Simple campaign actions

Indicates reach of campaigning and movement building through counting the number of simple campaign, prayer or lifestyle actions taken as a response to your intervention and that of allies where you have played a catalytic role. Depending on your context, actions could include: sending a postcard, sharing or retweeting a social media post, signing a petition, taking an online action, taking an easier lifestyle change action, a prayer action.

Keep a tally using a database or a simple spreadsheet. If actions are online there may be online tools that can track numbers for online data such as shares and retweets from relevant social media managers or allies.

In contexts where exact data is difficult to collect, you could estimate the total number of campaign actions by extrapolating from ‘spot checks’ or from information that is more easily obtained. For example, if you encouraged a church congregation of 100 people to take a simple action, then it may be reasonable to assume that at least 10% of people would have gone on to take at least one simple action. You could therefore count 10 actions, without having to verify this with each person attending. As another example, if you are working with a movement ally, and that ally posts on social media, instead of trying to track exactly how many times each post was shared or forwarded, it may be reasonable to take a percentage of the ally’s social media followers. For example, if the ally regularly shares campaign messages with 1000 others via WhatsApp, you could assume that, say, at least 5% of the recipients will forward these messages to others. Therefore you can count an estimated average of 50 simple actions for each social media post that the ally does, without having to try and count the exact number. (Note that these percentages are just examples; you will need to come up with your own estimates based on what is reasonable in your context.)

This indicator is not usually disaggregated.

This indicator counts the number of actions taken, not the number of individuals who take action. This means that one individual could take more than one simple campaign action; for instance, signing more than one online petition. The main reason for counting actions, not individuals who take action, is that it tends to be much easier to count the actions taken, than to try and identify which individuals have taken more than one action and filter those out.

This indicator does not count the number of actions you, your partners and allies take - rather, it counts the number of actions that other people took in response to your activities. It also does not simply count the number of people you communicated to as part of your campaign, but only the number of actions that those people went on to do. For example, if you speak at a church with 100 people attending, you cannot count this as 100 actions unless those people actually took an action in response. (As noted above, where it is not possible to count such follow up actions, you can provide a reasonable estimate.) If, at the end of the service, 50 of the 100 people sign a petition, then this counts as 50 simple actions. If 25 of those people also stay behind after the service to pray, then that counts as 75 simple actions. (As noted above, if one person signs the petition and also prays, that counts as 2 simple actions even though they were done by one individual.)