The difference between measuring activity and measuring effect
Launch library · evergreen read
Activity measures how much a campaign is doing: events run, messages sent, people contacted directly. Effect measures what difference that activity actually made in the world, and a busy campaign can still have a modest effect if its activity does not connect well to genuine, lasting change that anyone can actually point to afterward.
It is tempting to report activity heavily, since it is straightforward to count and always shows something visibly happening, but activity figures on their own say very little about whether a campaign is actually succeeding at what it originally set out to do for anyone it was actually meant to help.
Shifting the centre of gravity in reporting from activity toward effect, even when effect is harder to measure and less flattering in the short term, tends to produce more honest, more genuinely useful evaluation over the whole life of a campaign and well beyond it, into the next one.