Evaluation. Many communicators working for social change within limited budgets balk at the sight of this word, seeing instead, “Abandon hope all ye who evaluate here.” After all, it’s already hard enough to design a communications campaign that stands a chance of competing with corporate-funded campaigns. How can we afford to set aside precious resources for evaluation? The answer is that with limited resources to achieve goals, we can’t afford to merely hope for success.
CONSCIOUS EVALUATION
Rather than abandon hope for evaluation, take hope, because evaluation doesn’t have to be expensive or extraordinarily time-consuming. By incorporating an evaluative process at the beginning of the campaign planning process, evaluation can become a trusted comrade, offering crucial guidance in all the stages of your effort—even making you a communications rock star. The best evaluation occurs when you are conscious of its role in every stage of the campaign, from planning to implementation to conclusion. Evaluation helps direct, focus, test and inspire your campaign.
1. Direct: Evaluation is your best informant and partner as you determine your audience, messages and overarching strategies.
2. Focus: As you execute the campaign, evaluation helps sharpen a campaign’s focus and serves as a reminder of its original goals and objectives. While unintended consequences may come to light in this process—both positive and negative—evaluation helps put them in perspective and serves as a disciplining mechanism to keep the initiative on track. And sometimes evaluating negative consequences can help justify access to funds for bigger and better campaign activities in the future.
3. Test: Pilot testing offers a means to evaluate a campaign prior to a full launch, but it’s also advisable to conduct periodic check-ins to ensure the tactics remain effective and that resources are spent wisely. Testing can take the form of a demonstration project at a single site, or with a smaller media market or target group.
4. Inspire: Nothing energizes a campaign more than hard data, revealing its messages are effective and target audiences are changing behaviors. Such results can be empowering and inspiring—but only if your organization makes an effort to find out.
LOGICAL PROCESS
That covers the “why,” but what about the “how” of evaluation? Enter the logic model. Logic models are a way to visualize and monitor the progress of a campaign, much like a blueprint for the construction of a building. They take very complex ideas, copious amounts of creativity and lofty goals and convert them into a simple, one-page visual representation. They capture the campaign’s ecosystem in its entirety and can be shared with key stakeholders (including funders) throughout the process.
Although logic models come in a variety of shapes and sizes, their basic properties are relatively similar. They generally describe in graphic form the overall situation, priorities, inputs, outputs, outcomes, assumptions, external factors and success indicators for a campaign or public intervention. Revisiting your logic model at regular intervals provides the focus outlined earlier, as this will ensure your plan is on track with your desired outcomes and impact.
Before you plan your next campaign or even a more modest communications effort, find or make a logic model template that you like, and use it to guide ideas, inspire possibilities and structure the change you seek. Remember that capturing an entire campaign in a one-page graphic takes time and effort. Be patient and allow your creativity to take shape, and use existing data to make sure you are realistic in your predictions.
By laying the groundwork for evaluation, you will be well on your way to implementing a communication evaluation plan. The full approach is reviewed below:
• Gather the people who matter most to your campaign.
• Together, propose a goal and objectives.
• Apply your goal and objectives to the development of a logic model.
• Use your own logic model success indicators to determine key evaluation questions.
• Identify how you will measure or answer each of those questions.
• Determine timeline, budget and staffing.
• Implement evaluation plan.
Now, what’s so scary about that? PRN
CONTACT:
Maria Rodriguez is the president of Vanguard Communications in Washington, D.C., a PR agency communicating for social change. She can be reached at [email protected].