Evaluating The Success of Your Nonprofit Marketing Campaign

Naturally, the first two components of executing a marketing campaign are planning it and implementing it. However, if you want to be able to learn from your campaign and perform more effectively in the future, the evaluation component is one that you will not want to overlook.

Systematic evaluation enables you to objectively realize what worked in your campaign, and—just as importantly—also discover what didn’t work. By utilizing an effective evaluation process, you can become an expert campaigner over time, which means more potential funding and more potential brand recognition for your organization in the future.

Reflect upon your original goals

At the beginning of your marketing campaign, you hopefully created a series of measurable objectives. The purpose of these objectives was to have something tangible that could guide you to success over time.

Perhaps the purpose of your campaign was to raise a certain amount of funding, or perhaps it was to get a certain amount of people to ‘like’ one of your organization’s social media pages. But no matter how you may have chosen to define success, the evaluation process is when you get to determine whether your objectives were actually achieved.

It is much better to be honest with yourself and learn from your mistakes than to deny that some things could have gone better. 

Were you able to achieve your goals? If yes, what do you think enabled you to actually do so? If no, what do you think was stopping you from achieving what you wanted to? These questions may certainly be difficult to answer perfectly, but reflecting upon your original goals is what will help you improve your organization over time.

Use quantitative data to analyze your success

Data is one of the most important components of any successful marketing campaign. It is not enough to simply declare, “I feel like that campaign went well”, or “it really seems like people are beginning to recognize our brand.” Even if these statements are true, you still want to be able to point to a number that can actually prove them.

One of the reasons why using quantitative data can be so incredibly beneficial is that, when doing so, you create a tangible benchmark that allows you to compare your campaign to others. For example, if the purpose of your campaign was to convince people to go to a certain fundraising event, you will not only be able to compare the tangible attendance figure to your original goal, you will also be able to compare future events to this one.

Generally, the more data you can generate in the course of your campaign, the better. With a good set of data, you can discover where you can produce outcomes most efficiently, and can also learn to focus your efforts where your work will be the most effective.

Be overly critical

Running a nonprofit organization is not something for the faint of heart. No matter how effective your campaign may be, you will still inevitably have to deal with a lot of rejection and realize that there are certainly areas you could be improving.

Even if you were not able to achieve your original campaign goal, the campaign can still be considered a success if you are able to learn from it. Scrutinize every action, event, and strategy you engaged in along the way, and ask yourself, did we achieve what we were supposed to have achieved?

By critically analyzing every component of your campaign, you can already be well on your way to successfully running your next one. By using quantitative data and sound reasoning, the path to success should become much clearer over time.

…but don’t fix something if it isn’t broken

Though you certainly want to be critical of every component of your campaign over time, you don’t want to change things simply for the sake of change. As you move forward, you should be not only asking yourself what needs to change, but also be asking yourself if the changes you are proposing will actually be able to make things better.

Your campaign is something that consists of many interconnected pieces. Change what is broken, keep what has been working.

When evaluating your marketing campaign, you might want to begin by making a list of what you believe are your greatest strengths and weaknesses. One column should represent your strengths—things you want to be sure to maintain for future campaigns. The other column should represent your weaknesses.

Both columns can teach you a lot about your campaign.

Learn from your results

Ultimately, the entire purpose of the evaluation process is to help you learn how to run a better campaign in the future. Running a successful marketing campaign is not easy, and even the most educated individuals will still run into a number of surprises along the way.

The only way you can learn to deal with these surprises, and guide your organization towards achieving long-term success, is with experience. If your organization is trying to achieve big things—as many nonprofit organizations are destined to someday do—then you are going to want to be sure it is able to constantly be improving over time.

From the moment your marketing campaign is complete, you have already begun doing work on the next one. Each time around, you will have a clearer and clearer picture of what does and does not work. The evaluation component of one campaign ought to naturally lead into the planning component of the next campaign, and with these things in mind, success eventually becomes inevitable.

To read part one in this series, ‘Planning a Successful Nonprofit Marketing Campaign,’ click here.

To read part two in this series, ‘Implementing a Successful Nonprofit Marketing Campaign,’ click here.

Tags: Ally360, analysis, business, data, evaluation, ideas, marketing, Non-profit, numbers, organization, progress, results, strategy, success