SocialButterfly

Quote of the Week: Failure Happens (and One Way to Avoid It)

Monday, March 15th, 2010 | Public Health, Quote of the Week, Web Communications

This is not a boggy-too sad to read post. This post is about failure, yes, but it’s also about what can be learned from it. This week’s quote comes from Sarah Ragsdale over at the Walking the Path blog:

“Failure happens.”

However, Sarah doesn’t mope and pity in the eye of failure–instead she offers insights into why failure happens based on the text Marketing in Public Health. Sarah reviews four types of common failures when it comes to communications interventions:

1. Strategy failures occur when external barriers exist in the community that cannot be overcome by communication messages. For example, a condom usage campaign may be very effective in raising awareness, but if condoms are not available in the community, the campaign is moot.
2. Execution failures are the result of poorly constructed messaging or targeting the wrong audience. We must always remember to do our homework and study our audiences.
3. Measurement failures happen when we planned the communication strategy appropriately and delivered it well, but we had a poor evaluation strategy. Check out our post on evaluating social media.
4. Expectation failure results from overestimating the campaign’s impact in the community. Change occurred but not to the level stakeholder’s expected.

I would like to call your attention to reason number 3–measurement and evaluation. Why? Because this can be one of the easiest to avoid and is also one of the most important elements in any social marketing campaign. Think about a project that you are currently working on–do you have an evaluation strategy for your communications? If not, some resources you may find helpful are provided below:

• Pubilc Communication Campaign Evaluation (PDF)
• Guidance for Evaluation Mass Communication Health Initiatives (PDF)
• Web Analytics: An Hour a Day (for Web and social media types)
• Complete Web Monitoring (for more Web and social media types)
• Planning a Social Marketing Program Outline from Craig Lefebvre (overview)
• …and for those who want to completely geek-out with me, here is the motherload of all evaluation resources.
• (What other resources do you suggest?)

If you do have an evaluation strategy, I want to also challenge you and ask you two questions: What are you evaluating and why are evaluating it? Often, by asking these questions, you can avoid some of the other failure pitstops that Sarah mentioned. I know our team internally are asking ourselves these very questions on some great projects we are brewing up–and I look forward to continued thoughts from the team and from you. Because when it comes to “success” in social marketing, my head automatically thinks of desired behaviors, behavioral objectives and behavioral outcomes–what does your mind think of?

flickr credit: fireflythegreat

Tags: communications, communications resources, evaluation, evaluation strategy, failure, health communications, health evaluation, measurement, public health planning, Quote, resources, Social Marketing, strategic planning, Walking the Path, web analytics

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