Monitoring and evaluating your campaign

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Campaigners 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 overall campaign to draw out learning that can be fed into your future campaign work.

Why monitor and evaluate campaigns?

Regular monitoring and evaluation can strengthen the impact of your campaigns.

A powerful evidence base can support your campaign to spur on supporters to take further action 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 into practice and whether the desired change makes a real difference to people's lives.

Monitoring and evaluation is also crucial for supporting wider organisational 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:

• keep it simple and in proportion to your campaign: a large campaign 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
• aim to gather a mix of evidence from internal and external sources
• be clear from the outset, clarify roles and responsibilities and make time for this in campaign planning - this can be built into existing structures such as team meetings and one-to-one meetings
• measure the impact or the effects of your activities rather than the effort put in, for example number of postcards sent or events held
• 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:

• What are we doing well and what should we continue doing?
• What are we doing ‘okay’ or badly and what can we improve?
• What was supposed to happen, what actually happened and why were they different?
• 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 reflection 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.

Further reading

Is your campaign making a difference? (NCVO): comprehensive three part guide to monitoring and evaluating campaigns. Part A: Getting the basics in place is available as a free download.

Campaigning for Success (NCVO): understanding impact and knowing when you have ‘won’ your cause.

Have your say

Do you monitor and evaluate your campaigns? Do you do it at the end of your campaign or during the campaign? What tools do you use? How much time does it take?

Have your say on the Campaigning and lobbying forum.