Section 8. Monitoring Progress and Making Adjustments in the Social Marketing Campaign

Learn how to adjust a social marketing campaign to changing conditions, the needs of a target audience, societal and community trends, and its own resources.

 

• Why should you monitor progress and make adjustments in the social marketing campaign?

• What aspects of the campaign should you monitor?

• How do you monitor and adjust a social marketing campaign?

For several years, the Peterson City AIDS Prevention and Treatment Team (PCARTT) had been distributing condoms and advocating safe sex and early HIV treatment in the Peterson gay community. Now, however, the rate of new HIV infections among gay men had dropped almost to zero, and practicing safe sex had become as much a normal part of their lives as brushing their teeth. The members of the team were beginning to realize that their efforts were only needed to maintain the status quo. PCARTT's efforts in the gay community had been so successful that a full-scale campaign was no longer needed there.

The AIDS problem in Peterson City hadn't disappeared, however. Through a number of channels, including public health data, conversations with medical workers, and their own experiences on the street, the team learned that HIV infections were soaring among IV drug users. It was clearly time for the PCARTT social marketing campaign to change its focus from the gay community to this other high-risk group.

The team understood that this meant more than sending their message through different channels and conducting outreach in different neighborhoods. It meant changing both the style and content of the message, and delivering it in very different ways. It also meant a new style of outreach, different equipment -- sterile needles as well as condoms -- and a different kind of approach. But PCARTT team members knew they had to adapt their campaign to changes in the marketplace. Their competition -- the AIDS virus -- wasn't going away anytime soon, and they had to adjust in order to meet it.

Any social marketing campaign, if it's going to remain effective, has to adjust to changing conditions, the needs of its target audience, societal and community trends, and its own resources. This last section of the Tool Box chapter on social marketing discusses how to monitor your campaign to know when you need to adjust it, and gives some suggestions about how to make the proper adjustments.

Why should you monitor progress and make adjustments in your social marketing campaign?

Successful commercial marketing campaigns will only stay successful as long as they respond to forces in the marketplace. The same is true for social marketing campaigns.

For community-based and other similar organizations, that means looking at a number of areas:

• Demographics. Neighborhoods can change, for instance, because of gentrification, immigration, or development. You need to adjust the delivery of your message and /or your service to continue to reach your target population.
• Consumer preferences. Issues seen as crucial one day may be invisible the next. If you're asking for contributions, or trying to convince people to change their behavior in some other way, you have to make sure that your issue doesn't disappear.
• Trends and social conditions. As circumstances and trends change, you have to change with them, or you'll be offering services or advocating behavior changes that are unnecessary. The introductory example of the change in the HIV problem in a community is a good illustration of this.
• Social memory. What was incredibly important and immediate to one generation may be trivial, or even unknown, to people ten or more years younger. The shock and sorrow in the gay community at the number of deaths of friends and loved ones in the 1980's, for instance, is fading history to young gay men in the 21st century. With new drugs that can keep the disease at bay, many are risking unprotected sex because they don't have the personal memory of the devastation that AIDS caused only a short time ago. (Maybe PCARTT needs to keep up its level of social marketing in the gay community, after all.)
• Communication channels. In the past several years, the number of cable TV viewers has outstripped that of the major networks. More recently, younger people often use the Internet to find information, housing, jobs, etc. Teens change their preferences in radio stations as often as they change their clothes. If social marketers aren't adjusting to these new channels, they won't reach their target audiences.

When we refer to monitoring the progress of a social marketing campaign, that means looking at not only how good the message is and how well it's reaching its intended audience, but also how well the organization is doing its job. Whether you're delivering services, advocating for an issue or for particular changes, recruiting volunteers, or raising money, part of your campaign is adjusting what you do to reflect the realities of people's needs and preferences. You may need to change your message, or change how you deliver it in order to attract your target audience's attention. You may also need to change what you do or how you do it in order to respond appropriately to their needs and to encourage the behavior change you're aiming for.

What aspects of the campaign should you monitor?

There are three essential aspects of any social marketing campaign that need to be monitored and adjusted.

Effectiveness. How well is the campaign accomplishing its goals? As explained above, this question addresses two distinct areas:

• Is the social marketing message effective, i.e. reaching those for whom it is intended, and having the desired effect?
• Is the work of the organization effective, i.e. actually bringing about and/or supporting the change it's working toward?

In some cases, where the message is the work of the organization (an initiative whose sole purpose is to develop and distribute anti-smoking messages, for instance), these areas may be the same. More often, if the organization is delivering service, engaging in advocacy, or trying to accomplish a specific purpose to forward its work (e.g. convince people to donate), the two areas need to be measured and considered in different ways.

In either case, monitoring effectiveness encompasses revisiting and reevaluating:

• Your goals themselves
• How well you've achieved those goals.
• How other people view the organization or initiative.

Efficiency. How well are you using your marketing resources? Are your efforts going in the directions that will give you the greatest return for the resources you have?

Strategy. How well do your current strategies and systems address the realities of the marketplace? Are your goals appropriate for the current situation? Are you looking ahead to understand what might happen in the future and creating new strategies, goals, and systems to address the changes you see coming?

How do you monitor and adjust your campaign?

There are two kinds of monitoring and adjustment to be made in a social marketing campaign. The first is in the campaign itself; the second is in the reality of the work of the organization. You can change your message or the targets of the campaign. You can also make real-world adjustments to convince and support people to make the change you're aiming for (providing child care, moving your operation closer to the target population, treating people with respect, etc.)

For non-profits, those real-world adjustments also involve two aspects: First, are you doing what you do well? And second, do you have enough money and other resources to sustain the work? You need to examine both as you make changes. In the ideal, they should be the same thing. In actuality, the extent to which they are connected often depends on whether you and funders define "good job" the same way. The more you can do to prove you're responding to the actual needs of the marketplace and the target audience, the better position you'll be in to find the money to support what you do.

So, how do you actually look at these areas and decide whether and how you need to change what you're doing? Depending on your budget, you can use some of the same formal tools that commercial marketers use, or you can use less formal, but nonetheless reasonably accurate measures that give you similar information.

Monitoring and adjusting effectiveness

As discussed above, you have to monitor both the results of the campaign and your work, as well as attitudes toward the campaign and your organization. There are various ways to do this.

Monitoring and adjusting results.

The three most common ways to monitor a marketing campaign are, in marketers' terms, sales analysis, market share analysis, and expense -to-sales analysis. All of these depend on hard numbers -- the number of participants you serve, the amount of money you raise, the statistical achievement of a particular goal.

It's apparently difficult for marketers -- even when they're discussing social marketing -- to think in any but commercial terms. While in some cases, sales is close to what we are really talking about in this chapter -- marketing an item connected to your work, trying to bring in contributions to your organization or initiative, trying to sell a service to third party payers -- in most cases we're referring to something slightly different.

The equivalent of sales for most health and community-based organizations is the number of people they can attract to services, the number of people they can convince to adopt healthy or socially desirable practices, the amount of community support they can muster, or the amount of influence they're able to exert over policy through their advocacy efforts. We'll continue to use the term "sales" in this section, but what we usually mean is one of those health-and-community-organization equivalents.

• Sales analysis. Sales analysis is simply an analysis of how well you're meeting your goals, whether they're attracting a certain number of participants to a service or program, convincing donors to contribute a given amount to your organization, persuading a certain percentage of the target population to undertake a specific behavior change, or to some other goal.

The numbers here are generally easy to determine, and are measured against either pre-set goals or past performance. What they mean may not be easy to determine. Attracting a lot of participants may not mean you're offering quality service, for example. You may need to know how long they stay, or how well they achieve their goals to determine that. You can compare the amount you've raised, or the number of people who've quit smoking to your goals, but not to what's possible, or to what would happen if you used another marketing method.

• Market share analysis. This type of analysis tells you how you're doing in relation to the competition. In health and community work, the competition can take many forms:
  
  • Another organization that has the same purpose and tries to attract the same target audience as yours.
  • Another issue competing with yours for community financial and political support.
  • The pull of the behavior you're hoping to change. (Dieters are constantly fighting the urge to eat; people quitting smoking are fighting the urge to smoke; it's easier to sit still and read or watch TV than to get up and run three miles; etc.)
  • Other things people could be doing. (Volunteering must compete for a spot on the schedule with time spent with family, reading for pleasure, sports, jobs around the house, and other non-work activities. Life is full of alternatives, of which yours is only one.)
  • More general comparisons to other, similar organizations or initiatives. If the statistics say that the average return on a non-profit fundraising appeal is 15%, and yours is only 5%, that's probably worth looking into. If a heart-health campaign in a nearby community resulted in the target population lowering cholesterol by an average of 20 points, and your similar campaign achieved an even better result, you're probably doing OK (assuming that either community's scores represented a significant decrease).

Measuring market share gives you a bit more information than sales analysis, because it uses the competition as a control group (i.e. a group that's not exposed to your campaign). If you're doing better than the competition -- if more people are eating heart-healthy diets in your area than they were before you started your campaign, for instance, but that isn't the case elsewhere -- you have some evidence that what you do is working.

• Expense-to-sales analysis. The question to be asked here is "What kind of return did you get on your marketing dollar?" If it costs you most of a dollar to generate a dollar's worth of donations, you're probably not using your marketing dollars well. (The dollar here includes whatever it takes to conduct a social marketing campaign -- staff time, mailing, printing, advertising fees, website development, etc.) If that's the case, you need to change the way you use your resources. (More on this can be found below, under "Efficiency.")

If your effectiveness according to these measures isn't adequate, you'll probably have to address one or more of the following if you want to change the situation:

• Your message. Your marketing research -- formal or informal -- can tell you whether people are getting and paying attention to your message. If they're not, you need to find new ways to deliver it and/or reframe it so they'll receive and listen to it. Possibilities for change here include the tone, the channels you use to reach your target audience, the language of the message, its content, and the medium in which it's presented.
• Your services. If you provide services, how effective are they? If you are a new organization, or are providing new services, it may take as much as two years to become accepted. If you've been around for a while and you're not attracting participants, however, you probably need to look at what you're doing and how. Are you meeting people's needs? Are the participants you do have meeting their goals? What's the word on the street about why people aren't enrolling? Answering these questions honestly will give you a start on making the changes you need to. You might need to rethink your methods, your goals for the service, or even the nature of the service you provide (if the needs of the target population have changed).
• Other service-related issues. How are people -- staff, participants, contributors, volunteers -- treated in your organization? As partners, equals, valued additions? Or as subordinates, ignorant and incompetent? What is your site like? Is it comfortable and pleasant, or cold and unwelcoming? How is the noise level, bathroom situation, parking facility, cleanliness, and accessibility? All of these can serve to attract or repel people, and need to be adjusted so they do the former.
• Your reputation. We'll discuss this further below, under "Attitudes," but it needs to be mentioned here. If you have a bad reputation in the community, because of a misperception, the quality of your work, or the way your organization treats people, it will obviously affect your ability to attract participants and support or convince people to act in the ways you want them to. It's important to alter whatever it is that leads people to think badly of your organization.

Monitoring and adjusting to attitudes.

The other measure of how well your campaign is doing is how it and your organization are viewed by your target population and others important to your work.

You can analyze attitudes by looking at them in simplest terms (e.g. asking people "How do you feel about our organization on a scale of 1-5?"), which gives you little useful data. You can also look at people's levels of satisfaction with your campaign and organization, which can give you more, useful information to work with. There are a number of different types of satisfaction measures, ranging from simple to fairly complex, that yield different amounts and kinds of information.

The question of whose satisfaction matters is one that needs to be asked here. Any organization has several "publics" whose good will is important -- participants or beneficiaries, the rest of the target population, contributors, funders, policy makers, the community at large -- and has to satisfy all of them to some extent. It's virtually impossible to maximize everyone's satisfaction, and maximizing satisfaction may not be the goal in any case. The best strategy is usually to try to strike a balance among the needs of the several constituencies. This often means balancing the costs to the organization (in money, good will, community support, etc.) with creating a relatively high, or high-enough, level of satisfaction among all concerned.

• Simple satisfaction/dissatisfaction scale. This is the most basic and least telling measure of satisfaction. It involves asking people to state their satisfaction with the organization on a numbered (usually 1 to 5) scale, ranging from "very dissatisfied" to "very satisfied." It will tell you whether people are favorable to the organization but will give you no information about what you need to change to affect their opinions.
• Derived dissatisfaction measure. This measure will give you a bit more information. It asks people to rate various aspects of the organization (or, more simply, the organization as a whole) on a numbered scale, and also to rate where they think it should fall on that scale. The difference between the two rankings will give you a fair idea of where people have problems with your operation.

Thus, a particular aspect of the organization -- the physical attractiveness of its space, say -- may not rank very high, but people may not think it should rank very high. In that case, there's really not a problem, and the organization doesn't need to run out and hire an interior decorator. If, however, most people rank another aspect -- the quality of the medical staff at a clinic, for example -- very low, but think it should be ranked very high, you either have an image problem, or you need to review the competency of your personnel.

• Importance/performance ratings. This measure again asks people to rank aspects of the organization twice: once for how well people think they're operating, and once for how important people think they are. The information gained here is a bit more specific and gives you more to work with.

Results of this measure are usually graphed in four quadrants:

Performance High        2    1             Importan high

Important Low             3     4            Performance Low

If an aspect of the organization -- again, let's take the quality of a clinic's medical staff -- lands in quadrant 1, everything's fine: people think an excellent medical staff is important, they find your medical staff excellent, and you just have to be sure to maintain your level of quality.

If it lands in quadrant 2 -- people still think your medical staff is excellent, but they don't really care much about the quality of the staff -- you're still OK. What you might think about here is whether you're putting too much of your resources into that area of the organization, since people don't attach much importance to it, anyway.

If the scores place staff quality in quadrant 3 -- the staff's not really very good, but that doesn't matter -- you don't really have to worry too much (except about the threat of a malpractice suit). Even though performance is low, the fact that people don't think it's important means that you don't really need to adjust anything, at least immediately. You may want to improve staff quality for any number of other reasons, but the current quality of staff won't keep the target population away.

If staff quality lands in quadrant 4, however, you have a serious problem. People think the competency of the medical staff is very important, and they don't trust your staff to remove a splinter. Here's the area where you have to make major adjustments, both in your campaign and in your operation. If, in fact, your staff is very good, and people just don't realize that, then you have to get that message out, and quickly. If, as is more likely, at least some of your staff isn't up to standard, then you need to think about how to either improve their skills or replace them, and to publicize the fact that you're doing it.

In other words, if you use an importance/performance measure, you need to put the most effort into changing anything that falls in quadrant 4, where its importance is seen as high and its performance is seen as low. You may have other reasons for improving or changing areas of the organization that fall into other quadrants, but they don't need to be changed immediately to respond to customer satisfaction.

• Consumer panels. Another way to find out what people think about your organization is to ask them in person. A consumer panel -- a group composed of members of your organization's target population(s) and/or its various publics -- is assembled to give feedback on the operation of the organization. This group is similar to a focus group, except that it meets on a regular or semi-regular basis, rather than only once. If you want honest feedback, you have to be careful to include people who are critical of, or at least not totally loyal to, your organization, and to rotate group membership from time to time.

Once you've found out what people see as the negatives of your organization, it's up to you to fix them, starting with those seen as most important.

If a negative attitude about some aspect of your organization or campaign is the result of a misperception, try to correct it through public information, media stories, support from members of the target population or from influential individuals -- whatever you have to do in order to make it clear that people have been mistaken in their beliefs about your organization.

If the negative perception is accurate -- your organization's staff is condescending to participants, your anti-smoking campaign is too strident and plays on people's fears, your request for contributions tries to make people feel guilty -- then you need to acknowledge the problem and change whatever is causing it. That may mean retraining or firing staff members, or changing the tone of your campaign entirely.

Monitoring and adjusting efficiency

Monitoring efficiency means looking at how well you're using your marketing resources, and whether they're giving you an appropriate return. In commercial marketing, this is known as profitability.

In health and community work, your profit is usually not measured in dollars, but in the number of people you can reach and serve, the number of people who change their behavior in a personally or socially desirable way, the number of policy decisions you affect, etc. On the other hand, nonprofit organizations also need actual money in order to survive; dollars are not totally irrelevant. If your social marketing effort is a fundraising campaign, then your return will be measured in dollars (or pesos or Euros or rupees).

Sometimes, both funding and other kinds of profitability are at stake. Many job -training programs are outcome-based, for instance: the job-training organization gets a certain amount of money for each person it recruits, further payments as trainees complete benchmarks in their training, and a final payment when the trainee actually gets a job at or above a specified level of pay. So by doing a good job at recruiting, training, and placing trainees, the training organization also does well financially.

A situation like that just described can work for financial profitability at the expense of community profitability. Outcome-based payment encourages organizations to recruit only those most likely to complete the process -- people who already have some skills and job experience -- rather than those with the lowest levels of skills and experience, who most need the service. The organization is certainly more efficient if it "creams," i.e. recruits only from the top level of the potential pool of trainees -- but is it, in fact, fulfilling its mission? In this case, it's presented with a situation where it may have to choose between efficiency and effectiveness.

As we have discussed elsewhere in the Tool Box, it seldom benefits an organization to ignore its mission in favor of other considerations, particularly financial ones. There are almost always alternatives, including negotiating arrangements with funders for working with high-risk populations, and setting up pre-training programs for high-risk participants to increase their chances of success. Efficiency can be achieved in a number of ways. If you ignore your mission, you risk becoming less effective as you become more efficient.

In examining your organization's efficiency, there are four areas to pay attention to:

Territory. Are you working in the right area? If you're only addressing youth violence in affluent neighborhoods, for instance, you're probably putting a lot of your resources in the wrong place. Has the neighborhood or area you're aiming at changed because of immigration, gentrification, or other social factors, so that it's no longer home to your target population? You may need to shift your focus, or even your whole operation, to another locale. Especially if your marketing resources are scarce, you should be concentrating them in the area where they'll have the most effect.

Market Segment. Are you concentrating on the right segments of the target population? Perhaps you're not trying to reach those who are most ready to change. Perhaps the people whose behavior you want to change are influenced, not by your message, but by the opinions of particular others -- their doctors, their pharmacists, their parents, etc. If that's the case, then it's far more efficient for you to reach those others than to try to convince members of the target population themselves.

Distribution channels. Are you getting your message out through channels that the target audience pays attention to? As mentioned above, if you're not using the channels that the people you're trying to reach use, you might as well be shouting your message to the winds. You have to be in the right media outlets and the right geographic areas, and you have to use the right language and images and the right form of communication (text, audio-visual, personal contact, etc.) if you're going to reach the largest possible number of those at which you're aiming.

Competition. You have to be aware of what the real competition is and work to counter it. If you spend your resources trying to neutralize the wrong competitor, the target audience will ignore you.

Before welfare reform, job-training and employment programs often tried to sell themselves by praising the benefits of self-sufficiency and the satisfaction of bringing home a paycheck. Virtually all of the welfare recipients the programs targeted were already aware of those benefits, and were, in fact, eager to work. They knew, however -- or quickly found out if they went to work -- that if they took a typical low-wage job, they'd lose all their health benefits. As soon as they or one of their children needed medical treatment more complicated than aspirin, they either had to go back on welfare or remain untreated. The job-training programs would have been flooded with applicants if they had found and advertised a way for trainees to keep their health insurance after they became employed. The competition here was not unemployment, but health insurance.

Questioning the target audience to find out what is actually at the root of their undesirable behavior -- continuing to smoke, not contributing to your organization, leaving their children unvaccinated -- will help you understand just what, in your campaign and in your organization, you need to adjust to respond to competition.

Monitoring and adjusting strategy

Like any for-profit organization, non-profit organizations have to monitor and adjust their short- and long-term strategies regularly to make sure that they're continuing to go in the appropriate direction. We're really talking about two kinds of strategy here: organizational strategy and marketing strategy. The two are inseparable: good marketing strategy has to reflect organizational strategy, and the best marketing strategy in the world won't help if organizational strategy is wrongheaded or non-existent

Organizational strategy relates to the mission of the organization. How are you going to fulfill your mission and reach your goals? If you've gone through a strategic planning process fairly recently, you should have an outline of current and long-term strategy. If you've just followed the path of least resistance to get to where you are, it's definitely time to develop an organizational strategy that takes into account where you are, where you want to go, and how you want to get there.

Marketing strategy is the strategy of your social marketing campaign. How can you best influence the behavior change you're aiming at? Whether your campaign involves advertising, providing support, direct solicitation, advocacy, or all of these and more, you need a strategy to keep it moving consistently in the right direction.

Monitoring strategy means paying attention to:

• Current conditions. What's going on in the world, in your field, in the target community, etc. that you need to respond to? Does your current strategy take these things into account? If not, you have to adjust your strategy to encompass the best methods available; the latest statistics; the current needs, location, and preferences of the target population; and new developments in your field.
• Long-range trends. Businesses that computerized early and continually upgraded their equipment had a huge advantage when the computer revolution hit in earnest. By the same token, you can analyze trends in the larger world, in your field, and in the target community to make strategic decisions about where you should go in the future. Where is your issue heading in the next two, five, or ten years? Will you still be doing the same thing, or will the issue be at the next stage of development? You need to think ahead and start preparing now for new directions in your organization or in your social marketing campaign. Keep monitoring what you're doing, so you're always riding the crest of the wave, rather than struggling to catch up to it.

Think of the fact that polls show that a vast majority of Americans realize the importance of clean air and water, and are eager to safeguard them. In the mid-twentieth century, that was not yet the case, and environmental social marketers concentrated on making people aware that air and water quality were far too low. Once that goal was accomplished, they shifted to other issues - energy conservation and acid rain, for instance - that were somewhat more specific. As the public in general has become more environmentally conscious, social marketers have changed their messages and approaches to reflect public knowledge and attitudes.

Adjusting strategy relies on an accurate and clear-headed analysis of trends and issues. If times have changed, and your current campaign doesn't acknowledge that, you're operating at a disadvantage. You have to be aware of what the change is, and of how you can alter direction to respond to it.

Some adult literacy and employment training programs, for instance, recognized in the early '90s that computers would play a larger and larger role in jobs and as sources of information. They began to strategize about how to fund computers and computer labs, and to develop computer literacy curricula. Their participants were able to gain skills and confidence in what was still at the time a new area and, as a result, were able to compete successfully in the post-program worlds of academics and employment. The programs, by the same token, found themselves on the cutting edge. They already had the equipment and expertise to take advantage of funding and other opportunities, while most other organizations were trying to play catch-up.

A comprehensive way to examine and adjust your strategy is to do a marketing audit. This is a systematic look at the context of your issue and your organization, your organization itself, and its response to its environment.

Some of the questions that a thorough market audit asks are:

• What are the current and future issues and trends (demographic, economic, technological, ecological, political) in the larger environment that are likely to affect the organization now and later?
• What are the current and future issues and trends (markets, customers, competitors, distribution, suppliers, marketing firms, publics) in the field that are likely to affect the organization now and later?
• What are current organizational and marketing objectives and strategy, and do they address the current and future reality effectively?
• What are current marketing systems, and how are they functioning?
• Are profitability and cost-effectiveness satisfactory?
• How are you handling the Four P's: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion?

For an outline of a formal market audit, please see Tool #1, A Sample Market Audit. Although this outline is extremely thorough and calls for an outside auditor to take a comprehensive look at your organizational and marketing practices, it can also serve as a source of ideas for a much less formal and comprehensive audit. If you're a small organization with limited resources, you can still take a good look at what you're doing. You may be able to get help from an organization such as SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) or from a university marketing department. Or you may be able to set up an internal committee or group - perhaps even the same group that created your strategic plan, if you have one -- to monitor your strategy and do a limited marketing audit. In any case, you don't have to address every issue in the sample audit in order to make some judgments about what you're doing, and adjust it to present or future reality.

In Summary

A crucial part of any social marketing campaign is follow-up: monitoring and adjusting your campaign and your actual operation to make sure that they continue to respond to the needs and circumstances of the target population and the issue you're addressing. That means looking at your campaign's and your organization's effectiveness, efficiency, and strategy on a regular basis, and changing whatever needs to be changed to keep both the campaign and the organization successful.

Monitoring and effectiveness involves looking at how well you're meeting both your marketing and your overall goals (sales analysis); how you're doing in relation to the competition (market share); how effectively you're using your resources, and whether you're getting the most out of them; and how the rest of the world views your campaign and your organization.

Monitoring efficiency means examining how well your campaign is using the various aspects of actual marketing: territory, market segment, distribution channels, and competition.

Monitoring strategy entails exploring current and long-term trends and issues and their impact on your campaign and your organization.

In all these instances, you have to consider the results of your monitoring objectively, acknowledge realities or problems, and work to adjust your campaign and your organization to respond to them. As long as you can continue to revisit and readjust your campaign and your work to address the realities of the social marketplace, your social marketing campaign -- and your organization -- should enjoy continued success