Evaluating Political Social Work Efforts

Abstract

Is victory at the polls or successful passage of a law the only way to evaluate a campaign? This chapter considers other ways that a political strategy may be viewed be successful, such as building candidate name recognition, facilitating the election of other candidates on a ticket, gaining credibility, and developing relationships. This chapter builds evaluation skills for advocacy and electoral campaigns through selecting appropriate metrics and methods to evaluate political social work efforts. Evaluation plans should be developed alongside your other strategic planning efforts, with benchmarks in pace before your efforts start. This helps to ensure that your evaluation efforts can inform and increase the effectiveness of your work while also ensuring that you collect the relevant data to assess the outcomes of your effort. We emphasize the ways in which evaluation can be used throughout a campaign, through both formative and summative evaluation, to assess progress and refine your strategy for success. Finally, the need for attention to monitoring implementation after a political success is discussed.