Scope

What is the Scope of your Campaign?

When you plan your campaign, you need to be realistic in choosing an objective. For a campaign, you should identify a specific, direct and achievable goal – for instance, do not try to win a “war” , try instead to win the battle. It is through many small battles like this that wars are won.

When setting your campaign aims, don’t make them broad, like “raise awareness” or “deepen understanding” – these may be byproducts of the campaign, but they are too vague. Your campaign objective should be measurable, and include a specific change or action. Ask yourself: “Who do I want to make do what differently?” When they do it, you can know your campaign has succeeded.

When you plan your campaign, you need to consider what resources you have access to and what actions you are planning to take. Campaigns will usually focus on a community or a country and look at one particular issue or problem at a time. You need to also decide if your campaign has multiple components (sub-campaigns). If it does, you may choose either to narrow the focus of your campaign or create a multiple-campaign strategy.

You also need to think about a timeframe. There is no “standard” duration in campaigns. These can be “high intensity” for 1 or 2 weeks or even days, or they can be “low intensity” for 2-3 months.

Understand the Stakeholders

Stakeholders are people, groups, organisations, or institutions that are connected to your issue. They may support your campaign, be adversely affected by the issue in question, have the power to change the situation, or even be responsible for the problem you have identified. An important task when designing your campaign is to learn as much about the stakeholders as possible. You should:

Understand each stakeholder’s relationship to the problem and your proposed solution
Determine the ability and willingness of stakeholders to help or hurt your campaign
Identify which of these stakeholders your campaign should concentrate on to create the change your desire.

Exercise: List the entities with a stake in your issue. Who creates the problem? Who is affected by it? How and why are these entities connected to one another? Consider each stakeholder’s level of support and level of influence in the context of your campaign. Using the list of the stakeholders, identify as many as possible who could help achieve your objective.

Diffusion of Innovations (Everett Rogers, 1962)

How quickly different groups can be persuaded depends on their acceptance of innovation. Different people adopt ideas or behaviors at different rates. Some people will be innovators in one idea and slackers in another. There is a need to communicate the same message a number of times in order to reach different people. And you should recognise that not everybody will accept new ideas.

2.5% – Innovators or Visionaries – These are the experimenters. They are the risk takers. They change based on information only.
13,5% – Early Adopters or Enthusiasts – They are selective and usually check sources before adopting. They are usually the leaders of change. As the early majority look to them for guidance.
34% – The Early Majority or Pragmatists – Take their time before adopting a new idea. They need to understand the new concept to adopt it. It needs a track record. They are not leaders and will accept change slowly, but quicker than Late Majority.
34% – The Late Majority or Mainstream – Adopt in reaction to peer pressure and emerging agreed realities. Most of the uncertainty around the new idea must be resolved before they adopt. They adopt out of necessity, not out of choice.
16% – Laggards or Resistors – Are traditional and make decisions based on past experience.

The Scope of Engagement

Broad: Is there a way that you can reach national or international communities/support?
Community: Who are the different communities? How will you reach them?
Direct: Is there a direct way to reach the audience (person to person)?

The Quality of Engagement

We look at engagement later in the Toolbox. But at the strategy stage, it is worthwhile considering that – for example – enabling a broad audience to become aware of an issue can get you good numbers, but as you ask your audience to do more, and become more engaged, your campaign may be also more effective, with fewer people. This is the balance between quantity and quality; the quality scale in the level of audience engagement (Source).