How do you know if a social change campaign is really effective?

Liking Isn’t Helping. Be A Volunteer. Change A Life

You’ve created a great campaign, and everybody likes it. But how do you know if it’s really going to stick?

Well, for sure it’s not simply how many people said they “liked it,” on Facebook, or said they “thought it was cool,” or “out of the box” creative. It isn’t even how many awards the campaign won, like the campaign above for Crisis Relief Singapore, produced by Publicis, that won a Gold Lion at Cannes.

Not that it’s not nice to win awards (think swag!), but as far as the impact of a particular campaign on a social, environmental, or health issue, it really doesn’t mean snuff. If the objective was to win an award at Cannes, well they nailed it. One main objective of this campaign would likely be (I’m guessing) the number of volunteers who have signed up and shipped out to help CRS with their good work as a result of seeing this campaign. Another objective may have been to raise funds, as there are probably some people who would like to volunteer but would rather give money instead. This is not to criticize CRS, they could have succeeded on all those fronts. I only use this as an example to demonstrate that success on a social level may not always mean success on a social marketing level.

I came across this article today, on alternative news aggregate site called True Activist, a repost from a site called Bored Panda, with the headline: 40 of the Most Powerful Social Issue Ads That’ll Make You Stop and Think. The article was posted on May 29, and in 13 days, has almost a million and a half likes on Facebook between the two sites. No doubt lots of people love talking about these campaigns and their supposed efficacy, creativity, or even genius. But the key word is supposed. How do we know for sure if our campaign is successful, and how do we measure that success?

The 40 ads in this article are clearly not designed for the same purpose, and I don’t mean purpose as in cause, but by function. Some are fundraising campaigns, others are social marketing campaigns, advocacy, or behavior change campaigns.

I’d be interested to see the impact evaluations of each (if they were done, unfortunately a big if), to see how their efficacy was measured. Most of us in the social marketing field know that without creating a research, monitoring, and evaluation plan, we will never know if a campaign is hitting its mark, and we won’t be able to revise our tactics mid-stream if it isn’t.

Unfortunately, many NGOs and cause-related organizations unwittingly hand thousands of dollars over to advertising agencies to create snazzy “ad campaigns,” assuming that they’ll do the necessary research on the target audience, create measurable objectives, and set up metrics for their success. They may attempt to do so, but selling behavior and social change is not exactly the same as selling soap. Research, monitoring and evaluation ends up being an afterthought instead of an integral part of the overall budget for the campaign. (Sigh.) So we have development and implementation in a nice glitzy vacuum, and well-meaning NGOs throwing a lot of “change” at ineffective change campaigns.

Don’t get me wrong, some of the campaigns included in this article could be “awesome” on a creative level and still have made an impact. It would be necessary to investigate each as a case study and find out the full story. The point is, when creating our own change campaigns, we won’t know for sure of their success unless we budget for measuring that success up front. At least 10%, (ideally 30%) of the budget should be set aside for monitoring and evaluation (M&E). More and more funders are holding social change campaigns to the same standards that they do their other programs or projects, and planning for M&E will assure that you’ll be able to:

• demonstrate your campaign’s social return on investment in the end;
• have something to legitimately brag about (besides the Gold Lion) and;
• get more funding to boost the campaign next season!

What’s not to like?