The Impact of eCampaigning
The impact of e-campaigning is still questioned, despite have made significant contributions to the achievement of campaign objectives over the last 5-10 years. So where has it made and impact and why? What is its value as part of the larger campaigning mix? What are its strengths and weaknesses? How can we prove what its impact is?
This topic could be (depends on you) a sharing of examples, principles and practices that make a campaigning impact, where it doesn't and what it takes to be have an impact.
Are you interested in participating in this group? Then add your name, comments and/or further edit the page with your thoughts, experience and questions to ensure it stays on the agenda.
Blogged at http://mrlloyd.livejournal.com/12869.html
Interested Participants
Format: name, organisation and why this topic?
Ben Beaumont, Oxfam
Branislava, CAFOD. I have few thoughts on this topic which I am greatly interested in...
- I'd say that e-campaigning can be more easily evaluated than campaigning because there is always data to analyse from. So if everyone else could do as much analysis as we can - we'd be lucky. The problem is that most of the time there is very little data from other than online sources.
- As far as I understand from some discussions between campaigners I've been part of, people feel that it's very hard to measure the impact of campaigning overall, not just e-campaigning. So while we can focus on e-campaigning we shouldn't look at it in isolation.
- A challenge is to set appropriate outputs and indicators for the overall campaign and for the e- part of a campaign. People too often come up with indicators without actually thinking through how they will measure them and who will do the measuring. So if an output is something fluffy like "raise awareness", you immediately need to think through how will you measure this - by the increase in the number of new supporters?, increase in income?, increase in the number of subscribers to your e-list?...
Participant Input
Add directly here or via the comments box below.
Measuring impact --Ida Olsen, Fri, 13 Apr 2007 10:41:07 -0500 reply
Ida Olsen, Global Campaigns Coordinator, Plan International
What I consider to be the key challenges: 1) Developing meaningful advocacy/campaign indicators that truly measure impact; 2) Strengtening impact by mainstreaming e-campaigning. Well-timed and intensive bursts of e-activity seems to be most effective; e.g. getting lots of people to e-mail a particular Minister just before a key meeting - this requires people power and resources to enable rapid and extensive mobilisation. Keeping their attention, interest and willingness to act is then critical (e.g. through regular e-mail updates, particularly communicating success). Has anyone done this really well across a number of countries and in a number of languages simultanously? If so, I'd love to hear from you!
Measuring impact: some good examples --myriam, Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:56:28 -0500 reply
There are quite a lot of examples, Ida, from Jubilee 2000 email upsurge before the G8 meetings in 2000 where Gordon Brown's email box was flooded (would never happen now, of course). Then again there was quite a lot of lateral thinking: weekly there were demonstrations to Japanese ambassies around the world, something the Japanese culture is not used to, guaranteeign media coverage by japanese media nearly week-in, week-out even with only 20 people there. There was the first online petition in Thailand a coupel of years ago to drop charges against a Media Justice activist. The fact that it was the first ever online petition in the country boosted the story, but still you needed a lot of press conferences, support from the print media and support from people such as Chomsky to get the message beyond the self censurship. I think Branislava has a point, yet I think the benchmarking will really depend on each campaign (short, targeted, focused such as getting someone out of jail versus long-term changes like trade justice). So it might be worth looking at a range of benchmarks and which can be allocated where, and which are the ones that can be applied to e-campaigning. Yet it needs to be within a broader spectrum of overall advocacy.
Really interested in this --Patrick Olszowski, Tue, 24 Apr 2007 05:25:52 -0500 reply
Patrick, Pr Manager, Action Medical Research
This is very interesting --Oistein, Tue, 01 May 2007 06:42:31 -0500 reply
We need to make sure that we do e-campaigning because it works, not because we think it's easier, cheaper or cooler than other types of campaigning. So this session, I believe, is key.
Jean NUS --Jean, Tue, 01 May 2007 05:49:30 -0500 reply
NUS have just switched to Impact reporting this session would provide a useful framework for this and our upcoming campaign planning season.
Anne - Mencap --AnneF?, Tue, 01 May 2007 05:53:36 -0500 reply
I'd be really interested to hear people's experiences of how they measure effectiveness!
agree --Oistein, Tue, 01 May 2007 06:50:54 -0500 reply
I'm interested in this too --jonathan, Tue, 01 May 2007 07:54:14 -0500 reply
measuring the impact --tracyf, Tue, 01 May 2007 07:15:55 -0500 reply
I agree that the real way forward is being able to set measurable objectives for e-campaigning work to demonstrate its affectiveness, manage expectations and ensure orgs invest the time and effort needed to make it work.
Interested --MartinLloyd?, Tue, 01 May 2007 08:52:29 -0500 reply
Yup, I'm in for this. Would be keen to see examples of what people have been doing, how they measure things at present and get a feel for things like relative traffic levels...
I agree with Oistein --Mariona, Wed, 02 May 2007 03:19:26 -0500 reply
I would really like to know that the e-campaigning we do, works.
Also very interested --Susie Wright, Wed, 02 May 2007 03:35:21 -0500 reply
... perhaps a crossover with the benchmarking discussion? could they be usefully combined? or is it better to keep them separate? what do people think?
Glen Tarman will join this --duane, Wed, 02 May 2007 11:28:40 -0500 reply
Sonia Fèvre will join this --duane, Wed, 02 May 2007 11:32:43 -0500 reply
Emma Guild of Students --emmasavery, Wed, 02 May 2007 12:06:31 -0500 reply
We need to find effective ways of doing this
Interested in this... --emmasavery, Wed, 02 May 2007 12:12:01 -0500 reply
I think a corss over with the benchmarking session would be really good
Echo Chow will join this --duane, Wed, 02 May 2007 13:06:54 -0500 reply
Branislava Milosevic will attend this --duane, Wed, 02 May 2007 15:04:00 -0500 reply
Anne Fox will join this --duane, Wed, 02 May 2007 16:12:26 -0500 reply
Interested too... --Andrew, Thu, 03 May 2007 06:56:42 -0500 reply
Dang there are two Andrews --AndrewDavies, Thu, 03 May 2007 12:03:55 -0500 reply
I would like to here about good examples. I suspect that as a group we're a tad biased in favor of eCampaigning :) But I suspect we'd agree it is not the best strategy for all goals/targets. So what are the criteria we use to decide when ecampaigning should be the primary tool?
If you can't count it, it doesn't count --Brian, Mon, 07 May 2007 18:28:21 -0500 reply
I'm sure every act of campaigning has some impact on the world, but in many cases, impacts are not easily measurable. Assuming the Internet is another communications channel, but one that provides new rules of interactivity and data collection, there are more clues about how people interact with Internet outreach than most other methods. Beyond page views, I'd like to know how organizations use the available data as sampling frames, or as other statistical basses for measuring their outreach impacts.
Behavioural impacts --Brian, Mon, 07 May 2007 19:22:11 -0500 reply
I'm curious if anyone has measured behavioural impacts from online campaigns. For example getting people to recycle or bike more.
Let's crossover benchmarking and impact --Patrick Olszowski, Tue, 08 May 2007 03:20:16 -0500 reply
Feel that a crossover with the benchmarking session would be really useful
Patrick, Action.
Bex Sumner (Greenpeace UK) would like to join this session --bex_sumner, Tue, 08 May 2007 07:59:41 -0500 reply
