How to Measure Cleantech PR Before the Next Raise

At some point before a Series B, C, or D, someone in the room says it. “We need PR before the raise.” The CEO says it. The board says it. Sometimes a lead investor says it. And then they look at the CMO or the CCO.

What happens next is where most cleantech communications programs go wrong before they start.

The CMO who hasn’t been given a clear brief has two options: go figure out the scope and sell it back to the board, or ask the board what they actually need to see.

Most choose the first option. It’s faster, it feels more confident, and it avoids an uncomfortable conversation. But if you build a CleanTech PR program without understanding what the board needs to see to feel ready to raise, you’ve built something that can’t prove its own value.

Then the question comes. It always comes.

“How will we know PR is working?”

If you don’t have a measurement framework ready before the program starts, that question will stop you cold every time someone asks it.

Why the measurement conversation has to happen first

The cleantech fundraising environment makes this more urgent right now, not less. It now takes twice as long as it used to for a company to raise a Series B, and the market has shifted decisively toward what observers are calling a flight to quality.

Over $300 billion in IRA and IIJA funds are currently stalled, including nearly $50 billion in already-approved loans, and the policy environment continues to shift in ways that create real narrative risk for companies raising against a technology thesis that was easier to tell two years ago.

Investors at growth stages are asking harder questions and taking longer to decide. That’s the environment a cleantech CMO is operating in right now. And in that environment, a PR program that produces coverage but can’t demonstrate a connection to investor perception, market credibility, or valuation positioning isn’t going to hold up to scrutiny from a CFO who wants to know what the line item is buying.

The measurement problem isn’t unique to cleantech. But the stakes are higher here because the raises are larger, the timelines are longer, and the proof points that investors need are different from the ones that work in most B2B sectors.

Pipeline and MQLs don’t map to institutional investor perception. You need a different framework.

The question most CMOs don’t ask before the program starts

When I start a conversation with a cleantech CMO who’s been handed the PR mandate, the first thing I ask is: how are you measuring it now?

Not how do you want to measure it, how are you measuring it today. Because the answer tells me everything about what the board actually asked for, and whether the CMO and the board are aligned on what success looks like.

Most of the time, the answer is some version of coverage volume and impressions. Those are activity metrics. They measure output, not outcome. And they’re the easiest thing to report because they’re available and they’re legible.

But they’re also the metrics that most quickly lose a board’s confidence, because a sophisticated investor or CFO can look at a coverage report and immediately ask: what did this do for the raise?

What the right question actually is

The harder, more useful question is: what would have to be true, in terms of market perception, investor awareness, or narrative positioning, for this company to be better positioned for this raise than it was 12 months ago?

That’s the question a measurement framework should be built to answer. And it’s almost never the question that gets asked before the agency brief goes out.

What cleantech PR measurement actually needs to account for

Multiple audiences, different signals

First, you’re managing multiple audiences simultaneously, and they don’t respond to the same signals.

The institutional investor needs to see market conviction and a clear path to returns. Policy and regulatory stakeholders need to see mission credibility and operational seriousness. Strategic partners need to see reliability and commercial readiness.

Coverage that moves one of those audiences can create noise with another. A measurement framework that only tracks total coverage volume won’t catch that problem until it’s already cost you something.

Narrative risk in a shifting policy environment

Second, the policy environment right now means narrative risk is higher than it’s been in years.

In Q1 2025, six manufacturing projects tied to $6.9 billion of investment were cancelled, the highest value of quarterly cancellations on record.

A regulatory shift or a subsidy change can reframe your entire market story overnight. A PR program built on a thesis that depends on policy stability is a program without a contingency.

Measurement needs to include how well the company’s narrative holds under that kind of pressure, not just how much coverage it generates when conditions are favorable.

Credibility as a measurable asset

Third, the timeline from technology validation to commercial scale in cleantech is long enough that earned credibility is often the only quantifiable asset available ahead of revenue.

That changes how brand authority gets calculated. The royalty relief method, share of voice relative to share of market, and CAC efficiency improvements from brand awareness are the frameworks that translate PR into language a CFO and a board can work with.

They require setup work before the program starts. But they’re also the frameworks that survive the “how will we know it’s working” question.

The internal alignment problem nobody talks about

There’s a version of this challenge that’s entirely internal, and it’s the one I see derail good communications programs most often.

Narrative gets siloed. Product teams carry one version of the company story. Finance carries another. Communications carries a third.

Each version is technically accurate. None of them are the same story, and investors feel the fragmentation even when they can’t name it.

The CMO who gets handed the PR mandate is often the only person trying to hold all three versions together. And they’re doing it without the political authority to tell the CFO that the financial narrative needs to connect to the market story, or to tell the CTO that the product roadmap needs to be communicated in a way that investors can evaluate.

That’s a structural problem, not a communications problem. But the CMO owns it by default.

What fixes it

The fix is to get product, finance, and communications in the same room before the agency brief goes out.

Not to agree on messaging, that comes later. But to agree on what success looks like for this raise, what the board needs to see, and what each team’s contribution to that outcome actually is.

A PR program that starts from that alignment is fundamentally different from one that starts from a coverage goal.

Where to start if you’ve already been handed the mandate

If you’re past the point of setting up the framework before the program started, the first move is to go back to the board and have the conversation that should have happened at the beginning.

Not to relitigate the decision to invest in PR, but to get explicit agreement on what the board needs to see to consider PR successful in the context of this raise. It’s an uncomfortable conversation. It’s also the only one that produces a measurement framework with credibility.

The second move is to pick a valuation framework and apply it before the program gets much further. Climate tech venture capital investment declined 20% in H1 2024 compared to H1 2023.

In a tighter market, the companies closing rounds are the ones that can tell the clearest story about where the market is going and why they own a piece of it. That story has a value. It can be measured. And a CMO who can connect PR activity to brand value in terms a CFO recognizes is a CMO who doesn’t get cut when budgets get tight before the raise closes.

The work that moves institutional investors happens in the 12 to 18 months before the pitch. The bylines, the conference presence, the media narrative, the way executives show up in conversations they didn’t initiate.

None of that is measurable after the fact. But all of it is measurable in advance, if the framework is in place before the program starts.