When planning a PR campaign, you start with a problem or opportunity, and a general goal to overcome or realize that. Objectives give you a way to narrow down your basic PR goal. There two keys to developing effective objectives in your PR plan:

• An objective should be specific.
• An objective should be measurable.

One PR campaign, and one goal, can have multiple objectives, perhaps relating to different key audiences. Let’s use one of our previous example goals, and demonstrate a few specific and measurable objectives towards reaching that goal.

Goal: Raise awareness of our website and what we offer within our target audience.

Objective 1: Increase views to our website to 100,000 per month within six months.

Objective 2: Have 25,000 unique visitors to our website per month within six months.

Objective 3: Have 50,000 registered members of our website within one year.

As you can see, these examples, are specific in that you have a particular number of visitors, views, or members in mind, whereas the goal was simply to increase awareness of the site. By targeting particular results, and giving yourself a particular time frame, you can now measure your success in reaching, or not reaching, your goals.