The impact
We put so much energy into developing the idea, pitching it, getting it live - and often lose steam when it comes to reflecting on it and understanding what went well and what didn’t.
I was lucky to work with lots of people who were really good at post-campaign reviews and knew how to package up our best work for award consideration. Here’s what I learned from them:
Selective data: When it comes to highlighting the impact, choose a few datapoints that most directly prove you achieved what you set out to. Less is more, and they should be hyper-linked to the goal
Contextual data: Data is meaningless out of context. Is that a big number? Who knows. Sometimes we benchmark against ourselves, sometimes we add context by making the numbers feel real (e.g. how many stadiums of poeple could we fill with the number of engagers in this football campaign)
Conduct a safe review: Get in a room, bring back up the original pitch, review what went live and look at it with a critical lens. What are we proud of? What could have gone better? This should be a safe, blame-free, space.
Truly partner with research: We often hand it off at this point, but if you’re a strategist or creative - your skill is in finding the nuggets that are the most interesting. If you’re a researcher, your skill is in conducting the analysis and presenting all of the findings. Magic happens when there is true partnership between those sides.
Recap Story: The same effort that went into writing the pitch should go into the recap story, whether that’s a document or a case study video. It should be simple, emotive, with the key messages easy to recall.
📸 Header photo by Pat Whelen on Unsplash
