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A. To date, standard and widely accepted guidelines for communications evaluation have not existed in either the for-profit or nonprofit worlds.
B. Nonprofit organizations and the campaigns they implement are often unique, making the creation and adoption of standard evaluating guidelines difficult.
C. It can be difficult to disaggregate the impact of communications efforts and their value added from that of other social change strategies being implemented at the same time.
D. Public communication campaigns often aim for complex and hard-to-achieve change (e.g ., changing public will by affecting norms, expectations , and public support, or changing behavior through skill teaching , positive reinforcement and rewards). Campaigns can also often aim for change at multiple levels of society (community, state, or national).
E. Some methods useful to communications evaluation are too costly for many nonprofits (e.g., polling) or may require staff time or expertise that is not readily available.
F. Communicators and evaluators don't always speak the same language. Most evaluators don't understand communications theory and practice; communications people don't understand evaluation language or methods. One result is that the evaluation's focus can sometimes be misguided. For example, the evaluation may focus only on " placement" of stories in the media as the primary measure of a campaign's success, ignoring the importance of informing supporters and allies though internal communications efforts such as newsletters, e-mails, briefing calls and meetings.
G. The goal of nonprofit campaigns often is to ensure that an organization's efforts to define a social problem and its proposed solution reach the awareness of those who hold the power to allocate resources and choose appropriate policy alternatives. This is a high standard for success, with implications for evaluation design and data interpretation.
H. Sometimes communications resources dedicated to achieving an impact are too limited to be effective. Also, sometimes a campaign is not ready to be evaluated.
I. Some campaigns seek incremental change. They are implemented in stages, and initial stages may be modest in impact.