On your marks - Get set - 6 April!

With 6 April 2014 approaching fast, all S&D organisations are called upon to showcase their activities on the first ever International Day of Sport for Development and Peace. As we will celebrate this day every year, it is also a time to monitor and evaluate these campaigns to learn for the years ahead.

Campaigning is about three things:

Planning and publicising your activity
Running your campaign and documenting it
Evaluating its success and learning from it

With the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace (IDSDP) coming up in less than two weeks, it is high time to finish your planning and to announce your activity celebrating that sport can do much more than allow us to act out our competitiveness, our sense of superiority and our beliefs in the survival of the fittest. Sport can, if used correctly and as a means to an end, build communities to become truly inclusive, educated, healthy and cohesive.

Reaching out to a wider audience
6 April bears the opportunity for the S&D sector to showcase its work in an abbreviated form. Staging a campaign, initiating an action day, or triggering moments of reflection and awareness-raising are however not enough if you want more than to preach to the converted. The newly incepted International Day allows for S&D activists and spokespeople to raise the individual organisational profile of individual work by linking into the global network, by showing, for example, the interconnectedness of a football project in Senegal with a Capoeira project in Brazil.

Making your activities on 6 April visible to the world will change the perception of those that are not yet involved. So lobby your local press, write a much-needed article about your work and place your campaign or activity on the IDSDP page on sportanddev.

Once the calendar reads 6 April, everyone should know about your activity. Not only the active participants or your village, but also the broader public, at best at national level. Media contacts are almost as important for campaigning as the activity itself. If the planning is not yet completed, but good publicity work puts pressure on you to deliver, do not hesitate to re-read advice on organising a campaign.

Building on this year’s successes and challenges
And while you are running your 6 April activity, make sure that you document it, taking pictures and videos, asking for feedback from participants, spectators and bystanders. Receiving their comments on the campaign’s idea, quality of implementation and messaging allows you to judge its success and ultimately to understand its effects.

Having done some basic monitoring, you can evaluate the success of your 6 April activity, draw lessons learnt on the effectiveness of your networking and publicity work and learn from 2014 for the coming years. This is crucial, because 6 April will from now on be on our joint agenda and campaigning successfully will be the sector’s core duty on this special day. Thus, seize the opportunity for global visibility, make noise and demonstrate the power of sport for development.