Feature: Assessing Impact of Media Campaigns

While refugee and forced migration advocates regularly organize publicity campaigns and develop marketing strategies to raise awareness and/or funds, the annually-held World Refugee Day (WRD) and Refugee Weeks in Australia and the UK present opportunities to promote key messages and galvanize the public to take action.  But how effective are they really? Here are various resources that discuss how to assess the impact and/or success of WRD and other (social) media campaigns.

World Refugee Day:

Understanding Impact in Human Rights Campaigning: UNHCR's 2012 Dilemmas World Refugee Day Campaign (Unpublished, 2013)
- While I was not able to find this report online, a case study of the campaign it investigated is presented in the recently published The Media and Human Rights: The Cosmopolitan Promise (Routledge, Sept. 2014, pp. 118-123).  The author's research was also discussed at a roundtable discussion in June 2013 and in this news story.

"Unpacking World Refugee Day: Humanitarian Governance and Human Rights Practice?," Journal of Human Rights Practice, vol. 2, no. 2 (2010) [preprint]

World Refugee Day 2014: Impact Report (UNHCR, July 2014) [text] [exec. summ.]
- Note: You can review UNHCR's campaign materials for WRD 2014 here.

Others:

How on Earth Do You Measure the Impact of Your Events? (On Think Tanks, Feb. 2015) [text]

How Successful is Your Social Media Outreach? (BlogTips, June 2014) [text]

The Invisible Lesson of Invisible Children (IRIN, Feb. 2015) [text]

Social Media: Making Your Voice Heard (IBT, Feb. 2015) [text]

Social Media in Health Communication Campaigns, Webinar, 9 Dec. 2014 [access]

Who Celebrity Advocates are Really Targeting. And It’s Not You (IRIN, Feb. 2015) [text]

In the end, while these resources can assist with measuring the extent of a campaign's outreach, can they be used to determine whether or not the outreach changed attitudes and opinions towards refugees and other forced migrants?  How can this more problematic challenge be assessed?

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