Tailor the message to the target audience

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Messaging presents facts about the key issue to educate the individual, community, or society.

Your audience may vary in terms of knowledge of the topic.

  • Does your audience already agree with you?  
  • Are they questioning your value or the understanding you have of their situation? 
  • What perceptions might your audience have that would affect how they hear your message? 

 

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The way and order in which the information is presented can impact the success of the public awareness campaign. 

 

Brief pilot testing with different messages or modes of delivery can help identify what is most effective and culturally relevant with the target population1.  Be sure to actively involve parents in the development and pilot testing of the messages.

It is important to make your message “catchy” or use other strategies to make the message more likely to be remembered.  Advertising professionals and communication firms can be great partners with you, as the content expert, to develop ideas and concepts for campaigns.  Whether you seek the assistance of communications professionals or not, there are some principles to consider when developing the message: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories.  Simple, clear concepts paired with concrete messages that appeal to the audience’s emotions with easily remembered stories are more likely to impact your audience.  See the next section to learn more about storytelling as a strategy.

Just remember prevention is hard to understand as the concept can be abstract and requires us to believe something did not happen because something else occurred.  “When we use language that activates shared values, we remind people that they have a reason to engage in the issue.”2

Prevent Child Abuse North Carolina developed a statewide public awareness campaign for the local Division of Social Service (DSS) agencies to prioritize, reframe, and align efforts for child maltreatment prevention. The toolkit provides an overview of research-based public education messages from the Frameworks Institute. Using data from two virtual focus groups with the North Carolina DSS staff in its development, the toolkit is intended to help professionals communicate about childhood adversity by developing a shared vision and shared understanding and messaging about effective child maltreatment prevention strategies.
https://www.preventchildabusenc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/prioritizingprevention_DSSCampaign_Toolkit_FINAL.pdf

Provide actionable solutions that match the problem.

Generally, messages that focus on risk are not effective.  However, if your campaign message is about reducing risk, you will want your message to be precise about what the audience can do to reduce that risk.  Often, when people hear risk and fear messages, they may tend to discount the potential harm or possible danger.  People tend to blame the person/people responsible, ignore or alter parts of the message that do not follow evidence or their experience, or adopt a sense of hopelessness/helplessness that there is nothing that they can do to prevent the harm3.  For more guidance on shaping your message, see the document, Reframing Childhood Adversity: Promoting Upstream Approaches by FrameWorks Institute.

Below are some ideas to consider in a public awareness campaign on preventing child abuse and neglect and who the suggested target audience may be:

  • Foster a fuller understanding of the prevention of child abuse and neglect in communities where prevention of child abuse and neglect is not prioritized as high as other health and social issues/concerns (see the Readiness Assessment in the earlier section);
  • Illustrate why collaborations with prevention providers and child welfare staff are valuable in communities where prevention of child abuse and neglect may not have an adequate number of professionals/providers to implement prevention programs;
  • Motivate audience(s) to support prevention of child abuse and neglect by explaining the prevention work and its impact on children and families in communities where resources focused on the prevention of child abuse and neglect are limited.

Here is an example on motivating an audience from PHRASES: Public Health Reaching Across Sectors, https://www.phrases.org/tools/

Example: What is the problem that prevention of child abuse and neglect is trying to solve? In the US, we spend so much time and money on child welfare (and create trauma for families involved in child welfare) but have limited resources to prevent child abuse and neglect (and reduce the amount of trauma for families). That is because we wait to provide resources to families and children once they are involved in the child welfare system. It is the mission of child abuse prevention to make sure that families, children, and communities have what they need to thrive.
Child abuse and neglect prevention providers bring together everyone who has a role to play in helping families and communities thrive including schools, businesses, government agencies, and people like you to prevent child abuse and neglect before it starts.

If you would like additional information on creating communication messages, be sure to review the following resources:  

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Strategic Communication Planning Hub – an innovative and free online resource – allows visitors to create communication strategies tailored to their organization’s needs and engage in a range of online learning around content writing, digital strategies and tactics, and message development.  

In April 2024, the Children’s Trust Fund Alliance through the Birth Parent National Network hosted a webinar, Creating Strengths-Based Messaging for Families and Communities, about the process in developing strategic messaging for different audiences. 

Additionally, from the July 2023 Peer Learning Call, Banyan Communications offered a template for creating your own child abuse prevention campaign that applies evidence-based communication best practices.

1“Making Health Communication Programs Work, A Planner’s Guide,” National Cancer Institute, https://www.cancer.gov/publications/health-communication/pink-book.pdf

2“Public Awareness Campaigns,” Military REACH, a project of the Department of Defense USDA Partnership for Military Families (July 2015) accessed October 11, 2022  Detail Result – Military REACH Library (auburn.edu) 

3Lacey Meyer, “Are Public Awareness Campaigns Effective?”  Cure, Vol 7, issue 1, (Spring 2008) https://www.curetoday.com/view/are-public-awareness-campaigns-effective

Use Multiple Communication Methods

The approach shown to be most effective for child abuse prevention and education campaigns is the multifaceted approach.

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Invest Time and Resources in Evaluation

Messaging presents facts about the key issue to educate the individual, community, or society. Your audience may vary in terms of knowledge of the topic.

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Examples of Public Awareness Toolkits

Seeking specific examples of Public Awareness /Communication Toolkits?

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