Your starter for ten

Here are the ten principles behind a robust evaluation process.

1. Create a Test-Learn-Refine culture

Embed evaluation in every stage of the social marketing process. Evaluating activity after the event is important but you should also try to continuously learn in 'real-time' so that you can respond rapidly and apply findings to improve your existing and future social marketing programme

2. Allocate enough budget for evaluation

Allocate about 5-10% of the total social marketing budget to evaluation.

3. Start the evaluation process early

At the start of every social marketing programme, ask yourself:

• What is the social marketing activity about and in what policy context does it fit? For example, social marketing activity around alcohol fits within the overall policy context of reducing alcohol harm and alcohol-related hospital admissions
• What evidence will be used to indicate how the social marketing activity has performed? For example, reduced alcohol-related hospital admissions from certain postcodes
• What relevant lessons from previous social marketing activities can be applied? For example, stakeholder workshops are a useful collective learning exercise
• How will the lessons learned from the evaluation be used to improve public health effectiveness?

4. Be precise about your social marketing objectives

Agree and define precise social marketing objectives for evaluation with your stakeholders. You may need to consult with a range of people when agreeing objectives, which could include social marketing managers, policy staff and community stakeholders.

Sometimes social marketing objectives are 'softer' than factors like sales and availability. For example, if your aim is to increase the motivation to cut down alcohol consumption, then measures need to be found for measuring levels of motivation. You might need quantitative research to do this.

5. Measure each step of behavioural change

At the planning stage, develop a theory about how people's behaviour needs to change. For example, you decide that there are three steps to help people reduce their drinking:

1. To make people aware of lower risk drinking levels
2. To find suitable 'exchange' messages that make them want to cut down on consumption
3. To point them to resources and support that will help them to cut down

Your evaluation should not just measure whether or not people reduce their drinking. It should also measure each step towards this behaviour change, that is measure how aware people are of lower risk drinking and how much they want to cut down as well. See the line of sight' diagram below.

6. Keep sight of your objectives

There are many things that need to change before our objective - reducing alcohol related hospital admissions - is achieved. Once you've got clear objectives (point 4) and clear steps of behavioural change (point 5), you can start to work out the kind of specific social marketing activities that may help to reduce hospital admissions in your area.

7. Use a range of measures

There is no such thing as one single measure for social marketing. Use a balanced scorecard approach, using, for example, all the measures included here.

For large scale activity, try to identify around five to ten measures that are critical to your social marketing activity's success. For small scale activity, you may only need one or two KPIs . For example, you want to engage all the PCT's health visitors about alcohol and invite them to a seminar. You could set a target around the degree to which they feel more confident in delivering IBAs to the target audience after the seminar.

• See also the template

8. Be consistent and rigorous

Reducing increasing and higher risk drinking means addressing complex behaviours that will only change gradually over time. Make sure your evaluation approaches are rigorous and consistent over a long period. For example, tracking studies that ask consumers questions about their awareness of the health harm resulting from alcohol or consumption levels, need to be consistently phrased. Otherwise small changes between each data-point might be attributable to the way the questions are asked rather than any reflection of reality.

9. Learn from what doesn't work

You can learn a lot from talking to someone who read a leaflet but did not respond to its call to action. Equally, if people are not converting to new behaviours at particular stages of a customer relationship programme, find out why, so that your social marketing programme can be refined accordingly.

10. Question activities that cannot be evaluated

If it can't be evaluated, you don't know if it has worked and you can't justify further investment in the activity.