Anatomy of successful campaigns and public advocacy initiatives

Recently someone asked me what makes a good public advocacy campaign? Well, I guess this is one of those questions with many answers.... What follows is based on my personal experience, which I hope you will find useful.

Ingredients for a sound public advocacy campaign

Campaigns and public advocacy are time-bound activities that are anchored in and support a communication/corporate strategy. As such they need to have an inspiring goal and an aspiration outcome, along with clear:

• purpose and context
• timeline
• messages
• informative and creative assets
• call to action

Campaigns come to life because there is a need to raise awareness about a topic. And a  successful campaign is one that informs and inspires and triggers action. 

During a campaign you inform your audience about the selected topic with the goal to build a movement. You inspire people to take to heart and rally around the topic so that ultimately you encourage policy makers and citizens to act and as a result bring about the necessary change. 

Change comes in different flavors, ranging from consumer/citizen behavior change to changes in national, regional and international legislature, to civil society becoming a die-hard advocate for your cause, to “nay-sayer” joining your movement, to investment in R&D, to businesses and industries embracing, internalizing and acting on the campaign messages and call to action and eventually to legally binding treaties.

The roadmap to success starts by clarity on what you want to measure:

• who do you want to reach and what do you want from them
• what is the focus of the campaign and why do you want to focus on this topic at this moment in time
• how are you planning to reach your audience
• what behavioral and policy changes you want to bring about
• what is the duration of your campaign/public advocacy activity

 As communicators, our goal is for the campaign or a public advocacy activity to go viral. And for this to happen the campaign needs to:

• be authentic
• show the organization’s heart
• be emotionally engaging
• pay tribute to and entertain the audience
• show you care about the topic and the audience
• show you’ve created content that is relevant to cause and the audience
• have simple and jargon free messages and campaign assets
• take a stand so that it can bring about the necessary policy and/or behavioral change

Last but not least, seasoned communicators know that flexibility to address emerging and new needs is a key ingredient to success. In other words, no matter how well planned your campaign and public advocacy activity is, it is never set in stone,  rather it is fluid and dynamic, as you need to constantly take stock of audience sentiment and feedback.

Measuring success
To show the impact of your campaigns and advocacy activities, and to go beyond the anecdotal examples you need to show how much you “moved the needle” on the campaign topic. In other words did you achieve your inspiring goal and aspirational outcome(s). 

To do so, you need to measure against your baseline to assess how well did you inform (by measuring likes, shares, page views etc - this said be careful not to embrace too tightly "vanity metric" ), how well did you inspire your audience  to take the necessary action(s) in terms of concrete commitments, change in behavior, change in trend, change in policy and legislations, investment in R&D, the topic increasingly making the headlines, etc. 

To do so you may wish to consider the following:

• What percentage of the targeted audience engaged with the campaign?
• What percentage of the targeted audience acted on the campaign messages? What did they do? For example, if business and industry were one of the targeted audiences,  did they increase investment in R&D, what changes did they implement to support the campaign’s messaging, call to action and goal.
• What percentage of the targeted audience acted as influencers? Who did what as a result of someone doing something? Who spearheaded to build a community?
• How many “Nay-sayers” moved to the campaign camp? What was the conversion rate?
• What concrete commitments and policy changes the campaign triggered? How many countries committed to meet/address the goals of the campaign? How many businesses rallied around the campaign’s core messages and actions and committed to change something? If you started off the campaign with a focus group, how did the focus group change their behavior?
• Does the campaign still have a life after its official end date? Are people still talking about the campaign, pushing out its messages and making concrete and actionable commitments?
• On a scale to 1-10 where does the campaign topic stand in terms of being a “household name”.
• Did you manage to build my own brand as a campaign/public advocacy service provider?
• Are other industries replicating and/or using elements of your campaign 

I hope you found the above useful and I would love to hear your views and experience in mounting successful and "viral" campaigns.