What stories do you use to describe your organization, its mission, and its accomplishments? Tweet us at deBeaumontFdtn or send us an email. By Mark Miller. August 28, Research from multiple disciplines led them to five principles to make people care: Join the community. Communicate in images. Invoke emotion with intention. Create meaningful calls to action. Tell better stories. If the aim of a campaign is to encourage people to behave in new ways, it is important to take a look at behavioral science that can lend insight into how a particular audience might perceive a message, lest you do more harm than good.
Take, for instance, the Dumb Ways to Die campaign in Australia. The song was created for the campaign by Victoria Rail to reduce the number of people who died by stepping in front of Metro trains out of Melbourne. The video and accompanying game are charming, with an indie-style earworm and characters that make macabre deaths adorable.
The strangely cheerful and catchy song topped iTunes lists of most-downloaded songs in 28 countries, and the video has more than million YouTube views. The campaign is also one of the most awarded in the history of advertising, receiving five Grands Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. In terms of awareness, the campaign knocked it out of the park. Metro said the campaign resulted in a 21 percent drop in deaths the following year.
Those millions of views may not have translated to specific behavior change. This campaign was explicitly focused on reducing the number of rail accidents by raising awareness of safety and getting people to be more careful around trains, but accidents account for only 25 percent of the deaths associated with heavy rail in Victoria.
The Melbourne newspaper The Age reported that between July 1, , and June 30, , there were 46 rail deaths in Victoria, the majority of which were suicides. A article in the journal Injury Prevention cites a rate of rail suicide in Victoria that was higher than the rate for the rest of the population in Australia, and The Age reported that from to , more than one person was struck by a train every week. Death in cartoon form is certainly temporary and painless.
At a minimum, the campaign does little to address a context that included an already abnormally high suicide rate, much to the concern of public health and mental health officials in the country.
This is worrisome given that communications science scholars, public health officials, sociologists, and psychologists have reported on the influence that media can have in normalizing death, suicide, and violence as something common, cool, or even charming, but most important, not permanent. Unfortunately, it is uncommon for practitioners to conduct a review of academic literature as part of the early stages of any effort.
Campaigns rooted in research are far more likely to conduct new research by testing their messages or surveying a target audience about their likelihood of acting. The gulf between scholarship that could help practitioners avoid harm, reduce risk, or increase the effectiveness of their efforts and practice is common and wide. Raising awareness also gets dicey when issues have the potential to generate controversy.
When issues are complicated by partisan politics, for example, the message may be vulnerable to backlash and slow down or halt progress on an issue. This was the case in a public policy initiative in support of the HPV vaccine.
In , the CDC recommended a national requirement that adolescent girls get vaccinated against human papilloma virus HPV , a sexually transmitted disease that causes cervical cancer. The recommendation, and the national lobbying campaign that followed, pushed for a state mandate that required the HPV vaccine for school enrollment.
A mandate that preteen girls be vaccinated against HPV became a political battleground because some social conservatives believed that the legislation was a gateway to sexual promiscuity. Prior to the controversy, 90 percent of children received the vaccine, but in the years that followed, only 33 percent of girls received it, and just 7 percent of boys did. Research tells us that people believe information about vaccine risks and benefits that supports their cultural and political values.
Political polarization increases as the news media report on the topic and advocates raise its profile. Government regulation, check. Reproductive rights, check. Children and sexuality, check and check. Could this story have turned out differently? Yale University professor Dan Kahan, who researched the program, says yes.
If there had not been a high-profile lobbying campaign to fast-track Gardasil, the vaccine would have slowly been introduced to boys and girls through their personal physicians and existing programs that provide access to childhood vaccinations, a more traditional path for introducing new vaccines, similar to the introduction of the hepatitis B vaccine HBV. That is the approach that the communications consulting firm Spitfire Strategies takes when working with its clients.
In every consulting project that Spitfire works on, Spitfire President Kristen Grimm and her team work to get nonprofit leaders to identify concrete goals for their work. Grimm is convinced that by focusing on what you want changed, you can identify a call to action whether you are working to make teens stop texting and driving, helping people make healthier choices, or working on issues where solutions are less obvious, such as addressing implicit bias or income inequality.
There are four essential elements to creating a successful public interest communications campaign: target your audience as narrowly as possible; create compelling messages with clear calls to action; develop a theory of change; and use the right messenger. We will explore each of these four elements in the following sections. One of the most important tasks in crafting a public interest communications campaign is to identify your target audience—the individuals or groups whose action or behavior change will be most important to helping you achieve your goal.
What works? What doesn't? How can you use what they have learned to ensure your campaign is a success? Fundraising and budgeting. You need to ensure you have a specific budget in place and have fundraising strategies in place.
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Contact Us. Submit a Question. All people — including marginalized and vulnerable groups — should be aware of and understand the commitments their government has made under the Agenda and how they can meaningfully engage in SDG implementation and accountability processes. Raising public awareness of the SDGs is also essential to foster the political and social change needed to achieve the ambitious agenda.
There are a number of actions that CSOs can take to raise awareness of the SDGs in order to further accountability for the Agenda, including the following:. Develop an awareness-raising strategy — As a starting point, CSOs should consider developing an awareness-raising strategy 7 that includes the following components:. Work in partnership and coalitions with other CSOs and stakeholders — Awareness-raising campaigns tend to be more successful and have a greater impact when they are conducted by a network or coalition of CSOs.
The wider the coalition, the harder it is to ignore. In addition to strengthening the power and reach of the campaign, these partnerships facilitate the exchange of expertise, knowledge and strategy among CSOs. Identify target audience and tailor awareness-raising initiative appropriately — CSOs should seek to identify the individuals or groups whose awareness of the SDGs is the most important to achieve their specific goal in relation to SDG accountability.
Target groups may include key decision-makers, local authorities, parliamentarians, the media, vulnerable or marginalized groups, or the general public. The results of the assessment can be utilized to tailor the awareness-raising campaign and its messages appropriately and to evaluate the impact of the campaign in the future.
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