Evaluating Your VERB Scorecard Campaign

As with all campaigns, the evaluation of your VERB Scorecard campaign should be built in from the beginning. Your planning team will need to demonstrate the value of your campaign and its effectiveness influencing your target audience to interested stakeholders, such as your campaign funders and partners.

Pre- and post-surveys provide your planning and evaluation teams with quantitative data that will help you assess the overall progress toward your campaign objectives. Collect baseline data from tweens (and parents, if a part of your evaluation design) just before the campaign starts, and collect post-campaign data immediately after the campaign concludes. Long delays between the conclusion of your campaign and the collection of post-campaign data will dilute this measurement of the behavioral impact of your campaign.

If a grand finale is held, postcampaign surveys can be administered with tweens and parents on-site in exchange for a small incentive. Follow-up surveys can also be administered with tweens in classrooms, after school programs, etc. and with parents via telephone. Your planning team can gain useful information from partner/vendor surveys.

The demographic information on the back of completed VERB Scorecards can give your evaluation team the information to identify trends in zip codes, ages, genders, the most and least popular physical activities, participation and attendance at partner/vendor facilities and events.

Including a question in your surveys or on the back of the VERB Scorecard about where participants heard about the campaign can suggest which promotional efforts were more effective. In Bowling Green, Kentucky, the public libraries were by far the most popular VERB Scorecard distribution site, followed by the a local skating center and the parks and recreation department.

The combined number of hours on all completed VERB Scorecard can be used to calculate the cost of the campaign per hour of physical activity that resulted. Lexington, Kentucky determined that their campaign cost $3.52 per physical activity hour in 2004, and $0.67 per physical activity hour in 2005 (the total possible hours on a completed VERB Scorecard multiplied by number of completed and redeemed VERB Scorecards divided by the total budget).

The previous campaign sites have been challenged to quantify anecdotal reports from community members that many tweens participated in the campaign, but didn’t totally complete the VERB Scorecard or completed it, but didn’t redeem it for prizes. A survey of all campaign participants to assess the extent of their participation hasn’t yet shown to be practical.

Share your evaluation findings with your entire planning team, your partners/vendors, the media and other interested stakeholders to begin cultivating support for your next campaign.