Understanding the impact of communication campaigns remains a significant challenge across sectors including road safety. Organisations routinely use campaigns to shift public attitudes and behaviours, yet the evidence base supporting their effectiveness is somewhat limited particularly when linking campaigns to longer-term road safety outcomes. 

Evaluations frequently use varied definitions, outcome measures, and study designs, making it difficult to compare results and attribute change to campaign activity. As a result, practitioners and decision‑makers face substantial uncertainty when planning and assessing campaigns.

This presentation explores some of the barriers that limit our ability to evaluate communication campaigns and highlights the implications this has for practice, investment decisions, and policy development. It also outlines emerging opportunities from advances in behavioural science, improved reporting practices, and new analytical and conceptual tools that could enable more rigorous, transparent, and comparable evaluation in the future.

Dr Jill Weekley, Senior Consultant, TRL

Dr Jill Weekley is a Senior Consultant at TRL with 20 years’ experience working in transport.

During her time at TRL she has led projects in a range of areas, most recently focusing on driver behaviour and the evaluation of behaviour change interventions in different contexts, such as driver training and licensing, new technologies and interactions with other road users and road infrastructure - with the aim of improved road safety. 

She has significant experience in the management and delivery of large-scale impact evaluations, leading both Driver2020 – a nationwide randomised controlled trial involving 28,000 young and novice drivers – and several evaluations of the national behaviour change courses for driving offences.