Test Your Tools and Pilot Your Campaign

As you design your strategy, you must address these priorities:

Test your tools and strategies with your priority audience.

This step is crucial and can be done through a formal focus group or an informal conversation with members of your priority audience. Through this step, be sure to evaluate if it is possible for the priority audience to make the behavior change. If the strategy receives positive reviews, you are ready to pilot. If not, you will want to make further refinements. Once you have refined your strategies and tools, you may be ready to pilot your campaign.
Pilot your campaign.

In the pilot, test the effectiveness of the strategy with a limited number of people. Essentially, you want to know, before committing to using the strategy throughout a community, that it will work effectively. If the pilot is successful, you can be much more confident of success when you broadly implement the strategy. If the pilot is unsuccessful, then you need to make further revisions, and pilot again before broad-scale implementation and evaluation.

Think of piloting as a “test run” or opportunity to work out the bugs before committing to carrying out a strategy broadly. Although piloting is important, it takes a lot of time and resources. Here are some abbreviated tips for any piloting you do:
- Try to use a minimum of two groups to conduct your pilot when possible and make sure the changes you observe are a result of your intervention, not coincidental.
- Make sure to accurately measure the behavior change outcomes when evaluating the success of a pilot.
- Carefully examine numbers and records that denote a change in behavior.
- Confirm that you are actually able to change a behavior before you implement it across your community.
- Revise the campaign as necessary.