Planning Your Campaign with Evaluation in Mind

Background: Social media campaigns can have massive impact on public health initiatives and behavior change. Campaigns must be planned and executed well to achieve greatest impact. Without a solid evaluation strategy, a campaign cannot be deemed a success or failure, so campaigns should be built with an evaluation component in mind.

Program background: Our research and evaluation work at the Health Media Collaboratory has given us the ability to better devise and advise campaigns to be well-evaluated. We have been assessing the effectiveness of media campaigns for more than 10 years, and now we are well-situated to evaluate the reach and effectiveness of social media campaigns as well. 

Evaluation Methods and Results: Through our own social media activities, accessing industry resources, evaluations and data collection, we have built a method to plan campaigns for evaluation. The in-house  data collection infrastructure we have built positions us  uniquely to view campaigns from a variety of vantage points. We have conducted literature reviews and closely studied industry papers and articles to develop best practices. We will share our own experiences preparing  to plan and implement our own campaigns for evaluation. 

Conclusions: Through an effective plan involving a careful thought process with evaluation in mind, any social media campaign can be deemed a success. HMC has developed such a methodology.

Implications for research and/or practice: The better a campaign is planned and evaluated, the more effectively it can deliver powerful health messages to its intended audience.