Attribution
How you know you’ve had an impact, and why it matters
Something awesome has just happened. A bank commits to not finance an environmentally damaging project you’ve been working to prevent. It’s a huge blow to the project’s chances of being built and you’re preparing a message to your supporters to congratulate them for this hard-earned victory. While finalising your message, an email from another organisation lands in your inbox with the subject: You’ll never guess what we just won!
A knot forms in your gut as you open the email, as other people claim credit for something you’ve worked on and feel every bit as entitled to own the outcome. If they’re claiming victory, will it now look like you’re trying to ride someone else’s coattails? Will it look like you’re undermining another organisation? Ugh, so awkward.
Attribution is hard, especially in a line of work as dynamic and multifactorial as campaigning. We need to win our campaigns for the sake of energy, morale and momentum. We need to demonstrate we’re worth supporting with the community’s time, money or whatever else we need from it. Above all else, we need to win because our mission is essential! But we exist in a complex world full of other organisations pursuing myriad strategies, external stakeholders, and often a lack of information about why a company, government or some other decision-maker did what they did.
It’s important to get attribution right and understand the role we have played (or not) in creating change.
Let’s go back to that scenario of the campaign win. You’ve finally got that email out to your supporters, letting them know about the win and thanking them for their role in making it happen. Hopefully it is sitting neatly alongside any other messages your supporters might be getting from other groups, not creating any clashes, and garnering some love from your supporters. Now its time for some introspection.
You got what you wanted, but how much of this win was your doing? Maybe you’d met with the bank and put your case to its management. You had been featured several times in the media, challenging the bank to rule out financing the project you’re fighting. You had even arranged a delegation of residents who would be at risk from the project’s air pollution emissions to visit the bank. But one of the other organisations had arranged investors to call the bank’s board chair and raise their concerns. Someone you know had been personally lobbying another board member to take a public position in opposition to the project. One group had organised protests at the bank’s major offices throughout your city. And who knows if there were other individuals or groups acting to advance of your cause without you being aware?
With all this other work being done by your friends and allies in the movement, what right do you have to claim credit? This is one reason of many why it’s important to figure out the role of our own interventions in an achieved change. Doing so is mainly made possible from feedback, with a little bit of strategic judgement thrown in.
Getting feedback
Feedback can come from many forms. Your target - let’s say it’s a company - might just flat out tell you what activity or combination of activities had the biggest impact on it. Someone inside the company, whether an insider quietly providing information or a formally established relationship, might relay back to you what it had been most concerned about throughout the campaign. You might hear from a third party that the company is struggling to deal with you because of one tactic or another you’ve delivered.
There are also quantitative measures of impact. If your campaign mobilised a proportion of your target company’s stakeholders beyond a threshold management is known to treat as a serious threat, you can expect to have played some significant role in a win. Perhaps a key strategy was to reach and engage people from the company through social media and your metrics showed that that campaign to be performing well and activating the people you were targeting. This isn’t necessarily definitive proof of this strategy’s impact but it is at least helpful data to work with. Perhaps if you also saw the company’s management actively working to combat your social media campaign with their own, it would be clearer that you are at least getting under their skin and seen as a problem to be dealt with.
Other ways you can infer impact from your own work include:
Public displays of courtesy and respect towards you from your campaign target (although be careful that the company isn’t just trying to subdue you with pleasantries),
Specific references to a particular tactic or strategy, especially if the company wants to find out if you plan to repeat it,
Receiving a lot of website traffic coming from your company target (which Google Analytics might be able to identify for you) or people from the target checking you out on LinkedIn, and
The company taking active steps to counter your own campaign (e.g. talking points distributed to staff or meeting important stakeholders to tell their side of the story).
Even getting hate mail from people at the company or being told to fuck off by staff in a direct response to as social media campaign is a small sign that you’ve at least got their attention.
Someone in the Australian climate movement once told me he’d been in a meeting with the CEO of a pension fund I was campaigning on. The conversation started by the CEO asking: “do you know Julien fucking Vincent”? I obviously had his attention!
The point is this: feedback, be it large or small, can come from all over the place and is important in shaping your understanding of the extent to which your own work has achieved or is achieving change. Gather it from wherever you can and maintain a picture of what is working, and what might not be showing evidence of working.
Looking beyond your own organisation
A couple of other things are important to determining the role you played in achieving a change or, if you are in the middle of a campaign, the effectiveness of your work.
Knowing what other individuals or organisations are doing in service of the same goal is important. Aside from putting you in a better position to coordinate your efforts and capitalise off one another’s work, it’s important to know if someone else is delivering some incredibly effective strategy that might be getting better results. Maybe it’s a strategy you could join forces over or maybe its effectiveness sets you up to do something else that might be more impactful?
I’ve actually been in a position where another organisation working on the same corporate target has been running a strategy that was once effective but had lost its sting and meant the company viewed this organisation more as a predictable annoyance than a force to be reckoned with. In this case, I was able to use that information to navigate around the other organisation’s strategy and add new elements of unpredictability to the campaign that kept me in a position to directly influence the company’s policy.
This is now taking us in the direction of strategic judgement, which can be really difficult. There might be four organisations dedicated to the same or a similar goal, each using two distinct strategies of their own. You need to continuously analyse what you are doing and its impact relative to those of your movement partners. This can invoke a sense of competition that can be helpful, as long as the dose is low enough to keep you operating constructively. The point of considering everyone else’s work is to learn or infer as much as possible about what you’re doing and whether or not it is working alongside the efforts of others. Does the company seem to be responding far more to your tactics than those of another group? Could you tweak your own efforts to help make another organisation’s strategy even more impactful? Is something you’re planning likely to undermine an otherwise successful strategy being delivered by a partner?
When reflecting on these questions, you need to apply the same strategic thinking and decision-making as you did when planning your campaign in the first place but, now that your campaign has had the chance to exist in the real world for a while, you’re looking for evidence. I would encourage you to start from a position of doubt and require yourself to be convinced. If you’ve been running a particular strategy for a while but can’t point to any evidence of it influencing your target, a conversation is needed about whether you need to change tack or keep the faith for a while longer with what you’re doing.
The quality of feedback you’re getting needs to be considered as well. Getting abused on social media by some inconsequential low-level staffer who is just ideologically opposed to your mission is different than if it’s a senior manager in sustainability who might feel like their job or credibility is under threat and is (probably unadvisedly) lashing out as a result. Beware also the potential for your targets to lead you astray. If you’re putting a lot of effort into tactics that aren’t getting results, and your target knows this, it might encourage you to keep doing what isn’t working. Telling the difference between useful and dodgy feedback from your target is another matter of judgement and all I can suggest is to consider the quality of the source and your relationship with them when evaluating their feedback.
Then, as part of a wider movement, communication is essential. If you want to know what other people are doing and the points of feedback we’re all getting on our work, you need to be in very regular conversation with them, sharing upcoming plans and anything you’re observing about how your target is responding. That other person who is directly lobbying their board member contact might just let you know the board discussed the reputational impact of the campaign, as a result of something you or a partner organisation has done. That’s worth knowing! So, remaining in contact with your movement partners is essential for getting the most out of your collective efforts.
Aside from helping you shape your campaign as you go, there are several other important reasons why interrogating the attribution of your work is beneficial.
Quality of conversation with stakeholders
I love it when I’m able to share good news like a campaign win or a significant moment and not only claim victory and thank everyone for their efforts, but actually explain why a particular change occurred. I feel like it builds a better relationship with followers and supporters of a campaign than simply telling them that we did stuff, won, and everything is awesome (which happens, and I find nauseating). Being able to say why we achieved the outcome we did, our specific interventions that helped make it possible, and even how our work made an impact as part of a wider movement feels symptomatic of a relationship with supporters that treats them with respect and on board at a strategic level. I should add that I’ve done nothing to confirm this – it’s still a hypothesis.
Where I know for a fact that this matters though is with larger funders. These people are smart and will respond well to an honest interrogation of a campaign, especially some analysis of what worked and why, and also what didn’t work and why. If four organisations go to the same funder and claim victory for the same thing without explaining why, its likely to look a little dubious to the funder. If you explain your strategies, analyse their effectiveness and place them in context of a wider effort, the strategists working for funders will likely appreciate it and you for engaging them on a strategic level.
Becoming a better campaigner
There is an even more important reason to engage in honest introspection about what role you played in delivering change. If you know what contributed to success and what didn’t, you’re better placed to win your next campaign.
Jürgen Klopp, manager of Premier League club Liverpool FC (yes, who I follow), once said something to the effect of: sometimes it can be better to lose but know the reasons why than win without having a clue why. It’s a principle that stands you in good stead for long-term success. I guess if you’re a one time only campaigner working on a specific issue, this probably doesn’t matter so much for you but as a career campaigner, I need to constantly improve my skills and knowledge about how to win.
Beyond being able to tell a convincing story to others about what led to a campaign being won, you need to be able to tell a convincing story to yourself. And you should be the hardest one of all to convince, because you’ll always have access to more information than you’re likely to share.
So there we have it. Contemplating the impact of your own work in an ongoing campaign, and the attribution of your own efforts towards an achieved goal, is both important and doable, leading you to make better decisions in the campaigns you’re running, be better at designing your next campaigns, requires closer relationships with others working in the same space that should benefit the collective effort, and creates more sincere conversations about what is working with important stakeholders, all of which should strengthen you as a campaigner and the networks and communities in which you operate.