Calculating your ROI, or return on investment, from a new marketing campaign can be simple. It’s about seeing how much revenue has been gained through the channels that the new campaign opened up. Calculating a ROSI, or return on security investment, isn’t always so easy.
Where marketing campaigns can be quantitive in nature, that is, explainable in percentages and profit increases, security is a bit trickier. Those of us in the security industry and our many satisfied clients know, however, that security is well worth the investment both in terms of physical as well as peace of mind.
Qualitative measures are those that are subjective. Researchers measure qualitative measures by conducting surveys and interviews. It’s more about getting the story than hard data or numbers. Certain similarities between stories can be counted, though, and insight gained from understanding multiple people’s experiences.
One way to qualitatively measure security ROI are to track the malicious activity (or lack thereof) at your community, company, or facility since bringing on extra security. If the ROSI is good, you’ll see a substantial decrease in criminal activity.
If there is a security-related incident, you can see how the event was handled. Was the threat handled more efficiently? Were less assets lost? How soon was the security guard able to identify and diffuse the situation? These are all solid measures of qualitative ROSI.
Next week we’ll look further into quantitative measures of ROSI and how numbers can prove security is a worthwhile investment for your company, property, or community.
