Beyond "virality" and basic analytics number: Develop, execute, and evaluate your social campaign more meaningfully

C4C is a consulting firm that focuses on research-to-messaging in advancing social causes in Indonesia and strengthening civil society. One of our projects focuses on campaigning for Latih Logika, a free critical thinking course for young people that aims to build logical and critical thinking skills among the public to strengthen democratic participation and make citizens wiser in information consumption and more resistant to propaganda and disinformation. Our task is to develop a strategy and execute the campaign to expand its reach and outcome. The Latih Logika campaign ran from May 2024 to June 2025, focusing on trials, recalibration, and infrastructure improvements. A stronger strategic communication presence helped us reach a wider, more diverse audience. However, as we start developing the next phase of the campaign, we realized that higher numbers didn't always mean getting closer to Latih Logika's main objective. Therefore, here are some tips we can share for developing, executing, and evaluating your social campaign in a more meaningful way that gets you closer to your social goals.

There's a common mistake we all make in social campaigns: jumping straight into thinking about what content or communications materials to publish. The truth is that content is probably the last thing you should focus on when developing your social campaign. This approach is problematic because it puts the cart before the horse. When we start with content creation, we're essentially creating solutions without fully understanding the problem we're trying to solve or the context we're operating in. It's like building a house without first examining the foundation or understanding the terrain.

Before creating any content, you should at least map out and define three crucial elements of your social campaign:

• Goals: What specific change are you trying to achieve? Are you looking to raise awareness, change behaviors, shift attitudes, or mobilize action? Clear goals provide direction and help you measure success beyond vanity metrics.
• Barriers: What obstacles prevent your target audience from achieving the desired change? These could be lack of information, deeply held beliefs, social norms, structural constraints, or competing priorities. Understanding barriers helps you craft more targeted and effective approaches.
• Chosen Approach: Based on your goals and identified barriers, what theory of change will guide your campaign? Will you focus on education, persuasion, community mobilization, or policy advocacy? Your approach should logically connect your activities to your desired outcomes.

To illustrate this framework in practice, let's examine how we applied this strategic approach to the Latih Logika campaign:

• Current Situation: Indonesian students and citizens have concerningly low literacy levels, making them particularly vulnerable to disinformation, hoaxes, and propaganda. This susceptibility undermines informed decision-making and weakens democratic discourse in the country.
• Main Goals: Our vision is for Indonesian citizens, especially young people, to become informed and actively engaged in civic participation. This enhanced civic engagement will ultimately strengthen Indonesia's democratic processes by creating a more discerning and participatory citizenry.
• Key Barriers: The root of the problem lies in Indonesia's education system, where critical thinking skills are not formally taught. Without these foundational skills, citizens lack the tools needed to evaluate information critically, distinguish reliable sources from unreliable ones, and engage thoughtfully in democratic processes.
• Chosen Approach: We developed a solution that directly addresses this educational gap by offering a free online platform that teaches critical thinking and logical reasoning fundamentals. This approach democratizes access to these essential skills, reaching citizens regardless of their educational background or geographic location.

Action Steps: The campaign focuses on persuading the public to consume fully Latih Logika's free courses and, crucially, to apply their learning in real-life situations through an online community and offline engagement. This dual emphasis on both learning and application ensures that the skills translate into meaningful civic engagement rather than remaining theoretical knowledge.

This strategic framework guided every aspect of our campaign development, from audience targeting to messaging strategy, ensuring that our tactics aligned with our broader democratic strengthening objectives.

Always rely on evidence and data when identifying your campaign roadmap. This doesn't necessarily mean you have to conduct massive, resource-intensive research projects. Evidence can come from various sources and scales, depending on your capacity and timeline. The key is to base your strategic decisions on observable facts rather than assumptions or gut feelings. This evidence-based approach helps ensure that your campaign addresses real problems, targets the right audiences, and employs strategies that have a reasonable chance of success.

Evidence can include existing studies and reports, small-scale surveys or interviews with your target audience, social media analytics, pilot program results, expert consultations, or even informal conversations with community members. The goal is to gather enough reliable information to make informed decisions about your campaign direction.

After establishing a clear roadmap, it's time to focus on actually designing the campaign journey. A campaign is essentially a communication effort to influence or change your target audience's perception, opinion, sentiments, or behavior, often a mixture of all four. Therefore, we need to determine how we will guide our audience toward the desired perception, opinion, sentiments, or behavior that could support our main goal.

The most common campaign journey framework is the inverted pyramid (or funnel) framework, which has become the norm in marketing. Even though it's widely used in commercial marketing, it's rarely adopted by social campaigns for their missions, a missed opportunity that leaves many social campaigns without clear audience progression strategies.

This framework is highly adaptable and can be adjusted based on your specific issues and goals. A compelling example comes from the University of Michigan, whose digital health recruitment platform strategically adapted a consumer behavior model, the buying funnel, to create their Digital Health Research Participation Funnel in 2013.

Their approach guided potential volunteers through a structured journey toward research participation, treating volunteer recruitment with the same strategic rigor typically reserved for customer acquisition. The results were dramatic: annual new account creation jumped from 1,844 (2007-2012) to 3,906 (2013-2016), representing a 111% increase.

This case demonstrates how consumer behavior models can be effectively adapted beyond commercial contexts to drive engagement in health research, social campaigns, and other mission-driven initiatives. The key is creating clear pathways that systematically guide audiences toward desired actions rather than hoping they'll naturally progress from awareness to engagement on their own.

After the campaign journey has been developed, it's finally time to think about what communication materials should be published and how to monitor and evaluate them. Having a clear consumer journey map makes it more structured and relatively easier to decide what content, tactics, and metrics to employ.

More importantly, this approach allows you to execute and evaluate the campaign in a more meaningful way, where every decision you make about content, tactics, monitoring, and evaluation directly supports your main campaign objective. This alignment ensures that your efforts aren't just generating activity, but actually driving progress toward your social goals.

A practical and simple example from our Latih Logika campaign illustrates this principle in action. The focus of Latih Logika's previous campaign was clear from the outset: to improve technical infrastructure and expand our reach, enabling more people to access and engage with our learning materials.

Based on the roadmap and campaign journey map we developed, we identified key metrics that should be monitored beyond the basic engagement indicators like reach, likes, and comments. Our strategic metrics included:

• The number of people watching 50% of videos (labeled "casual viewers"): This metric helped us understand initial engagement levels and identify content that successfully captures attention beyond the first few seconds.
• The number of people watching 75% of videos (labeled "engaged viewers"): This deeper engagement metric indicated genuine interest in the content and suggested potential conversion
• The number of learning modules downloaded: This metric was particularly valuable because it indicated both course completion and a desire for continued learning, showing that participants were not just passively consuming content but actively engaging with the educational materials.

These metrics ensured we focused on what actually mattered for advancing critical thinking education, rather than getting distracted by vanity metrics that don't correlate with our mission's success.

If you're interested in learning more about our research findings and the alternative narratives we've developed, we invite you to follow us on our social media channels. There, we’ll be sharing updates, insights, and the events that will follow up after that which is our data platform, named Lab Narasi, launch event in October 2025
Instagram: @c4c_id
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At Communication for Change (C4C), we've supported institutions in crafting and delivering policy recommendations that are evidence-based, politically savvy, and tailored to resonate with their stakeholders. We also specialize in developing and executing strategic social campaigns that drive meaningful change, from building critical awareness to mobilizing civic participation.

Contact us to explore how we can help turn your research into strategic, impactful communication and action, whether through message testing, narrative development, stakeholder engagement support, or comprehensive social campaign development and execution.

C4C is the architect of narrative change, we bridge research and communication to craft compelling messages and narratives that drive change.

We translate data and insights into strategic storytelling, helping organizations in the social sector engage audiences, inspire action, and create meaningful change. Whether you are a nonprofit looking to refine your storytelling or seeking research-backed strategies to enhance your influence, C4C has the expertise to bring your vision to life.