Evaluating campaigns

Submitted by Lee Webster on Thu, 05/05/2011 - 15:04

Hi campaigning folks,

Hope you're all well! I'm doing an evaulation of the Voices Against Violence campaign for CARE International UK - looking at the usual things of measuring success against objectives, assessing external coverage, examining awareness in parliament. However, I'm wondering what the best way to put the evaluation together is. Each question opens up more questions than answers, and I could spend the next two years evaluating the last two!

Could any of you provide what you think are good examples of campaign evaluations, or share your top tips or resources?

Look forward to some evaluation chat!

Lee

Submitted by Emma Taggart on Wed, 11/05/2011 - 12:10.

Hi Lee

The silence in response to your question might indicate that evaluating campaigns is a tricky subject – lots of organisations never evaluate their campaigns and those that do often struggle to work out how to do it. So CARE International UK is to be congratulated on giving it a go – more charities should be willing to put campaigning work under the spotlight to show it’s having an effect, especially at the moment when there is increased pressure to justify budgets and staff.

I don’t think there’s a ‘one size fits all’ approach. It’s more a case of working out which information sources will give you an indication of the changes in policy or practice that have occurred as a result of your work. That can mean looking at media coverage, MP awareness, Government policy etc, but obviously what you look at is determined by who or what your campaign targeted. You might also want to speak directly to some of the people who have been targeted by or involved in the campaign to find out what they make of it. At the very least it’s important for campaign teams to regularly review their work to pinpoint what’s working and what isn’t (I know that’s difficult for you because you work alone).

The key thing to remember is not to look for evidence of a causal effect i.e. “we did x and y happened as a direct result”. Instead, aim to build up a picture and a reasonable argument about why what you’ve done has contributed to change. Campaigning is not an exact science so it’s very hard to say with certainty that change happened as a result of your work but it should be possible to make an informed assessment of the likelihood of how your work contributed, alongside other variables, to achieving change.

As for how to put the evaluation together, I think you need to decide at the outset what you’re going to look at and who you’re going to talk to and resist the temptation to keep delving deeper – as you say, you could spend as much time evaluating as campaigning so you need to keep it light touch and draw a line somewhere!

Good luck!

Emma

Submitted by SarahShimminGilbert on Wed, 25/05/2011 - 10:26.

Hello Lee

Thanks for posting this question, and thanks for your really helpful comments, Emma. I've come up with four main thoughts that could help keep your evaluation focussed, partly based on my own experinecing of campaigning but also experience of evaluating campaigns for other organisations;

Be clear about the purpose of your evaluation. It may seem obvious, but by setting out why you are evaluating your campaign and what you hope to get out of evaluating your campaign, you can focus on evidence and findings that are most relevant. This doesn't mean disregarding other information or lines of enquiry, but can help to keep the evaluation focussed on exporing avenues that are most relevant. What questions are you trying to answer?
Identify the audiences for your evaluation; who is the evaluation primarily for, and how do you want them to change (think, feel or act differently) as a result of knowing about the difference your campaign has made? You yourself are likely to be a key audience, but what would your chief executive, a donor or campaign activist, for instance, want to know about the impact of your campaign? Again, being explicit about this could help you to keep focussed because key audiences are likely to want to know about specific aspects of your campain, or are likely to prefer information in certain formats.
Try to avoid 'just-in-case' data colletion. Emma has mentioned some useful places you may go to, to find out about the impact of your campaign. Focussing on your purpose and audiences for your campaign evaluation can help to ensure you only collect the information you need, in order to fulil the purpose and meet the needs of your audiences. Data collection can cost time and money, so only collect what you know you will use.
Learning. Evaluating a campaign is a fantastic opportunity to learn from your experiences. Learning from your experience and using it to improve campaigning in the future is a very valuable part of evaluating a campaign, in my opinion this should be a main driver for doing an evaluation.

I think Emma's point about assessing your contribution to change, as opposed to only focussing on how much of the change people attribute to your campaign, is great - this is much more realistic and achieveable!

Good luck with it, Lee, I hope this was helpful.

Sarah

Submitted by Virpi Oinonen on Wed, 25/05/2011 - 14:23.

Hi Lee,

You might also want to have a quick look at these two presentations:

evaluation case study by Hugh Mouser (Global Witness) presentation at the NCVO campaigns conference
Meaningful and Manageable Campaign Evaluation by Susie Rabin

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