Every engagement starts the same way: with the right questions, asked by the right people.
FIELD GUIDE
Field guide · Campaign intelligence
Decision to Movement
A campaign is not a content calendar.
Twenty-four pages on the Artefact91 Campaign Intelligence model: define the movement required, read the environment, anticipate change, choose where intervention can matter, build the intervention and adapt as conditions move. It is written for the work that happens before the creative brief.
Use it to design or reset a campaign, before substantial creative or media spend, and again whenever the operating environment materially changes.
Get the field guideWhat it is — and is not
A working model
Campaign Intelligence integrates strategic communications, research, stakeholder analysis, foresight, scenario thinking, evaluation and adaptive management.
A design tool
Use it to design or reset an institutional, public-interest, reputation, advocacy, behaviour-change or integrated communications campaign.
Not a forecast
Scenarios are structured possibilities. Probabilities require appropriate data and validated methods, and this guide does not pretend otherwise.
Not a causal claim
It does not claim communications caused an institutional outcome unless the evaluation design supports that inference.
What is inside
The operating rule
Separate facts, signals, assumptions and choices before anything else.
Define
Define the movement — the change you are trying to produce, without naming a channel.
Read
Read the whole environment through eight lenses, on an evidence ladder.
Anticipate
Anticipate without pretending to predict: signals, scenarios, trigger indicators.
Choose
Choose where intervention can matter, using the six-question test.
Move
Build the intervention as an architecture, sequenced rather than saturated.
Adapt
Adapt as the environment moves, with measurement as a feedback system.
Worked example
An institutional service launch, and what the six stages change about the brief.
Templates built to be used in the room
Movement brief
Complete before approving tactics, creative or media spend.
Operating picture
Everything that matters, marked fact, signal, assumption or choice.
Evidence register
The basis for every consequential claim.
Scenario stress test
A small set, plausible enough to change preparation.
Choice record
The rationale made visible, so it can be revisited when evidence changes.
Campaign architecture
Each execution layer connected to the movement objective.
Measurement + adaptation plan
What evidence will trigger a decision, agreed in advance.
The templates are compact by design. Copy them into your own workspace and pre-fill everything that can be known in advance.
What it is built on
The model is consistent with established directions in contemporary practice: objectives should connect to organisational or policy outcomes; audience and stakeholder insight should shape strategy; evaluation should move beyond output counts; foresight should explore multiple plausible futures rather than pretend to predict one; and live programmes should use evidence to learn and adapt. The six-stage sequence is Artefact91 synthesis, not a validated predictive science.
- AMEC — Integrated Evaluation Framework
- AMEC — Barcelona Principles 4.0 (2025)
- OECD — Report on Public Communication (2021)
- OECD — Strategic Foresight Toolkit for Resilient Public Policy (2025)
- OECD — Building Anticipatory Capacity with Strategic Foresight in Government (2025)
- UK Government Communication Service — OASIS planning framework
- UK Government Functional Standard GovS 011: Communications
- UK GCS — IN CASE: anticipating unintended consequences
- BetterEvaluation — monitoring and evaluation for adaptive management
- UK Government — Magenta Book, handling complexity in policy evaluation
General strategic communications guidance only. Adapt it to your jurisdiction, sector, governance and legal obligations. If you would rather model a campaign than read about one, the campaign simulator runs in three minutes. Or bring us the situation you are facing.
