The campaign strategy is the road map to effective campaign planning and implementation. It sets out the campaign purpose and solidifies plans on an agreed basis, relates activities to goals, and serves as a reference point during implementation, monitoring and evaluation. A written strategy document can be shared with others, discussed and adjusted as the campaign progresses. It identifies the approaches, methods and tools to be used to achieve the campaign goals, and is a key element for transparent communication with other stakeholders, and fundraising from institutional donors.

A theory of change can serve as a strategy for a VAW campaign if it can satisfactorily answer these questions:

• Do the assumptions, strategies and results correspond with the purpose of the campaign? 

• Is there coherence between the assumptions and the strategies? That is, does what the campaign intend to do make sense in the light of its rationale?

• Do the targeted social actors correspond to the strategies and the campaign’s real potential to influence them?

• Do the strategies hold the promise to be the most efficient and effective means to influence the desired changes in the targeted social actors?

Furthermore, you must consider the relative weight of the components, which influence one another. Depending on the context, some components may be more important than others. In complex situations, for example, where you cannot predefine what you intend to achieve, sometimes not even what you will do, the purpose, assumptions and targeted social actors may be more important to define in the planning phase than are the strategies and results.

Source: Ricardo Wilson-Grau, personal communication.