Why attribution is hard in social change work
Launch library · evergreen read
Social change rarely results from a single cause, since a shift in policy or attitude is usually the product of many factors working together over time, including other campaigns, unrelated events, and gradual cultural change that no one single campaign can claim full and exclusive credit for.
This makes attribution, the question of how much of an observed change was actually caused by a specific campaign, genuinely difficult to establish with real confidence, even when the campaign's activity and the observed change clearly happened around the same broad period of time, which invites suspicion but rarely proves anything.
Honest campaigns tend to speak in terms of contribution rather than sole attribution, acknowledging the role other factors likely played, which is both more accurate and, over time, considerably more credible than claiming full and exclusive credit for a complex, genuinely shared outcome achieved together, alongside many other efforts working toward the same broad goal.