A Designer's Foundation | Public Communications Campaigns

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Public Communications Campaigns | Public communication campaigns are growing more sophisticated and strategic. While there is still much progress to be made, campaign designers have begun to diversify their strategies and abandon the notion that information alone is the cure-all for society's behavioral ills. As a result, campaigns are decreasingly based only on the flawed notion that people will improve if they just know better. More campaigns are paying attention to context and linking their traditional media and behavior change strategies with on-the-ground community action to make the social and policy environment more supportive of the desired campaign results.

Evaluation of these efforts, however, has not kept pace with their innovation. At the same time funders are becoming more focused on results, we are still in the early stages of understanding how best to grapple with what many have called a "fuzzy" area of evaluation (Gould, 1996). Evaluators are trying to understand better the strategies and theories that guide campaigns, the right outcomes to measure, and appropriate methodologies to use in an increasingly sophisticated media and information-saturated world. Supports for both evaluators and nonprofit campaign planners and implementers trying to make their way in this field are lacking, with no definitive guides or mechanisms for learning what paths others have taken and what has been learned along the way.

Public communication campaigns use the media, messaging, and an organized set of communication activities to generate specific outcomes in a large number of individuals and in a specified period of time (Rogers & Storey, 1987). Public communication campaigns are an attempt to shape behavior toward desirable social outcomes (Weiss & Tschirhart, 1994). Those behaviors might include eating right, drinking less, recycling, breastfeeding, reading to our children, getting a mammography, voting, or volunteering. The outcomes of those behaviors – the campaigns' ultimate goals – may include healthier individuals, families, and communities or specific policy results that lead to better outcomes for individuals, families, or communities.

Very rarely do public communication campaigns feature only communications through media channels. "Promotion is only part of the 'marketing mix'" ( Balch & Sutton, 1997, p.64). Usually they coordinate media efforts with a diverse mix of other communication channels, some interpersonal and some community-based, in order to extend the reach and frequency of the campaign's messages and increase the probability that messages will successfully result in a change (Dungan- Seaver, 1999).

Gary Henry¹, Director of Georgia State University's Applied Research Center and an evaluator who has worked with campaigns, calls this mix of communication channels the "air" and "ground" strategies. The air strategy is the public media campaign and the ground strategy uses community-based communications or grassroots organizing. A good example of a ground strategy comes from the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) AIDS Community Demonstration Projects. Faced with the challenge of reducing the risk of HIV transmission among ethnically diverse, hard-to-reach, and high-risk populations, this campaign used volunteer networks of peers from the target audiences and other trusted community members to relay its messages and small media materials, along with condoms and bleach use kits (Fishbein, Guenther-Gray, Johnson, Wolitski, McAlister, Rietmeijer, O'Reilly, & The AIDS Community Demonstration Projects,1997). Messages conveyed through an air strategy alone would not have worked; the situation called for a ground strategy that had a fighting chance of reaching the intended audiences in ways that mattered.

All campaigns are different and use different interventions. The common thread running through them is their focus on similar results – trying to influence what people think, think about, and do.

Information compiled by Julia Coffman for the Communications Consortium Media Center is used with permission.