This course corresponds to Day 3.

Evaluation can play a vital role in helping you document how well your campaign works and why. Many people shy away from evaluation, wary of the cost, concerned that their own performance will be judged, or fearful that an evaluation will cast their program or campaign in a poor light. Yet, the benefits of conducting a systematic and thorough evaluation far outweigh the drawbacks. A well-planned evaluation design can help you do several important things:

• Measure program success (outcome evaluation): For example, did your smoking prevention campaign improve students' knowledge of the danger of smoking? Did it prevent students from starting to smoke? Did your campaign have any unintended effects (e.g., did smoking increase among any segments of your target audience)?

• Determine if the campaign was implemented as planned (process evaluation): This provides a context for understanding your outcomes. For example, if your campaign was ineffective, was that because the message was wrong or because the print ads never made it into the newspaper? Process evaluation is also critical for replication. If your outcomes are good and your evaluation is credible, others may want to replicate your campaign. But they can't unless you provide them with detailed information about how to do it. It's also important to provide information about your program costs and to factor out any start-up costs that someone else will not incur.

• Meet funders' requirements for evaluation: More and more funders are imposing requirements to evaluate as a condition of funding. Recently, some funders have begun to suggest guidelines for how much money should be allocated to evaluation. Funders want to know if they are getting what they paid for.

• Make the campaign more appealing to potential funders: Solid evaluation results can help distinguish your campaign from others. Simply undertaking an evaluation indicates that you are willing to hold yourself accountable.

• Test or improve the efficacy or efficiency of campaign elements: One function of evaluation is to systematically identify and assess the need for changing parts of the campaign.
  
  
  • More specifically, an evaluation can be used to test how a campaign might save money. For example, you may want to find out if you need to place ads in both community newspapers, or just one. You could compare the readership for both papers: If most of your audience reads one paper but few read the other, then you may be able to cancel the second ad without sacrificing effectiveness or compromising your outcomes.


• Address political controversy or public concern: Evaluating your campaign can provide objective information that might resolve controversy between the campaign's critics and supporters.