Helping the United Nations assess and improve its top global campaign for the MDGs

Most countries have agreed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. These goals aim to reduce poverty while improving the social and environmental conditions for billions of people. For the United Nations, the 15-year-long Millennium Campaign is a top priority that operates on a budget of about $9 million USD per year.

Having just passed the halfway point, the United Nations Development Program wanted to assess the campaign’s impact and understand which activities were most/least effective, and then to rethink their strategy in order to improve its performance.

With our partners Leitmotiv and the SCRG, our founder Dr. Cugelman co-led a 5-person research team that evaluated the United Nations Millennium Campaign. Dr. Cugelman worked as methodology lead while evaluating the impact of the global campaign’s communications, in particular the media and online engagement, as well as the US campaign.

Responding to our report, the United Nations Development Program’s evaluation office certified that our methodology was solid, and Salil Shetty, the Campaign Director (now the Secretary General of Amnesty International) responded, “This is not just another evaluation report, it’s a must read.”

Our key support included:

• Leading the evaluation process and project design
• Co-authoring the global evaluation and strategic recommendations
• Assessing the campaign’s impact through communications, news media, online channels, and social media
• Authoring the US report
• Providing oversight support across other national reports
• Undertaking independent research projects and analyses, including financial analysis, using web surveys, news time-series, and online data extraction