Campaign Success

Deciding what constitutes success for your campaign depends on a vast array of factors and is completely dependent on what you yourself would consider a success. You may be advocating for a policy change, trying to influence the behaviour of a specific group of beneficiaries, or even trying to give people access to a specific service. Success depends on the campaign’s scope and the targets you set at the beginning.

Broadly there are two main types of objectives to campaigns: policy influence and behaviour change. The first is mainly concerned with changing or protecting policies, while the second is about changing the behaviour of ‘the public’ or specific groups — their attitudes, opinions or actions.

Why Do We Ask What Success Is?

Campaigning is a powerful tool for bringing about social change, but it can be risky as it does involve the spending of often scarce time and money on activities for which success is far from guaranteed. Measuring the impact of your campaigning will raise your confidence in pursuing this course, as well as fulfilling your responsibility to assess whether—and how well—your strategy works. And allow you to monitor whether or not your campaign lives up to this promise, bringing advantages that include:

Learning on the job. Campaigns are often complex and long term. They can involve a range of ‘tactics’ running in parallel—a social media campaign, public campaigning stunts, meetings with politicians—and understanding which of these are most effective will give you scope to review and revise your campaigning strategy as you progress.
Accountability to your stakeholders. You will need to communicate very clearly via the causal links between your tactics and the social change you hope to bring about—and report on your progress— to members, funders and beneficiaries (those you are campaigning on behalf of), who will find it easier then to understand the bigger picture.
Appealing to funders. Funders increasingly want to see evidence of impact as a growing number become more strategic in their approach. Demonstrating how your campaigning work has contributed to change will help you attract funding and will also make it easier for funders to monitor their own impact.

What Are the Challenges?

Measuring the effectiveness of campaigning activities is almost always complex. The main challenges include:

Outputs versus outcomes. It is often easier to focus on outputs rather than outcomes. Outputs are usually something you have control over and can count—the number of events held or leaflets handed out, for example—and given how difficult it is to measure campaigning outcomes, it can sometimes be helpful to use outputs as proxy indicators. However, you can only show that your campaigning has an effect if you can evidence the link between what you did and your desired intermediate or final outcomes.
Causality, consistency and predictability. Linking campaigning and outcomes is complex; you may plan exactly the same activities for two different campaigns and get two completely different outcomes. What worked before might not work again because the external environment has changed—in fact, it will often change during the course of your campaign.
Time frame. The pace with which outcomes are achieved is similarly hard to predict, further challenging the flexibility of your measurement framework. Many campaigns must run over a number of years, and change will happen suddenly in some cases and incrementally in others. This can make it hard to judge whether, after a certain period, the effects of the campaign are still forthcoming.
Contribution and attribution. In campaigning, a variety of external factors are beyond your organisation’s control, you will often have no counterfactuals (‘what would have happened if we had not run this campaign?’), and a number of other organisations may be running campaigns in a similar area. This makes it difficult to be certain you were entirely responsible for the change (attribution). In most campaigning work, it is therefore more important to demonstrate that you made a contribution to the change.
Data collection. In some campaigns, it can be difficult to collect data from the people you want to influence. If you are targeting top-level decision makers, it can be hard to get an interview and even more challenging to get an answer from them about why they did (or did not) change their mind on a particular issue. Indeed, there are those in government who say they are not influenced by campaigns. (Source)