During campaign strategy development, the campaign team or alliance determines which elements of the campaign and external factors must be monitored.
This includes:
- Monitoring activities: Are campaign activities implemented as planned, to what effect, and what needs to be adjusted?
- Monitoring target audiences: What are the changes the target audiences undergo that could be ascribed to the campaign activities? Are they moving closer to the campaign position, or the change intended, and adopting any of the campaign language or philosophy?
- Monitoring relationships: How often does the campaign interact with its target audiences and other stakeholders, including the media, and on what subjects? Are the campaigners discussing new ideas? Are the campaigners becoming a confidante or a source of information to influential people?
- Monitoring connectedness: To what extent does the campaign connect with its audiences and other stakeholders, thus contributing to the emergence of supportive networks? Record the sources and numbers of inquiries received as a result of the campaign. Does the campaign reach the people it’s supposed to? How and where have they heard about the campaign or its message?
Source: Adapted from Community Economic Development – Advocacy: Monitoring Indicators, The Banffshire Partnership Ltd Access Project.
Example: Stop it Now! an awareness-raising and behaviour-change campaign that was launched in 1995 in Vermont (USA) was assessed on the basis of the following evaluation design (Coffman, J., Harvard Family Research Project, 2003. Lessons in Evaluating Communications Campaigns). Only those components of the campaign theory of change that are highlighted with bold frames in the figure below were systematically monitored and evaluated.