – along with expert human curation, qualitative observations, and insights from an industry-savvy, highly trained media analyst.
This was joined by an expanded set of quantitative metrics – including quote and headline visibility, key messages by sentiment, and regional volume combined with Media Impact Score – to measure the impact of its media efforts across the client’s list of preferred sources.
- Quantitative-only mention counts & reach
- Confusing, competitor-built impact metric
- No sentiment measurement
- Thought leadership value invisible
- Deep qualitative + expanded quantitative view
- Media Impact Score (MIS) on key sources
- Full sentiment methodology, org point of view
- Thought leadership weighted & visible
The client’s new measurement approach now includes:
Deep sentiment methodology: Previously, the organization didn't measure sentiment at all, partly because its thought leadership coverage often appeared alongside unrelated negative news, misrepresenting its value as a trusted source of advice. Fullintel introduced sentiment-tagging from the organization's own point of view, applying positive weight to thought leadership initiatives so those mentions register as positive regardless of a story's overall tone.
Media Impact Score (MIS): Built on AMEC measurement standards and scored out of 100 across outlet tier, sentiment, prominence, spokesperson quotes, and headline visibility replacing the prior ambiguous evaluation scale.
MIS scores applied to the client's key preferred media outlets, enabling clean benchmark comparisons over time.
Expertly curated monthly analysis reports from an industry-savvy, highly trained media analyst, combining qualitative observations with the expanded quantitative metrics.
MIS Point Values (all articles scored out of 100, applied to coverage from the client's key sources):
- Outlet Tier: Tier 1 (+40) · Tier 2 (+25) · Tier 3 (+15)
- Sentiment: Positive (+25) · Neutral (+10) · Negative (-25)
- Prominence: Exclusive (+10) · Dominant (+7) · Balanced (+5) · Minor (+2)
- Spokesperson Quote: +15
- Headline Visibility: +10
Overall Media Impact Scores — along with average year-to-date and 12-month rolling averages — are calculated by averaging the impact scores of all articles from key media outlets, which were classified in collaboration with the client.
The Result
The organization now has much greater visibility into the prominence, sentiment, and quality of each media mention thanks to an approach that follows the Barcelona Principles of media measurement. That has in turn helped it better focus and target communications campaigns based on sentiment and other qualitative data.
Adding qualitative evaluation to existing quantitative metrics allowed the organization to reach its internal media outreach and organizational goals, such as getting coverage of its thought leadership initiatives and community outreach in key outlets, along with reaching its membership growth goal. The organization also now uses Fullintel’s sentiment data when creating new communications goals around improving coverage tone.
MIS scoring provided a qualitative measurement for each media mention, allowing the organization to go beyond surface numbers and glean deeper insights from its coverage. MIS scoring has also helped every division within the not-for-profit establish quality-driven benchmarks for comparison with other divisions (and for accurate comparisons against itself over time).
Thanks to Fullintel’s expert media curation, MIS scoring, and deep sentiment, the organization’s senior leadership also now has a much better (and more accurate) view of the performance of its communications team. The MIS score is easy for stakeholders to understand, allowing the communications team to spend more time analyzing coverage and less time explaining the score’s methodology and context to senior leadership.
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