| Summary: | The project presented in this report was carried out under a mandate given by Ms Cath Lovatt, Director of the Directorate of Communications and Marketing at the Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH), the fourth largest acute teaching trust in the UK. It aimed at using the balanced scorecard approach to evaluate how the Directorate could assess its progress towards its strategic objectives. The 12-week consultancy project was guided by the research question “What should a ‘gold standard’ balanced communications and engagement scorecard look like for the NUH?”
Comprising three functional heads, Communications, Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) and Business Development and Marketing, the Directorate is interested in adopting a management tool that would enhance its alignment with NUH corporate strategy, demonstrate its contributions to the organisation’s success, and respond to the National Health Service (NHS) measurement requirements in a coherent and strategic way.
The present report proposes a review of three sets of theoretical elements: first, the balanced scorecard approach (Kaplan and Norton, 1992; 1993; 1996a; 1996b; 2000), its application to the healthcare and corporate communication contexts and its limitations; second, the concept of stakeholder and the developing notion of engagement; third, corporate communication measurement frameworks and practitioners metrics. The analysis section details how the balanced scorecard framework was applied to the Directorate’s strategy, how leading and lagging success factors were identified and how certain metrics could enable the Directorate to monitor
these critical factors. The report concludes by presenting a visual example of what a ‘gold standard’ balanced communications and engagement scorecard could look like for the NUH, and by recommending that the Directorate implement this performance management tool, based on the research and analysis discussed in the following pages.
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