If you’re studying French, the answer to this post title is a simple “yes.” But if you work in PR, the answer is a little fuzzier. Creating success is critical, but making a measurable financial return your benchmarking metric can be a major mistake. When you partner with a PR firm, you’re paying for more than dollars and cents, you’re paying for sentiment, positioning and clarity – things you can’t put a dollar figure on. Here are some ways you can maintain accountability, track progress and measure success with your PR partner. 

Swaying sentiment

How do people feel about your organization? If you sit in your lobby, at your bar or in a committee meeting, it won’t take long for you to feel what the sentiment is. But you can benchmark and track sentiment by making a few small process changes! If your company receives online reviews, have you noticed trends upward or downward in your star rating? Start tracking your scores and see how the trend moves. Talk with your frontline staff about their interactions with clients or customers. Are new people coming because of referrals? Or are existing clients calling with grievances or pain points? You can also include simple questions in your phone screening process to gather qualitative insights into how people view your business. Make it a regular practice to monitor your organization’s social media presence. Is what’s said good, bad or neutral? Any or all of these practices can help you gauge sentiment and determine whether your PR efforts to sway public opinion are working. 

Perfecting positioning

Public relations can help you define your brand in the market. The return here? That the exact people who need to find you can find you, and the people who don’t, well, they don’t. Tracking this can be simple. When you field online inquiry forms, are they increasingly relevant? Do calls to your team align with the key messages you’re pushing? If the media needs a source in your area, do they reach out to you as a subject matter expert? With professional positioning, you’ll see measurable results in these areas (and more)!

Creating clarity

Clarity is a primary aspiration, but can be difficult to achieve. With messages spanning multiple channels and audiences, you need skilled professionals to weave them together into clear, concise content. How do you know if it’s working? As with the previous two points, the proof lies in your business interactions. If people come prepared for their appointments with the necessary documents, or customers understand how to apply their reward points at checkout, that could be key indicators that you’ve created clear communication with your team. If your customers are engaging with your products and services as you want them to, you’re moving in the right direction. 

Public relations isn’t immeasurable – far from it. But if you’re measuring PR success against the wrong metrics, you may find that your perceived “return” doesn’t align with your actual results. If you’re looking to see results in any of these areas in 2026 (or beyond), we can help make that happen.