From our experience, many organisations put a lot of effort into the planning and timing of online campaigns but then fail to evaluate them properly. Analysing the results of campaign actions and thinking about what worked and what didn’t is vital for future success.
E-campaigning is a place for trial and error. While you clearly need to get the fundamentals right (such as the timing, the target and the ‘ask’) there is a lot of scope for creativity…. aka spectacular failure, or spectacular success.
What do you evaluate?
Evaluation usually breaks out into the policy outcome and online benchmarks.
Let’s be honest, many of the campaigns organised by the sector are longer-term and may not actually produce a tangible ‘win’ for months or even years. This means that evaluating the campaign outcome is either a simple ‘yes’ if the campaign is successful, or measuring other ‘lesser’ outcomes like increased political awareness or support.
Measuring the online benchmarks on the other hand is more detailed, but generally more straight forward. Now we’re talking about levels of participation, response rates, percentage of message customisation, etc. These types of benchmarks are like a ‘health check’ for your online community. Are they still responding? Are they still with you?
Community Health Check
It goes without saying that your online community drives your e-campaigning success. Email is still the main communication method so use the reporting that your broadcast email tool gives you to monitor; email open rates, click throughs, numbers of actions taken, bounces and un-subscribes over a period of time. This will give you a clear picture as to how your community is performing.
Here are some other areas to evaluate:
One of the best ways to make sure you get the most out of your online community is to run split tests for your emails. Send out two versions of an email to a proportion of your email list, then wait for the results to come in – evaluate how many people opened the emails and took part in the campaign action from them. Then send out the best performing email to the remainder of your list and this will really help to up your response rates. Do make sure that the two versions of the email are different (images, content, length of copy, subject line etc), too similar and the results you get back will be similar and you’ll have learnt very little!
Can you flag up your super activists on your database? These are the people who do more than 6 actions a year, attend events, visit their MP, pretty much everything you ask of them. Generally super activists are about 10% of your list but account for about 40% of actions taken. If you aren’t monitoring them you are missing a big part of your online strategy.
Are you looking at your ‘churn rate’, i.e. the rate at which your email list goes bad? Organisations tend to lose about 20% of their email list in a year so they need to recruit a significant proportion of campaigners just to stay still, let alone grow. Analysing the ‘churn rate’ is a great way to check the health of your community.
You should also look at your total web traffic, monitor the number of page views for your actions and check how many people are taking part in your campaigns. A good conversion rate of page views to actions taken is about 30%. Are new people actually signing up to your lists from the web? You should be expecting about 3% return.
To evaluate your web traffic you’ll need tracking in place. Google offers a free ‘Analytics’ tool which allows you to track the number of web page visitors, the country they came from, the source of their visit (such as a link on a Facebook page or another website) and much more. Put Google Analytics on your campaigning websites for the duration of your campaigns, that way you can see if a news story on a specific day actually led to more visitors and actions taken or not. If it’s not in place you will never know!
Marketing
Don’t just evaluate your existing community, analyse the marketing techniques you are using to boost your numbers too. If you’re losing about 20% of your list to ‘churn’ you need to be sure that tactics, such as banner placements, Search Engine Optimisation and banner ads are actually brining in the numbers.
How many new recruits are your different tactics bringing in? How are they doing against the original targets you set? What are your overall stats and how do they compare to any offline activity you are running?
Are you making use of social networks such as Facebook and how effective is this tactic as opposed to others?
And are you getting your supporters to email their friends and asking them to take part in campaigns? In-house data shows that about 10% of supporters that take an action will ‘tell a friend’ so it can make a real difference to your numbers. Sending e-cards to friends rather than just plain text email messages can boost numbers as they can be really engaging, but how will you know if you don’t try and evaluate?
Political Outcomes
All the focus so far has been on the ‘numbers’ but evaluating what the targets of your campaigns are doing is of primary importance.
Encourage your supporters to send any messages they receive from MPs (or other targets) back to you. You can also ask your supporters to email their MP with a link to an online survey so you can directly get responses from them and plan your future actions. Finally, if you’re asking MPs to sign an Early Day Motion or support a cause, make sure you keep your records up to date. This way you can see if you are on the way to hitting your targets. You can also get your campaigners to thank the supportive MPs - this could be very useful for future lobbying as you will get them on side!
e-campaigning ideas guide 2008
To give you ideas from some of our clients about how they evaluated their campaigns, we have recently published the 2nd edition of our e-campaigning ideas guide, which goes into detail on five case studies for UK, Canadian and Worldwide campaigns.
Click here to download your free copy - http://web.advocacyonline.net/ecampaigningideas
Jonathan Purchase is Head of Client Services and Support at Advocacy Online, a leading provider of e-campaigning technology and services.