ten suffer from a lack of credibility, especially when they attempt to recommend some intervention that is outside their usual specialty. They often have little access to management, and are not a part of the executive decision-making team. Integrated communication models require new approaches that often require significant change and resources — often more than the typical employee communication specialist, PR agent, or trainer can martial. As Schultz (1993c, p. 5) points out, “Some of the difficulty in integration is a result of many organizations never viewing communication as important to their overall success.” Because integrated communication interventions are often “high risk, high gain”, there is a necessity for rigorous evaluation in terms of bottom-line return on investment. Dozier (1990) argues that program research, the use of quantitative and qualitative research techniques to plan and evaluate communication programs, is still considered something new to most practitioners. Although such “hard” measures may still be considered innovative and are not well-established in traditional practice, he insists that they are essential to the progress of the field. However, communicators often lack the skills to develop business plans and conduct formal program evaluation, and such rigorous evaluation carries the risk of pointing out failure. An even more important consideration is how communicators themselves are evaluated and compensated. Now, professional communicators are often evaluated and rewarded on the quantity rather than quality of their output — how many brochures and newsletters they produced, how many hours of training they designed, or how many ads they placed. Clients and managers need to alter the current system. “Agencies must move to media neutrality. That simply means they must move away from being driven by media commissions and find a new method of compensat...
