Campaigns to End Violence against Women and Girls - Virtual ...

Impact Was the campaign strategy useful in making progress towards the
goal? What difference did the campaign make to the problem it was
trying to address? What are the lasting changes the campaign has
contributed to?
Monitoring the use of resources: In addition to effectiveness (“are we doing the right
thing?”), efficiency (“are we doing things right?”) needs to be monitored so as to ensure
optimal use of campaign resources, including staff and volunteer time, and campaign
infrastructure (management structures, communications tools etc). Some campaigns run
into the problem of having effective goals and a strategy to meet them, but lack
efficiency in terms of how they use their resources to actually implement their strategy.
This can lead to poor outcomes, and the inability to ultimately achieve campaign goals.
Accountability to campaign members and donors to the campaign also needs to be
considered. Finances and Fundraising presents key issues related to budgeting and
financial accountability.
Monitoring external factors: The term “external factors” refers to factors that are not
directly part of the campaign – most commonly, activities by individuals, groups or
organizations outside of the campaign that may have an impact on the campaign, or
changes in the political, economic, social or technological context. Since the number of
such factors is virtually unlimited, monitoring should focus only on those that are crucial
for the success of the campaign, e.g. public opinion swings and media coverage of the
campaign issue.
GETTING AND RECORDING THE INFORMATION
The people involved in the campaign – the campaign team, alliance members, volunteer
activists –, and the target audiences and stakeholders – are key sources of information.
In most campaigns, significant amounts of monitoring are informal and unrecorded:
observations and discussions before, during and after campaign events. For effective
monitoring however, a certain degree of formalization is needed.
It is important to design forms and build routines, such as regular meetings, and keep
regular records that can be the basis of future monitoring reports. Ideally, tools that
produce only the data needed for effective monitoring should be applied, and only
information that is crucial to monitor the key aspects of the campaign should be
collected. Reports should be precise and concise, and regularly discussed at team
meetings. It can be demotivating and wasteful for campaigners to fill in reporting and
data collection sheets that will be left unused.
Given the multi-faceted nature of campaigning, there is virtually no limit to the tools and
methods that can be applied in monitoring. Observation, interviews, focus group
discussions, web tracking tools – monitoring data can be collected in many ways.
Common tools are often adapted to the specific monitoring (and evaluation) needs of a
programme. See Data collection for more information on the kinds of tools that can be
used.
Examples: The “barefoot” impact assessment methodology developed for a
community radio programme in Mozambique shows how methods can be combined
creatively to match the character of a campaign and its information needs. It focused on
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Campaigns December 2011