Evaluating Success for Your Campaign Strategy

by The Campaign Workshop

 

Campaign Strategy Success

Because They Don't Hand Out Medals for Campaign Strategy

Now more than ever, it's important to set measurable goals for success and to evaluate your campaign strategy against those goals. What may have worked for another campaign may fail miserably for yours, so keeping your benchmarks for success in mind will be critical. Let's look back at evaluating the success of your campaign strategy. 

What is success? This is not always the question folks ask when developing a campaign strategy but it should be.  When starting on a new project, or even evaluating an older one, it’s important to set goals and measure the success of your campaign strategy.  Think about the goals for campaign strategy. Success metrics shouldn’t just be, “did it work?” Rather, you need measurable benchmarks that are meaningful to your organization.  Albert Einstein once said, “Everybody is a genius.  But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’ll spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.”  If you define the success of your campaign strategy by the wrong metric, you can end up continuing a program that isn’t working as well as it should, or worse, cutting off a project because it was not “climbing trees.”

 

When it comes to campaign strategy, there is a difference between solutions and success.  There are a number of ways to solve any given problem, but some solutions may have unintended consequences or be organizationally untenable.  It’s also important to set realistic goals and measure your progress as you go to get a clearer picture of what elements make something successful for your individual campaign or organization.

Be strategic about primary and secondary goals, and use both when evaluating success.  Perhaps your event didn’t raise quite as much money as you had hoped, but it did get a ton of publicity and a number of new supporters who may turn up for the next one, for example.  If your primary goal was to raise money, then perhaps you should look into other fundraising strategies, while you may want to hold low-cost events in the future for the secondary goal of growing your organization’s membership and public profile.  By splitting our goals, and definitions of success, rather than eliminating “failed” fundraising events, we get a more accurate picture of our strengths and weaknesses and what to do differently to make our next attempt successful.

How do you judge the success of your campaign strategy? Leave a comment or drop us a line here: