How do you prove that your campaign worked?
The most obvious way to prove the success of your campaign is to record the number of new volunteers you recruit. But how can you measure the success of a campaign which aims to increase the profile of a charity in general? Or a campaign designed to improve awareness in volunteering in general?
- Create a brief report on all your PR activities. List the media coverage you achieved, evaluate the content of the coverage and which audiences you reached with your media work. See the article, Recording and evaluating your PR work.
- Set in a place a permanent "how heard" mechanism. Make sure that anyone who emails, calls or visits your organisation are always asked how they heard about your charity/ volunteering.
- Record the amount of activity on your charity/ campaign's website. Find out more about this in the Media Trust's guide to Measuring website success.
- Track new recruits. Randomly select a number of people who contacted your organisation following your media campaign and track their progress. Write up their experiences as case studies, showing how new volunteers are joining your charity.
- Make sure to let everyone know in your organisation about what the campaign achieved; keep your colleagues motivated and engaged in your media work. Send out a newsletter or throw a party to introduce your new volunteers to the rest of the organisation.
Project evaluation and research
For larger volunteer recruitment campaigns and substantial projects you may need to consider commissioning an evaluation report from an independent research body. For example:
If you want to produce your own evaluation report:
- Begin by listing all your campaign activities.
- Record as many of the project's outcomes (such as volunteering enquiries) as possible.
- Paint a picture of your charity's media profile and work before your campaign began. Explain the challenges you faced when you began the project.
- Consider running focus groups with your target audience (those you wanted to volunteer) to discover what they responded to and what they didn't like about your media campaign. Have a look at the Billion Minutes evaluation (as part of the Year of the Volunteer Review).
- Do a few in-depth interviews with new volunteers about how they heard about your charity and what inspired them to get involved.
- You can send out questionnaires and surveys to your new recruits and to your target audience. Ask them for feedback on your campaign.
Have a look at the evaluation Special Constables did for their "Could you?" campaign.
Volresource.org.uk have a good beginner's guide to project evaluation.
Volunteering England provide advice to charities in their online Good Practice Bank about Monitoring and evaluating a volunteer programme.
For a basic guide to research techniques have a look at this free online guide, Proving and improving: a quality and impact toolkit for social enterprise.
Read the next article in this section.... Renewing your media strategy
