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24 CHAPTER 1 ■ Social Marketing for Public Health: An Introduction

Step 8: Outline a Plan for Monitoring and Evaluation
A plan for monitoring and evaluating a social marketing campaign is needed be-
fore final budget and implementation plans are made. It needs to be referred back
to the goals established for the campaign. Monitoring is a measurement conducted
sometime after the launch of a new campaign, but before its completion.
Monitoring is executed to determine if midcourse corrections are needed to en-
sure that marketing goals of the program will be reached. An evaluation refers to a
measurement and a final report on what happened through the campaign. It
needs to address questions like: Were the marketing goals reached? What compo-
nents of the campaign can be linked with outcomes? Was the program on time
and within budget? What worked well and what did not? What should be done
differently next time?
Measures fall into three categories—output measures for program activities;
outcome measures for target audience responses and changes in knowledge, be-
liefs, and behavior; and impact measures for contributions to the plan purposes
(e.g., reductions in obesity as a result of many more people buying healthy
foods and/or beverages due to a social marketing campaign).
In the development of a monitoring and evaluation plan, five basic questions
need to be taken into account:

• Why will this measurement be conducted? For whom?
• What inputs, processes, and outcomes/impacts will be measured?
• What methods (such as interview, focus group, survey, and/or online
tracking) will be used for these measurements?
• When will these measurements be conducted?
• How much will these measurements cost?

Step 9: Establish Budgets and Find Funding Sources

The budgets for a social marketing campaign reflect the costs for developing and
implementing it, which include those associated with marketing mix strategies
(the 4Ps) and additional costs anticipated for monitoring and evaluation. In
ideal objective-and-task budgeting, these anticipated costs become a preliminary
budget, based on what is needed to achieve the established marketing goals.
When the preliminary budget exceeds available funds, however, options for addi-
tional funding and the potential for adjusting campaign phases (such as spread-
ing out costs over a longer period of time), revising strategies, and/or reducing
behavior change goals need to be considered. Additional funding sources may in-
clude government grants and appropriations, nonprofit organization and foun-
dation supports, advertising and media partnerships and coalitions, and