About Us:
The History of KDPaine & Partners

The Beginning: Katie Paine Puts Together Some Charts for Lotus

In the fall of 1986, under pressure from her boss at what was then Lotus Development, Katie Delahaye Paine invented a system of media content analysis that looked at each article that had been published about Lotus over the course of the past year and determined if it contained a key message, if it left the reader more likely to purchase a Lotus product, and whether any key spokespeople had been quoted. When she showed her results to her PR agency at the time (Hill & Knowlton), the response was clear: To quote the head of the agency, Bob Strayton, “Anyone not using this by the year 2000 doesn’t deserve to be in business.” 

Paine resigned the following day to start her first measurement company, The Delahaye Group.

The Delahaye Group

In 1995, when the Internet was becoming a major marketing force, Paine invented one of the first systems for measuring consumer generated media, including newsgroups and chat rooms.

By 1999, she’d grown Delahaye to a $4 million business and accepted an offer to merge with Medialink, who later sold it to Bacons, now Cision.

KDPaine & Partners

Dissatisfied with the lack of affordable measurement tools, Paine launched KDPaine & Partners in 2002 to provide measurement that would be affordable for non-profits, government agencies, and smaller businesses.

In order to do that, she needed an affordable, easy-to-use analysis tool. And so the Do-It-Yourself Dashboard was developed, which enables smaller companies to have their own custom dashboards. It also is robust enough to handle the high level analysis needs of major Fortune 1000 companies.

In 2004, with the advent of social media and blogs, Paine created a Consumer Generated Media version of the DIY Dashboard. It integrated social media with traditional media in one dashboard to provide one of the first tools to measure all aspects of social media and integrate results between traditional and new media.

In 2007, Paine published her first book, "Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator's Guide to Success." Click here to read more about "Measuring Public Relationships" the Book.