Introduction The purpose of this study was to better understand communication quality and to find a way of measuring this at the municipal level. Measurement can clarify the added value that communication has for governmental organisations, support accountability and help set priorities for the organisation’s communication policy. In The Netherlands an instrument has been developed to measure the communication quality of municipalities. This was tested and evaluated in four cases. The instrument is draws both on the idea of performance indicators as developed by Kaplan and Norton (1996, 2004a, 2006) and on the auditor and self-assessment procedures as developed by the European Foundation of Quality Measurement