Public relations professionals use many different methods to demonstrate their contribution to organizational goals, yet it is unclear how the reporting of public relations success measures up to real outcomes. Ten years after the International Public Relations Association produced a gold paper on public relations evaluation, this study uses data from industry campaign awards to identify how practitioners use evaluation to demonstrate their success. Results suggest that media evaluation methods continue to dominate evaluation techniques and practitioners often mismatch objective and evaluation types in their campaign reporting, and fail to demonstrate how specific objectives have been achieved
