8.4 Evaluating the Campaign

How do you know whether your campaign has had an impact? How can you monitor and evaluate your campaign to know whether it is making a difference? Campaigns are often passionate and action-orientated but frequently under-resourced. For many, monitoring and evaluation may seem like an unaffordable or an unwelcome mechanism of control. But simple and effective monitoring and evaluation can, if implemented well, become a powerful tool for social and political change.

Monitoring. Is about regularly measuring and assessing what is going on during the lifetime of your campaign against your campaign objectives, learning from the findings and adapting your campaign strategy.

Evaluation. Looks back at certain points at your campaign to draw out learning that can be fed into your future campaign work. So, evaluations do compare between the actual outcomes with the planned outcomes, which was determined in the beginning. Here, we have to analyse the results (equal, positive, or negative). The to take actions about any strange results, that might need corrective ones.

Why Monitor and Evaluate Campaigns?

Regular monitoring and evaluation can strengthen the impact of your campaigns. A powerful evidence base can supports your campaign to spur on supporters to take further actions or demonstrate that certain policies are improving people's lives to be decision-makers.

In the post-campaign period it can be extremely useful to monitor how any policy commitments translate...

8.4 Evaluating the Campaign

...into practice and whether the desired change makes a real difference to people's lives. Monitoring and evaluation is also crucial for supporting wide organizational learning and influence future campaigns and strategy. It can also be used to demonstrate accountability to stakeholders providing evidence for feedback on performance.

When and How to Monitor and Evaluate Campaigns
You should identify what you want to know and why you want to know it from the outset. Think about involving your beneficiaries or users here so that people who will actually benefit from the campaign are able to inform the indicators of what success will look like and how you will know when your campaign has achieved its goal.

The key points to remember are:

1.	Keep it simple and in proportion to your campaign: a large company may benefit from an external

evaluation and the perspective that brings; for a small campaign sitting round with colleagues pondering

the key questions and what you can learn may be the best way.

2.	Aim to gather a mix of evidence from internal and external sources.

3.	Be clear from the outset, clarify roles and responsibilities and make time for the campaign planning -this

can be built into existing structures such as team meeting and one-to-one meetings.

4.	Measure the impact or the effects of your activities rather than the effort out in, for example number of

postcards sent or events held.

8.4 Evaluating the Campaign

5.	Attributing credit or trying to prove causal links between campaign activities and social change can be

complex; instead of looking for proof, build evidence that could reasonably be used to make a connection.

Key questions to ask:

1.	What are we doing well and what should we continue doing?

2.	What are we doing 'Okay' or badly and what can we improve?

2.	What was supposed to happen, what actually happened and why were they different?

3.	In what ways has our understanding about the situation deepened or changed?

Monitoring and evaluation is tied into the campaign culture that you work in. It's about creating space and time for reflecting and learning. It should be OK to make a mistake but not to keep on making the same mistake.

Your overall aim should be to carry monitoring and evaluation out as well as you can in the circumstances and then learn from your experiences.

What is Impact?
The term 'impact' is used in different ways. It can be seen as the broad, longer-term effects of your work, or the institutional changes it brings about. However, for nonprofits it is also used to mean the outcomes achieved for your immediate user group, whether occur in the short or long term. The crucial distinction to make is...

8.4 Evaluating the Campaign

...between what you can do (that is, your outcomes, the changes that result from what you do).

The importance of demonstrating impact. It is important to communicate with your stakeholders and the wider public about your work and the difference you make. Information about outcomes has also become part of regulatory requirements. Foundations and other grantmakers are requiring evidence of measurable benefits to clients and commissioners are also focusing on outcomes. More than that, getting information as you go along about how effective you are in achieving positive change in crucial if you are to achieve even more for your client group.

Identify a realistic level of change. Certain types of work intended that take many years to achieve. It may be difficult to get good information over times, so intermediate outcomes may be more important to identify in order to do justice to your work, for example in relation to improved skills and confidence and readiness for work. You may also agree with your funding bodies certain outcomes that you can report on which will contribute towards a desired area of impact.

Standards of evidence. Evidence change outcomes rely on comparing the situation before and after your activities. Even with good outcomes information, it may be difficult to demonstrate that the outcomes are a result of your intervention. To overcome this, evaluations sometimes do a campaign study by setting up a control group and some argue that this will provide a better standard of evidence.

8.4 Evaluating the Campaign

Potential funders and other stakeholders may find the results of an evaluation using a campaign group more persuasive. But a matched campaign group should be the same in all respects -in age, gender, and socio-economic factors- other than the fact that one group only receives the intervention and this can be difficult to establish. It may be even more difficult to get reliable information on the control group if you are relying on external sources for it. For most small nonprofits a control group will not be appropriate, and even for larger ones, the investment of time and resources should be set against what might be limited gains.

Measuring the impact of campaign. You may find it particularly difficult to measure the impact of your campaigns, and how for your particular activities have contributed to a change of public opinion and attitudes, and changed policy and practice. One reason for this is that there are likely to be a number of other significant contributors to any change that is seen. However, you can still demonstrate the effectiveness of your campaigns, for example in building effective partnerships, in mobilising press or public opinion, or gaining important advocate, so it will be important to identify these as planned outcomes from the start and put in place appropriate monitoring.

Get help with evaluating your outcomes and impact. Man organizations are successfully working together with consultants over a period of time to improve the quality of outcome and impact information, and this can be a relatively cost-effective way of improving your reporting on impact. Consultants can help you to establish a monitoring and evaluation framework, to identify appropriate data collection tools or to develop your own. They can carry out interviews to supplement internal monitoring, help with data