Campaigning Wiki

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Summary

Evaluation is the discipline of asking, at planned moments, did the campaign do what it set out to do, and what does that teach the next one? It closes the loop between planning and learning.

Body

Evaluation is what stops the campaign cycle from being a single arc. The People Power Manual closes its Campaign Strategy Guide with a chapter titled “Evaluation and success indicators” and treats it as a first-class part of strategy, not an afterthought [source: people-power-manual]. The Community Tool Box names “planning an evaluation” as one of the core sections of its public-action model, alongside assessing community needs, engaging stakeholders and action planning [source: community-tool-box].

Three kinds of evaluation recur across the campaign literature and should not be confused:

  • Process evaluation — did the campaign deliver what the plan said it would? Tactics run on time, at the scale intended, to the named audiences. The ALA Frontline Advocacy Toolkit’s evaluation step asks: what criteria can you measure, and how? — the questions a process evaluation answers [source: ala-frontline]. The same toolkit explicitly warns against skipping evaluation when the advocacy project “appears to be finished”, because the next project depends on the lessons [source: ala-frontline].
  • Outcome evaluation — did the campaign change anything outside the team? Attitudes, behaviour, policy, institutional practice. The People Power Manual’s “Evaluation and success indicators” chapter pairs this with the SMART objective: the SMART sentence is the test the outcome evaluation administers [source: people-power-manual]. The Community Tool Box treats outcome evaluation as the test of whether the action plan actually produced the change it named [source: community-tool-box].
  • Learning evaluation — what should the next campaign repeat, adapt or stop? The Commons Library runs after-action reviews as the named mechanism for capturing learning, on the principle that a campaign team that does not write down what it learned will re-make the same mistakes next cycle [source: commons-library]. The People Power Manual pairs learning evaluation with movement-resilience work: the campaign’s lessons live in the movement, not in a single organisation [source: people-power-manual].

The Community Tool Box also stresses that evaluation must be planned at the same time as the action plan, not bolted on at the end: data-collection has to be in place before the action runs, or the campaign will not have the evidence it needs to evaluate [source: community-tool-box]. The ALA Frontline Advocacy Toolkit repeats the same warning and asks library advocates to decide “what criteria can you measure?” in the planning step, not after [source: ala-frontline].

A common failure mode is to confuse output indicators (emails sent, meetings held, doors knocked) with outcome indicators (the change the campaign intended). The Commons Library treats this as the most common evaluation error and recommends that every campaign KPI explicitly states what kind of change it measures, so the dashboard cannot accidentally drift from outputs to outcomes [source: commons-library]. The People Power Manual’s evaluation chapter pairs this discipline with indicators: each indicator has an owner, a baseline and a review cadence, and the evaluation step is a periodic read of those indicators [source: people-power-manual]. BetterEvaluation’s framework adds that the choice of evaluation method depends on what is appropriate for the campaign’s particular situation — for advocacy specifically, empowerment evaluation and Most Significant Change techniques are often better suited than conventional impact evaluation, because they capture qualitative shifts in agency and voice that matter for campaign outcomes [source: betterevaluation].

Use it for

Closing a campaign cycle with a documented debrief; deciding whether to continue, scale or stop a tactic; reporting to a funder, board or coalition; feeding the next campaign plan.

Types of evaluation answer different questions, and the campaign should match the type to the decision being made:

TypeQuestionWhen
FormativeIs the design sound?before / early
ProcessAre we implementing as planned?during
OutcomeDid the intended changes occur?after a phase
ImpactWhat lasting difference did we make?well after
SummativeOverall, was it worth it?at close

The Community Tool Box’s evaluation chapters pair these types with the moment the team needs to decide — formative before launch, process weekly, outcome at each milestone, summative at close [source: community-tool-box]. The ALA Frontline Advocacy Toolkit asks the same question — when do we need to know? — and warns against skipping evaluation when the advocacy project “appears to be finished”, because the next project depends on the lessons [source: ala-frontline]. For the broader framework (indicators, contribution analysis, Outcome Harvesting, after-action review) see mel-framework.

Open Questions

None yet.

Sources & verification

  • sources/community-tool-box — grounding: secondary — RAW (833 chars)
  • sources/ala-frontline — grounding: secondary — RAW (13361 chars)
  • sources/people-power-manual — grounding: secondary — RAW (7977 chars)
  • sources/commons-library — grounding: secondary — RAW (5257 chars)

Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.

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