Campaign evaluation: how to measure behaviour alongside awareness

The campaign reached its audience. People watched the film and visited the advice page. Those are useful findings, but your commissioner has a further question: did anyone do the thing the campaign was created to encourage?

A practical campaign evaluation makes room for both questions. It checks whether the activity was delivered as intended and investigates the audience response. When behaviour is the objective, the evaluation needs a defined behaviour, an appropriate starting point and a realistic way of observing change.

Separate the things you can learn

The Government Communication Service’s evaluation guidance distinguishes communication outputs, audience perceptions and audience behaviour. That distinction is useful when choosing measures: evidence of exposure answers a different question from evidence that someone understood a message or acted on it.

• Delivery and reach: did the intended activity run, and what evidence shows the audience encountered it?
• Understanding and response: did people recognise the message, understand the action and feel able to take it?
• Behaviour: what observable action happened, where and over which period? Wider contribution: how does that action relate to the organisation’s longer-term objective, and what else influences it?

Choose a small set of measures with a job to do. A film completion rate may help diagnose the creative. Registrations may show an initial response. Neither establishes that someone continued a new behaviour after the campaign ended.

Write the evaluation question before choosing the dashboard

Be precise about who should do what. Increase recycling is difficult to evaluate as a campaign objective without further definition. A more useful question identifies the intended group, the material or action involved, the location and the observation period.

Then work backwards. What would count as evidence? Who holds it? Can it be collected consistently and appropriately? These questions can affect delivery: a partner may need a simple recording method, or an event team may need to distinguish attendance from a completed activity.

Use this evaluation planning worksheet

Here is an illustrative example for a fictional community clothing-repair campaign. Use the fields to build your own plan, adapting the observation method to your audience and resources.

• Question: did people attending a repair session complete a repair, and did they report using that item afterwards? These are two distinct outcomes to record separately.
• Starting point: review records from comparable previous sessions, where available. Check whether attendance and completed repairs were recorded in the same way before treating those figures as a baseline.
• Observable action: define a completed repair and record it consistently at the session. A booking or a visit to the information page remains an earlier step.
• Follow-up: ask participants who have appropriately agreed to follow-up whether they used the repaired item. Label this self-reported information and record how many people responded.
• Owner and method: name the person collecting each measure, where it is stored and when it is checked. Agree how incomplete or duplicate records are handled.
• Decision: if attendance is healthy but few repairs are completed, investigate tools, time and support. If repairs are completed but items are not reused, investigate the reason before increasing promotion.

Record context as carefully as results

Compare like with like where you can. Different observation periods, seasonal conditions, service changes or a new recording process can influence the figures. If a before-and-after comparison shows improvement, describe what changed and the limits of what you can attribute to the campaign.
Where you use a rate, report the count and denominator together. Findings from a small, self-selecting follow-up group should be presented as feedback from that group, with the collection dates and response level visible.

Where the decision warrants it, involve an evaluation specialist early to consider a suitable comparison or test design. A small campaign still benefits from a consistent observation method and an honest account of what remains unknown.

Our We’re Watching You work for Keep Britain Tidy illustrates a focused behavioural intervention: glow-in-the-dark eyes and direct messaging addressed dog fouling in locations where visibility after dark mattered. The case connects audience insight, a defined action and the practical environment in which the message appeared.

Finish with the next decision

A useful review states what was delivered, what the audience response shows, what you can reasonably conclude and what you will change. Keep the distinction between observation and explanation visible. It helps a commissioner decide whether to adapt the intervention, improve the user journey or investigate further.

We bring research and creative thinking together in our campaign work. If you are defining a campaign, bring the behaviour you want to influence and the evidence you can access. We can explore how the creative brief and measurement plan should connect.