Goals and Objectives
The information presented here is a brief overview of the complex landscape that makes up the field of preventing and countering violent extremism (PVE and CVE) online. Often, these online interventions can be referred to as counter-narratives, counter speech, alternative narratives, or positive interventions, depending on the ultimate goal for the online engagement. For more comprehensive guidance and in-depth analysis of positive interventions, we recommend consulting the outputs of the GIFCT Working Groups focusing on positive interventions.
Setting Smart Goals
- audience targeting
- budget setting
- defining your expectations
For a truly robust campaign plan, you should identify the specific tactics that will allow you to achieve your objectives. These are the "how" part of your campaign and should be both practical and logical.
- To reach your target audience, you might use targeted advertising on social media to penetrate specific online echo chambers of people (closed social spaces where certain beliefs are repeatedly amplified and reinforced, and where there is little exposure to opposing perspectives).
- To encourage engagement from your audience, you might create a messaging service to open up opportunities for dialogue.
- To establish a national network of community leaders, you might run interactive networking events.
A successful online campaign depends primarily on correctly identifying your audience and the best way to communicate and engage with them. Identifying your audience is a process that is constantly evolving based on available tools, knowledge, and access. You will need to develop a strategic communication plan in order to reach your targeted community.
The basics of strategic communication theory involve: what, to whom, how, and where.. We highly emphasize the need to identify, test, and confirm the right audience for the message to be disseminated before moving forward with other steps of the campaign development, as those are intertwined with your audience and might not be suitable for different targets. With more technological tools at the disposal of many different actors, audience targeting is now key to success for interventions based on online communication.
Multi-platform identities, online community networks, and gamification techniques have all contributed to shaping a more nuanced understanding of what "audience" may mean. However, audience targeting still relies on two foundational elements:
- Identification of a problem and who it involves - determining the issue or challenge and understanding the root cause of the problem and contributing factors. Who do you want to reach to help fix that challenge or problem? That should help you determine who you want to reach.
- Identification of a problem and who it involves - determining the issue or challenge and understanding the root cause of the problem and contributing factors. Who do you want to reach to help fix that challenge or problem? That should help you determine who you want to reach.
- To make a positive impact, campaigners must carefully identify the problem they are trying to solve. Understand that oftentimes, the audience you want to reach is also a vulnerable community. The Campaign Toolkit was updated as part of GIFCT’s Addressing Youth Radicalization and Mobilization Working Group in 2025. As such, we have built out a number of resources focusing specifically on campaigns focusing on youth, which can be found here.
- One way to approach audience targeting is to think about both ideal and worst-case scenarios for the intervention life cycle. Hope for the best case but be prepared for the worst, which might include a lack of response to your campaign or perhaps adversarial attacks on your campaign. For small community-led interventions, broader, macro audiences can be considered ideal types in terms of desirable conditions. On the other hand, larger campaigns with significant resources can consider creating clusters of micro-audiences who may have some key overlaps in terms of need and behavioral patterns that can help to better create and refine messaging through a more nuanced narrative and tone. Overall, the narrower your audience is, the more likely your campaign will be impactful.
- Tech tools can be powerful and transformative assets for campaigns, as they can provide insights that capture lifestyle and networking affiliations of users on a particular platform. When information mining reveals opportunities for engagement, it is important to provide content that can trigger a positive shift in people's thinking. By using subtle entry points, such as building trust and engagement, it may be possible to encourage critical thinking and foster a sustained shift away from hate-based or violent extremist ideologies.
Using third-party data mining capabilities to create highly targeted user profiles raises specific ethical concerns, especially involving vulnerable individuals or groups. Understanding the complexities of vulnerability and the ethical implications of audience micro-targeting is crucial for anyone developing a campaign.
In online interventions, robust quality assurance, security protocols, and risk management systems are critical, as are proportionality and transparency. Activists and campaigners must consider how risk and protective factors affect people differently and mitigate against any known vulnerabilities.
A comprehensive campaign strategy should include:
- An impact assessment phase at both the initiation and end-stage; and
- A mid-way analysis of how content, audiences, and wider issues have affected known vulnerability levels.
Most successful campaigns need resources, but there are plenty of examples of successful campaigns run on little to no budgets. The most important thing is to ensure that funding is appropriately spread across the budget to account for your own time, the production of content, and the delivery or advertising of the content.
Be sure to keep accurate records of where you are spending your campaign budget, and justify why each cost is necessary and important. This will help you manage your budget across multiple costs.
For example, if you spend most of your money on content production, do you then have enough to effectively promote it? If you are a professional organization, be sure not to spend all your money on content and delivery, ensuring you leave enough to pay for the time of yourself and your colleagues to monitor responses to your campaign and evaluate the results. Even a simple table can help you allocate budgets and start to map out how best to avoid spending too much on one thing or spending too much early on in the campaign process.The more details you can add to how you are allocating spending, the better the chances that you will not overspend during your campaign.
Being able to define expectations is an essential skill of any successful campaigner. Setting clear and realistic expectations can help ensure all stakeholders are aligned on your campaign's goals, objectives, and outcomes.
In many cases, even small changes can be significant achievements for activists and campaigners working in this field! For example, a campaign that successfully raises awareness about the dangers of violent extremist ideologies and encourages individuals to seek out non-violent solutions to their grievances should be considered a significant achievement.
A helpful way to think about your expectations is by looking at the Theory of Change framework, which helps establish a clear and logical setting for how a campaign intends to achieve its desired outcomes. A Theory of Change outlines the causal pathways that lead to a specific result. In countering hate and violent extremism online, a Theory of Change can help you identify the key drivers of radicalization and violent extremism and establish strategies for addressing them.
