Eric Gilbertsen is Chief Client Officer at REQ, a digital agency specializing in Advocacy, Reputation, and Brand Marketing.
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Measuring the success of marketing campaigns is relatively easy by using the marketing funnel—a logical and relatable model. Consumers enter the funnel by becoming aware of new products or services through myriad channels. A subset will choose to learn more. Fewer will grow intent on buying—until, at last, even fewer people will complete the purchase and exit the funnel.
Advocacy is different because, fundraising aside, a tangible transaction is rarely the goal.
Ambitious Outcomes
Think about legislation or a new regulation that affects an industry. It may or may not become reality, and the benefits and drawbacks are rarely crystal clear. Those decisions rest with policymakers, each with their own life experiences, ideologies, priorities, biases and influences. Or think about our most complicated societal challenges, like climate change, sustainable energy, poverty, healthcare and education. These long-term challenges can’t be measured in weeks or months—or maybe even in our lifetimes.
How can you measure success when the outcome is beyond your control, influenced by countless factors or so vast that it may be decades away?
For the marketer, attributing the sale isn’t perfect, but data platforms provide great intelligence. But for advocacy organizations, the challenge is finding a measurement framework that works for political and regulatory issue campaigns, public education, corporate social responsibility (CSR), industry reputation, societal missions and other ambitious outcomes.
The 5-Step Advocacy Funnel
For all but the most tangible outcomes, establishing causation might be too much to ask. But the advocacy funnel—something I developed for our advocacy clients—is an effective and familiar way to measure your advocacy campaigns—with one key twist.
1. Awareness
Like marketing, an advocacy campaign starts with awareness. You can’t buy a product or advocate for an issue that you aren’t aware of. Is this social, political or reputational issue on the radar for people who can make a difference?
Awareness needs to be established with decision-makers, influencers and advocates. Your metrics may include reach, impressions, video views, social following, media monitoring, first-party research and more, depending on the audience.
2. Engagement
In the marketing funnel, consideration is typically the next level down. Today, consideration plays out online through comparison shopping, product photos/videos, specifications, customer reviews and even immersive AR experiences.
In advocacy, the equivalent step is engagement. These moments of interest may start with a scroll-stopping social post, news headline or video. Or it may be a Google search or dinner table debate. When engagement begins, indifferent awareness becomes genuine caring.
The metrics for engagement may include clicks, website behavior, video analytics, social engagements, search volume and more.
3. Advocacy
When a consumer decides to buy, they’ve done the research and feel committed to spending money. Their intent takes shape by choosing a size, color or model. They may add items to a virtual shopping cart. Or perhaps they’ve started a process, like applying for continuing education or a loan.
Equally, there is a moment when an advocate’s engagement boils over and becomes action. It might be a birthday fundraising campaign on Facebook, sharing an article on Twitter or expressing a POV on various social channels. It could also be a call or letter to a policymaker, volunteering or community organizing.
The metrics of advocacy are often quantitative and trackable, but they stop short of being highly correlated to an outcome. A fundraising campaign might deliver a tangible impact, but what is the value, really, of other forms of advocacy? While it’s hard to say for sure, they do correlate with the next level down the advocacy funnel.
4. Impact
Every purchase is revenue for a company and a chance to build a lasting relationship. This growth is a valuable, tangible result of brand marketing. But it’s not the end of the road because a sale is short-term.
The advocacy campaign equivalent to a purchase is impact. It can take many forms, but examples include corporate sponsorships, fundraising revenue, new coalition partners, media coverage and stakeholder engagement. These are tangible examples of impact that organizations can measure. Acts of advocacy often become the metrics of impact, but a significant amount of impact is the result of relationships and outreach.
5. Outcome
In marketing, the outcome is often simple: The customer is either happy and loyal or not. The subscriber either renews or doesn’t.
In advocacy, all higher levels of the funnel—the activities and metrics of advocacy—build toward an outcome, but there’s a twist: The campaign might backfire due to sentiment and the strength of opposition.
Sentiment Is Key
Like a fork in the road, sentiment can send your advocacy campaign toward a successful outcome or a damaging backfire. At every step of the advocacy funnel, the message could persuade, motivate and galvanize your audience, or you could alienate them and embolden the opposition. This is why measuring sentiment is critical and yet frequently overlooked.
Here are a few methods for tracking sentiment:
• Using an online panel or offline focus group, test your messaging, creative, design, tone and production quality. Is it communicating what you intended?
• During the campaign, invite feedback in surveys, polls, subscriber emails, a website “suggestion box” or social media channels.
• Leverage an expert on media monitoring and sentiment analysis to understand if your POV is gaining traction.
• Conduct in-depth interviews to assess the impact on any decision-makers who matter most to your desired outcome.
Factoring The Opposition
Every advocacy campaign has opposition, just as every product or service has competition. It’s not enough to look inward at your own campaign’s metrics because the opposition is making an impact of their own. The same research techniques will reveal the insights needed to objectively assess your campaign’s success trajectory. For a truly comprehensive measurement framework, you may have advocacy funnels for the opposition surrounding your own.
Establishing clear causation with your ultimate outcome may never be possible, but applying this measurement model can—at a minimum—help you communicate your campaign’s impact and focus on the initiatives with the strongest correlation to your goal.
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