Incorporating Evaluation into Media Campaign Design

This Applied Research paper provides information on core concepts relevant to media campaign evaluation strategies and showcases several sexual violence prevention campaigns that have completed evaluations at various stages of the implementation process.

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VAWnet Summary:

Incorporating Evaluation into Media Campaign Design by Sharyn J. Potter with contributions from Brad Perry (April 2008).

In Brief:

For the past two decades, advocacy organizations have used media campaigns to increase the public's knowledge about sexual violence (Kitzinger & Hunt, 1993; Fabiano, Perkins, Berkowitz, Linkenbach, & Stark, 2003). Media campaigns enable organizations to deliver a message to a public audience through the use of posters, billboards, television, radio and internet advertisements. Sexual violence advocacy organizations have used media campaigns to draw attention to the prevalence of sexual violence, the availability of services for victims and the need for community members to work together to reduce the incidences of sexual violence. Yet, only a fraction of these campaigns have been formally evaluated, and there is limited information on the development and evaluation of media campaigns focused on reducing sexual violence.

Corporate marketing campaigns are extensively evaluated before they are unveiled to the public, but in the not-for-profit world, media campaign evaluation can fall by the wayside when resources are limited. Evaluation is an integral component of every stage of media campaign planning, design, and implementation, providing campaign creators with the opportunity to examine how their message resonates with the target audience.&

Feedback from media campaign evaluations can help campaign creators increase the likelihood that the target audience is receiving the message that they intended. This paper describes standard media campaign evaluation strategies including focus groups, prototypes, surveys and pilot studies as well as more sophisticated evaluation strategies such as pre- and post-tests, experimental trials, and measurement of community reaction. Finally, the evaluation strategies used by four recent sexual violence prevention media campaigns are reviewed. By integrating some of the techniques described in this paper,