Case study
Three times the scan rate, on the first run.
Two evenings of postering, 53 posters, 13 people asking to join. A climate campaign wanted more volunteers and had a couple of evenings to find them. Posters with a QR code, and a short poll behind the code that ends by asking for an email. It worked on the first run, because Endviolence had spent 2025 finding out which posters get scanned.
What it took, and what came back.
- Endviolence, 2025
- The climate campaign, 2026
What it took
- Posters put up 19x fewerEndviolence, 2025991The climate campaign, 202653
- Designs tried 12x fewerEndviolence, 202535The climate campaign, 20263
- Days spent postering 25x fewerEndviolence, 202550The climate campaign, 20262
What came back
- Scans per poster 3.3x moreEndviolence, 20250.68The climate campaign, 20262.25
- Posters scanned at least once 2.9x moreEndviolence, 202523%The climate campaign, 202666%
- Emails left 13 peopleEndviolence, 2025none askedThe climate campaign, 202613
The first run
Endviolence, an animal rights group, had put a tracked code on every poster in 2025 and read what a design does to the scan rate: 0.28 per poster in spring, 1.12 in summer once the designs and the streets changed, 0.22 again in autumn with new designs. The climate campaign, a different cause with a different audience, started from the summer's answers. Three designs. One evening of postering, 31 posters; a second evening weeks later, 21. Scans per poster: 2.25, and two in three posters got scanned at all.
Scans count the people who reached for a phone. The posters stayed up for weeks, with scans still arriving six weeks after the first evening, and far more people read them than scanned them. Likely hundreds got the message without a phone coming out.
Behind the code sat the poll. 40 people opened it, 27 finished, and 13 left an email to get involved locally. Their three designs still ranked themselves, 3.0, 2.5 and 1.8 scans per poster, which is the lead for the next print run.
The point
Your city, your audience and your design still need a test. What you skip is the year of guessing before it, because what another campaign put up, and what happened next, is on the record. Put the first run up, read the scans by design and by street, and print the one that worked.
Start with one campaign.
Open your own private workspace today. Put the first run up and read the scans by design and by street.