Communication Campaigns: Strategies and Planning

• Study notes for students are provided below:

Communication Campaigns

• Can be commercial, educational, informational, political, or focused on reputation and social change.
• Aim to influence and persuade.

Characteristics of a Communication Campaign

• Purposive and aimed at a large audience.
• Has a defined time limit.
• Organization set of communication activities that reach an audience determined by campaign goals.

Effective Communication Campaign

• Be short and simple, visual, and create events.
• Tell stories about people.
• Be proactive and communicate in the correct order.
• Use human terms.

Communication's Purpose

• Communication projects what you are typing to get across.
• Ask yourself why you are trying to communicate.
• What is your objective in terms of actions from your audience?

Communication Campaign Planning Process Importance

• Focuses efforts, improves effectiveness, encourages long-term views, and demonstrates value for money.
• Minimizes mishaps, reconciles conflicts, and helps to be proactive.

Organizing a Communication Campaign (R.P.I.E.)

• Research to gather information to describe and understand a citation.
• Planning involves identifying the target audience, and determining objectives, goals, actions, and messaging.
• Implementation involves the tools needed to deliver the messages to accomplish the goal of the campaign.
• Evaluation takes place throughout the planning process to ensure that the measures are effective.

Levels of Evaluation

• Basic evaluation: Media impression, reaching the target audience.
• Intermediate evaluation: Awareness, understanding, and reception of the message.
• Advanced evaluation: Behavior, opinion, and attitude changes.

Analyzing the Situation

• Accurately identify and understand the citation or problem the campaign will address.

Analyzing the Environment

• Internal vs external.
• The "big picture" involves the organizational context such as government actions, nature of the industry, regulatory organizations, economic trends, and development in science, technology and social trends.

PESTEL the Organization

• Political, economic, social, and technological factors.

SWOT Analysis

• Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Identifying Issues

• Structural: Major long-term trends.
• Crisis: Short-term and unforeseen events such as product recall or war.
• External: Long contextual issues such as environmental or community concerns.
• Internal: Issues that the company faces from within such as corporate takeovers.

Examining Internal Environment

• Performance: Quality of the goods and services, Viability of the causes and ideas
• Niche: Specialization, what makes the organization different from similar organizations.
• Structure: Purpose or mission of the organizations such as available resources.
• Internal impediments: impediments or obstacles.

Public Perception

• Visibility: Extent to which an organization is known.
• Reputation: Peoples evaluation of the information they have.

Analyzing Key Audiences

• Need to know demographics such as age, gender, religion, race/ethnicity, occupation, family situation, location of home, and cultural characteristics.
• Identifying Key Publics.

Audience Types

• Unaware: have little to no information.
• Indifferent: may be aware but not interested.
• Favorable: likely agree with my point of view/issues.
• Unfavorable: hardest to convince, the goal here is to weaken opposition and make them question their beliefs.

Questions to Think About Your Audience

• Where do they get information?
• What organizations and social networks do they belong to?
• How do they spend their time and money?
• What is their lifestyle and relevant actions, interests towards the topic, and attitudes towards the topic?
• What would prevent them from getting involved with your topic?

Research Methods

• In-depth interviews, public opinion surveys, public meetings, focus groups, online discussions, and workshops.

Establishing Goals

• Determining objectives include types of communication goals

Types of Communication Goals

• Reputation management goals: Identify and improve the perception of the organization.
• Relationship management goals: How the organization connects with public.
• Task management goals: Focus on getting certain things. increase public support for organizational goals.

Concept of Positioning

• The concept is always fluid and can be repositioned.
• Determine the position you seek with your audiences.
• What do you want people to think about us?
• Manage how an organization distinguishes itself in the mind of their audience, the concept of distinctiveness.
• Positioning for PR is about how the organization wants to be seen by publics.

Objectives Elements

• Goal rooted, based on organization goals.
• Public-focused, each objective linked to a specific public.
• Impact-oriented, affect you want to make on your public and lined to research.
• Explicit, clearly defined, and no room for interpretation.
• Measurable: precise, quantifiable.
• Time definite: clear time frame (within 6 months).
• Singular: Focused on one desired response from one public.

SMART Objectives

• Specific.
• Measurable.
• Attainable.
• Relevant.
• Time based.

Communication Objectives

• Writing communication objectives.
• Step 1: Audience – indicate the audience of the objective.
• Step 2: Category – Awareness, acceptance, or action.
• Step 3: Direction – What direction would you like to achieve?
• Step 4: Specific Effect and Focus, what you would like to address and achieve.
• Do not list tactics on how you are going to do it.
• Step 5: Performance Measure – indicate the expected level of achievement that can be measured, state percentage or numbers.
• Step 6: Time period, desired time frame.

Formulating Strategies

• Difference between strategy and tactics.

Strategy

• Strategy is the overall approach for your campaign.
• How will you achieve the goals and objectives?

Tactics

• Tactics is what you will do.
• Such as the methods or activities used to implement the strategy.
• Position is the process of establishing a way to stick inside the consumer's head, which may include trademarks, services, or behaviors.
• For example, you can create an image for an audience that the service or product is only for them.