Demonstrating Your Team’s Value: Reporting That Tells the Full Story
It was the quarterly leadership meeting—the one where each department head gave their update to the executive team. The kind of meeting where decisions got made, budgets got shaped, and everyone vied for their work to be seen.
The marketing director had slides. Charts, graphs, conversion rates. A neat table showing how last quarter’s campaign led to a 12-per-cent bump in email signups.
When it was the comms team’s turn, things got quiet.
“We had 14 media mentions,” the team lead offered. “Coverage included the Globe, the Star, and a few trade publications. Sentiment was mostly positive…”
She trailed off.
It’s not that her team hadn’t done the work. They’d fielded who knows how many journalist inquiries, constantly reshaped key messages—often with almost no notice—and prevented countless minor issues from spiraling into something bigger. The kind of work that happens quietly, behind the scenes, every day.
But none of that was in the deck.
Why not?
Because they had no centralized way to capture it. No structured record of the calls, the late-night coordination, the shifting narratives managed across departments. And no easy way to quantify that kind of effort. The team lead had pulled what she could from memory and a few email threads. But translating that into a clear, visual update for a room full of executives—without the right tools—felt almost impossible.
What Comms Teams Know That Leadership Often Doesn’t
At first glance, a quarterly leadership meeting might seem like the perfect opportunity to surface these invisible efforts. But that’s the catch: You can’t highlight what you didn’t capture in the first place.
Communications work is often invisible unless something goes wrong. Leadership rarely sees the frantic coordination behind a well-crafted quote or the 5 p.m. phone call that heads off a negative headline. The media hits that do show up in dashboards are just the visible tip of a very large, very active iceberg.
So why does comms reporting so often fall flat?
Because most teams are only reporting outputs: press releases sent, articles published, quotes included—not outcomes. And even when they try to capture more, the tools just aren’t built for it.
The Real Cost of Underreporting
When teams can’t clearly show their value, two things happen:
- Budgets get cut. Leadership doesn’t fund what it can’t see.
- Teams get burned out. It’s exhausting to do strategic, high-stakes work and feel like no one notices.
Meanwhile, the work keeps piling up. Crisis preparation. Internal messaging. Journalist triage. There’s no line item for “prevented a blowup,” but that’s often the most valuable thing a team does.
What Real Reporting Looks Like
Imagine a monthly report that doesn’t just list mentions, but tells a narrative.
It shows:
- Emerging narratives and how your team proactively shaped them.
- Sentiment trends over time, tied to your messaging pivots.
- Requests handled, categorized by theme, urgency and outcome.
- Key wins, like quotes that aligned with institutional priorities.
- Behind-the-scenes work: briefings prepared, issues tracked, approvals coordinated.
That’s not fluff. That’s strategy.
And it doesn’t have to take hours to compile. Teams that use centralized systems—ones that automatically log media requests, store past responses and track message alignment—can pull this kind of report in minutes.
Telling the Full Story Changes the Game
When comms reporting evolves from reactive recaps to strategic storytelling, something shifts.
Executives stop asking, “Did we get any coverage?” and start asking, “What should we be saying next?”
It becomes easier to justify headcount, to advocate for better tools, to have a seat at the strategic table.
And most importantly, it reminds your own team that the work matters—even when it isn’t visible on the front page.
The next time you’re sitting in a leadership meeting, don’t just talk about media coverage—show the full story. Broadsight helps comms teams report what really matters: the wins no one sees, the crises averted, and the strategy behind every message. See how it works at broadsight.ca.
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