OSI-Supported 16 Days Campaign in 2002:
Clear Objectives, Focus, and Cultural Diversity

Congratulations! You won this year's 16 Days Campaign grant from the Open Society Institute, and your campaign will take place between November 25 and December 10, 2002. But, you may have never organized any campaigns so far - so, what should you do first? What does it mean to organize a campaign any way? Who can help you? Are you going to be successful? And how will you know if you were successful or not? This article will try to help you find your way around by introducing the experiences from the 16 Days campaigns sponsored by OSI in 2001.

By Nebojsa Radic

One of the common mistakes among 2001 campaigns was lack of clear objectives. In order to be able to better focus before and during the campaign, and to assess how successful your campaign was once it is over, you should clearly define its objectives right at the beginning.

The objectives should be realistic and clear , as easy to measure as possible. Changing perpetrators' behavior is probably what we would like to happen one day, but will not happen after 16 days of campaigning, regardless of how professional, devoted and high-impact the campaign was. For that we need longer work, not only by our NGO coalition, but by the whole society, and law and legal sanctions are needed to promote new behavior. Therefore, changing perpetrators' behavior would be a wrong objective for your 2002 campaign, although it might be a mission of your campaign. Possible campaign objectives - to mention only a few - would be to introduce a draft law in the Parliament, or even to have a new law passed; to build capacity in the police to deal with the cases of domestic violence; to increase a number of victims calling the SOS telephones; to increase awareness of general population of the scope of the problem; to involve the authorities in seeking solution for the problem; to get commitment from the authorities, etc.

What you don't want to be: A stream watering the desert

That leads us to another advice: in setting up the objectives you should focus on very specific audiences. Whose awareness, attitudes or behavior we want to change? Certainly not everybody's, at least not in 16 days! Clear focus (selected "target audiences") is one of the most important preconditions for success of any campaign. The energy, money, human work - all those vectors put together in your campaign, if not coordinated towards the same goal and target, will have no other impact but noise and waste. As Kahlil Gibran put it: Millions of small streams would never make it across a desert, its waters would disappear in the depths of the sands. But, put together, they make a river, big enough to come across. If water is not your symbol, think of fire: only if focused through a well-positioned enlargement glass, otherwise diffused sunlight lights a fire.

OK then, who is your target? Organizers of 2001 campaigns in several countries could not make up their mind. In many places we had all these targets in the same time: Women ("These are SOS phones and centers that you can call", or "I do not want to be a victim, I do not want to put up with that"), Men ("Show your strength but not against woman", "Real men do not hit women"), Witnesses ("When our neighbor Mr. Horvath beats his wife, we should call police"), Physicians ("VAW is a crime, physicians must report it"), Policemen ("Domestic violence is not a private matter"), Government ("VAW is a public health problem, causing huge losses in country's wealth"), and Legislators ("Women rights are human rights"). Besides all that, in one country there were two additional targets: children in schools ("The daddy, mom and me - a wonderful family"), and business community ("Let's build world without violence!"). Here we have hundreds of streams going nowhere, in a useless business of watering the desert! These are all legitimate messages and targets, but your campaign cannot and should not be everything to everyone. Make up your mind! Do one thing at a time!

"We organized 7 press conferences, put up 200 posters and visited 20 schools"

In order to communicate the message to your selective targets, you will need to put up certain activities. This is where the creativity in 2001 came to its best. We had countless press conferences, round tables, TV and radio shows, press releases, printing of posters, billboards, essay competitions, special documentaries, PSAs, police training, journalist training, disco club visits, distribution of pins and T-shirts, even a post stamp issued in one country, street rallies, visits to the markets, and many, many other things. Fine. So, when OSI asks you to write a campaign report (and it will certainly do so), should your report say: "We had a very successful campaign because we organized 7 press conferences, put up 200 posters and visited 20 schools"? No, it should not - although this is how - more or less - several 2001 campaign reports looked like. The activities are the tools to communicate the message; they are not objectives of your campaign. If you printed three million leaflets - one for each family in your country - it does not mean you had a good campaign. There are many questions the funders would ask you, some of them being: "But this is a waste of money because statistics show 40% of population in your country is illiterate and 20% speak minority language only, and your leaflet is in majority language" or "Good, did you distribute them all?" or "Fine, what is the response rate - how many people read the leaflet?" and last and the most important: "So what was the impact of that action?"

Think practically. You do not have to do just everything possible to communicate the message to your target audience. Select the most effective actions and focus on them - those that will be simple and economic to organize, with the biggest possible impact. Effectiveness of media relations is not measured by the number of media articles published about your action, but rather by: quality of the articles, number of readers they reached, relative influence the readership has to your cause (an article published in a women weekly would not help much in a campaign aiming at changing behavior of VAW perpetuators, but a banner exhibited by handball or rugby players could contribute to that aim), and finally, the impact they had in changing awareness, attitudes or behavior. The same applies to any of the above-mentioned actions. If you go for round tables, one with major policy makers might be more useful for changing behavior by imposing legal sanctions then ten round tables organized as citizens' discussion forums. Again, depends on what your goal is.

In order to assess impact of any campaign, measuring is very important. As a part of 2001 16 Days grant, OSI requested research and evaluation. It resulted in several such attempts. You can contact campaign organizers in Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, or Tajikistan, and find out about the ways they tried to evaluate their 2001 campaigns. Of course, measuring social change is a difficult task and there is lots of room for improvement. Some of the techniques used in 2001 were monitoring the number of SOS calls before, during and after the campaign (in case it was an action-oriented campaign), estimates of media outreach (in case of an awareness campaign), monitoring and analysis of media coverage, comparison of data received in pools conducted before (base-line) and after the campaign, and even focus groups (in case of attitude change campaign).

Be creative but understandable - "Be what you are"

All we spoke about so far were campaigning techniques - focusing, defining goals, thinking strategically, and evaluating the impact. OSI will not direct you towards what to tell to whom in your campaign, simply because they understand that variety of problems that exist in different countries with different cultures calls for different approach. Diversity is what OSI supports and fosters. 2001 campaigns offer a wealth of examples of culturally sensitive approaches to the issue - see OSI-Supported 2001 Campaign: Best Practices, Innovation, Creativity and find out that in Azerbaijan a quote from Koran was used as the campaign motto, that in Indonesia participants made traditional woven shawls and betel nut containers with anti-violence message, that in Kyrgyzstan debates were organized on the markets because "market is the most popular place in our villages and many people go there", while in Serbia PSAs and radio jingles were produced in four languages: Hungarian, Roma, Romanian and Serbian. So, be what you are and communicate your message in the language and symbols that your compatriots understand and use. And challenge the myths!

I hope this article at least gave you some food for thought. There will be more opportunities for discussion and learning at the OSI advocacy seminar organized this July. Besides that, before and during the campaign, we will have an open line for online consultancy as well as a listserv for exchange of experiences and ideas among campaing organizers.

Good luck!

This website is maintained by the Open Society Institute. For additional information about the 16 DAYS MEDIA CAMPAIGNS TO COMBAT VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN please contact Eva Foldvari (Network Women's Program) or Nikoletta Nagy (Network Media Program).