If you want to run a campaign to promote healthy behaviours or reduce harmful behaviours, smart commissioners are looking for short-term and longer-term impact. However there can be a tension between proving ROI in the short-term and delivering long-term behaviour change, meaning a shift is needed from typical campaign assessment models. Here I provide my thoughts to help marketers to navigate that tension.
Looking for long-term impact
When we’re in the business of changing behaviours around health, predominantly we’re looking for long-term impact. Smoking cessation and exercise are two examples that are clearly beneficial for audiences to embrace forever, not just for the life of a campaign. Typically, we recommend campaign measurement models that are geared to showing tendencies towards sustained behaviour change over years and decades, looking at habit forming, subject fluency, understanding and embedding of personal motivators, etc. There will be early evidence of success against these measures, but longitudinal data is what shows true ROI.
This long-term impact isn’t only for lifestyle-type behaviours though. Even changing behaviours more immediately – say avoiding drink-driving at Christmas, taking up a vaccine during a flu outbreak or watching for sunstroke in July – will have much greater real-world/life impact if their impact is life-long. Put another way, your campaign brief might be centred around a near-term goal of increasing vaccine uptake over 3 months, but wouldn’t it be better to increase consideration of vaccination for the rest of our audience’s life? That’s why, regardless of the brief, we always advocate for targeting measurable positive behaviour change over much longer than the campaign period, and for assessing metrics well beyond impressions.
Why short-term impact assessment is still valuable
Of course, all of that said, it is still crucial to measure campaign impact in the short-term, whether through impressions, engagement, pledges or downloads, even when the impact we’re looking for is more complex and less immediate. For a start, this data provides valuable insight into reception of campaign creative in the real world, and often reveals much more than focus groups and user panels; no matter how much co-creation you’ve done, ‘real’ audiences will often still act differently in the wild. Measuring and also optimising creative in line with to live performance data is highly effective to meet audience needs, ultimately helping the effectiveness of your behaviour change campaign.
Short-term assessment is also useful in establishing ROI and making the case for continued investment, helping you to secure stakeholder buy-in, which is ultimately what will make the long-term investment (and therefore behaviour change) possible.
Balanced campaign measurement
In summary, there must be a conversation between agency and commissioner about the balance between measurement for short-term impact, with that to prove long-term behaviour change. The latter is the more valuable for health and should be the outcome we are shooting for, but requires a more long-term and often costly approach. By working together we can create a balanced scorecard that meets operational and strategic needs, and ultimately finds the most successful campaign to change health behaviours.
For more on how we deliver campaigns that promote long-term behaviour change, contact Rachel: Rachel@threetenseven.co
