“Campaign evaluation isn’t about proving impact. It’s about gathering enough evidence to make better decisions, adapt your strategy, and recognise progress when change happens slowly.”
SMK Associate James Noble leads our How to Evaluate a Campaign workshop. In this blog he encourages us to see evaluation as a decision-making tool, rather than an accountability exercise, highlighting 3 of the things you‘ll learn on this course:
1. Why evaluating campaigns is different
I’ve worked in charity evaluation for over 15 years and much of the guidance about evaluation has service-delivery in mind. Campaigning is different. We’re trying to achieve change in complex and unpredictable environments, often by influencing people we have little direct control over, such as politicians, journalists or the public. Even when we succeed, progress is usually incremental.
The underlying issue is that the nature of change is different. With a service, you generally know in advance what outcome you’re looking for, and progress should be observable fairly quickly if you’re on the right track. There’s also usually a body of evidence, from past programmes or others working on the same issue, that tells you roughly what to expect and when.
Campaigning rarely offers any of this. Change tends to happen slowly, and in fits and starts, with long periods where nothing seems to be moving followed by sudden shifts. When something does happen, such as a change in the law, you’ll never really know how much of that was down to your campaign as opposed to other organisations, changing public mood, or plain political circumstance. The one thing in campaigning’s favour is that when change does land, it can be genuinely tangible, a new law, a reversed policy, a ban that sticks, in a way that many service outcomes aren’t. But you can’t build an evaluation approach around waiting for that moment, given how rarely and unpredictably it arrives.
2. What good campaign evaluation can help you do
For me, the right focus for campaigners should be on collecting data that helps you make better decisions, and over fairly short-time scales. The important things this kind of approach to evaluation gives campaigners are:
- Structure: It improves the rigour of your thinking by setting out what you’re trying to achieve, for whom and how. In the workshop we explore theory of change as a practical tool for doing this. It doesn’t need to be complicated, just clear about the change you want to see, who can influence it and the contribution you hope to make.
- A shared sense of purpose: Agreeing a theory of change and evaluation plan helps keep everyone aligned. Campaigners often assume they agree on the basics, but evaluation discussions frequently reveal different assumptions. Surfacing and resolving these differences is valuable in itself.
- A framework for checking progress: Most campaign wins are incremental, and success day to day often looks like building momentum rather than winning outright, which can feel underwhelming if you don’t have a framework for recognising it. Identifying shorter-term outcomes gives you a way to ask “is this working?” while there’s still time to adapt, rather than waiting until the end.
3. The importance of learning rather than proving
None of this requires certainty, or proof that your campaign caused a particular change. Rather, a campaign evaluator’s goal is for “good enough” data, reviewed regularly and honestly.
Perhaps the main mistake I see campaigners make is putting evaluation off altogether, because it feels complicated or because they’re worried about getting it wrong. A rough theory of change and a habit of asking simple questions along the way will tell you more than a perfect plan that never gets used.
It’s also worth publishing what you find, or at least sharing it informally with other campaigners. Evaluation tends to be treated as something done privately, for internal learning or for a specific funder. But if every organisation is just evaluating for itself, we won’t be able to collectively understand what moves public opinion or shifts a policymakers’ positions, and the sector keeps having to relearn the same lessons separately.
These are some of the challenges and tools we explore in How to Evaluate a Campaign. The workshop is designed for campaigners who want a practical approach to evaluation. We’ll explore how to build a useful theory of change, identify the data that matters most and use evidence to improve decisions. The aim isn’t to turn you into an evaluation specialist. It’s to give you the confidence and structure to make evaluation work for your campaign.
Join the next workshop
James is leading the workshops on 6 November 2026 and 3 February 2027 and you can book here. If you’d like support before then, or something a bit more bespoke, get in touch by completing this form here.
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