How to improve your approach to evaluating effectiveness

What is effectiveness and why is it important?

“Effectiveness is about creating an evidence-based culture, enthusiastic about data and analytics but designed to manage its blind spots and having a commitment to learning”. – IPA Making Effectiveness Work, Oct 2024.

At its core, effectiveness ensures marketing efforts are driving real change. In the public and third sectors, where success is often measured in behavioural change, awareness or policy impact (rather than revenue), defining and measuring success can be complex. An evidence-based approach ensures that marketing teams make informed decisions, optimise future activity and secure buy-in from stakeholders.

Why is it so hard to measure campaign impact?

Despite best intentions, several common challenges persist:

• Lack of buy-in: Many managers don’t recognise the value of effectiveness measurement.
• Vague objectives: Without clear, measurable goals set at the briefing stage, evaluation is an afterthought.
• Misaligned KPIs: Metrics are often chosen based on what’s easy to measure rather than what truly matters.
• Conflicting objectives: Campaigns often have multiple (sometimes opposing) goals, making measurement complex.
• Focus on execution: The pressure to deliver quickly often overshadows the need for structured evaluation.
• Weak reporting mechanisms: Without defined responsibility, reporting happens in an ad hoc way – or not at all.
• Lack of meaningful insights: Final reports based on incomplete data fail to answer key questions, reducing their perceived value.

The building blocks

1. Setting clear objectives

To measure impact effectively, marketing teams must start with well-defined objectives that align with broader organisational goals. It’s easy for business, marketing and communication objectives to become conflated, so taking the time to unpick and refine them is essential. Objectives should always be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timed).

Wherever possible, establish benchmarks and ensure clarity on how data will be sourced. This provides the foundation for a structured effectiveness framework, with clear KPIs and measurement criteria.

2.  Creating a learning agenda

An effective measurement strategy isn’t just about proving impact – it’s about learning. A learning agenda shifts focus from backward looking evaluation to insight driven future planning. By framing measurement in terms of what we want to learn, organisations can:

• Bridge the gap between data and actionable insights.
• Encourage ongoing optimisation rather than one-off reporting.
• Make evaluation a tool for continuous improvement rather than a tick-box exercise.

3.  Embedding a ‘test and learn’ approach

Where possible, build testing into campaign rollouts. For larger projects with longer durations or cyclical activities, allocating a portion of the budget to ‘test and learn’ can provide valuable insights. Testing typically focuses on channel effectiveness, creative impact, messaging and timing – helping refine future efforts based on real-world performance.

Putting it into action

The ‘effectiveness funnel’

A useful way to visualise marketing impact is through an effectiveness funnel – a numerical journey that tracks progress from the target audience through to the final outcome (e.g. number of foster carer applications received).

The funnel serves several purposes:

• It clarifies the journey of potential respondents from awareness to conversion.
• It establishes benchmarks to track progress.
• It customises objectives for each campaign.
• It highlights areas for improvement by pinpointing drop-off points.
• It defines responsibilities for different funnel stages.

Reporting dashboards

A well-structured reporting dashboard ensures marketing teams and stakeholders can track effectiveness in real time. These dashboards should be built based on campaign objectives and the learning agenda, ensuring they provide relevant, actionable data.

Where data collection is the client’s responsibility, it’s crucial to establish clear expectations about sources, frequency and format of reporting to ensure meaningful evaluation.

Evaluating effectiveness doesn’t have to be an afterthought. It should be an integral part of every campaign you do. By embedding clear objectives, a learning mindset and structured reporting, public and third-sector marketers can move beyond tick-box evaluation to build strategies that deliver meaningful impact.

If you found this blog interesting, sign up for our upcoming webinar on evaluating effectiveness where we take a much deeper dive into the subject…