Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Tippecanoe County
Campaign for Hoosier Families
Group Members:
Christopher Ha Executive Director
Nan Lin Co-Media Director
Zeina Kayyali Co-Media Director
Yuwen Wei Research Director
Xiaoyu Zhou Communications & Event Coordinator
Table of Contents
Introduction ..……………………………………………………………………………………..2
Situation Analysis ....………………………………………………………………………..…… 3
Campaign Planning ...…………………………………………………………………………......6
Campaign Execution ...…………………………………………………………………...……...11
Campaign Evaluation ...……………………....………………………………………………….15
Final Schedule and Budget ..…………………………………………………………………….18
Lessons Learned ...………………………………………………………....…………………….20
Our Agency …..………………………………………………………………………………….24
Appendix ………………………………………………………………………………………...28
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I. Introduction
Campaigns are important in solving organizational problems because of the various
communication tools and knowledge used to face the array of issues organizations encounter. By
using these communication tools, we are able to induce changes in knowledge levels, behaviors
and attitudes. Communication tools such as brochures, press releases and special events, generate
awareness and encourages the publics to take action. Nonprofits usually have lack of resources
such as finance, manpower, and media relations. Due to the lack of finance, the nonprofits do not
have enough money to hold certain necessary events or recruit interns. The shortage of
manpower prevents nonprofits from running consistent programs, and the insufficient media
coverage makes it difficult for nonprofits to publicize important information for their target
publics. Therefore through the campaigns ability to generate awareness, the organization can
accumulate more resources to identify and solve their issues. For the purpose of this campaign,
we contacted a total of four non-profit organizations; Natalie’s Second Chance, the Tippecanoe
Arts Federation, Almost Home Humane Society and Campaign for Hoosier Families. Ultimately,
we decided that Campaign for Hoosier Families would be the best fit for us, since our campaign
goals align with their organization’s concerns. Some of the organization’s concerns are their
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II. Situation Analysis
The Campaign for Hoosier Families (CHF) is a separate campaign under the
County. CHF makes advocacy a key aspect that ensures public policies are implemented at the
local, state and federal levels for the protection of low-income families, and a pathway out of
poverty. The mission of CHF is to teach the publics on ways they can impact the local or state
legislative system in order to induce a change. Some activities that CHF engages in are the
different ways for contacting state legislators to achieve recognition and effectively produce
change. Common contact methods used are phone calls, emails, and letters delivered to state
legislators.
By interviewing the client and conducting online research, we found that CHF has only
executed one campaign which happened in the past year. The campaign’s main goal was to raise
awareness and teach the public how to contact state legislators. Major aspects of the campaign
included a special event, increased social media coverage, and an informational brochure. The
special event was to increase awareness about what specifically the Campaign for Hoosier
Families does, giving digital resources for political activism, providing the necessary information
to keep up with the Indiana General Assembly, locating the state legislator, and contacting them
through various methods of communication. Social media was another big aspect where they
created additional platforms to boost the expansion of information across the web. By creating a
Twitter and Facebook page, they were able to reach a wider array of audiences. Lastly, the
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informational brochure was a handy portable resource to handout to members of the greater
However after the campaign, CHF continues to face problems with ineffective use of
multimedia, inconsistent staff who lack social media skills, heavy use of written information
content, lack of activities/events, and latent publics. To begin, CHF has a tremendous problem
with the types of information content that they release and inefficiency of using multimedia.
First, a majority of their content are too information intensive and very dull for its readers.
Through social media and press releases, the content of their information are provided in an
abundance of words without any additional visual aid to ease the eyes of its viewers. Therefore,
audiences are often inattentive and unwilling to read any of the content that are distributed.
Moreover, CHF is rarely exposed to traditional media platform, such as newspaper, radio and
periodicals. Since most of audiences are from low income families thereby they are more likely
to get access to traditional media, the rare coverage on traditional media will result in low
Other problems CHF faces are with inconsistent staff members or volunteers to regularly
assist with the campaign throughout the year. This results in the inconsistent and inefficient
management of their entire campaign since its early start in 2015 and their media platforms. This
leads to the problem within social media because there is no staff with knowledge of the
Apart from multimedia, staffs, and information content, CHF does not have enough
special events and activities to actively engage their publics. The only event they have held is the
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Political Skills for the Digital Age where they taught members of the community how to address
and contact their legislator. Although the event was free, it proved to be unsuccessful because of
the absence of many people. As for activities, they only encourage their public to contact state
Lastly, CHF encounter problems with latent publics. Most of the people targeted by CHF
are the legal citizens of the United States without the knowledge of how to attain resources to do
something about policies opposing low income families. These people are considered latent
publics because they are facing the problems of low income families but do not detect and
recognize that these are groups in need and how they can help.
Due to time constraints, we decided to address the issues with ineffective use of
multimedia, inconsistent staff without social media knowledge, and heavy use of written
through traditional media, social media has also become prevalent among publics in this society
nowadays. Furthermore, staff members of any organization are essential to success, whether they
are full-time members, interns or simply volunteers. CHF’s problem is that their staff is limited
on knowledge about social media. By educating the staff about social media and the necessary
skills to continually manage their media platforms, they can achieve a greater amount of
awareness for their campaign. In addition to fostering an environment for media platforms, we
are developing these staff members with the necessary skills set so that they can pass it on to any
new incoming interns or volunteers willing to help with this area. At the same time, the
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organization is struggling to strategize creative content. Therefore, the quality of information
content has to be improved, in order to retain and attract more audiences. By tackling this
problem as well as inconsistent staff and use of multimedia, we can fully launch creative
informational content that CHF can utilize to post on their social media platforms. In addition,
we can also disseminate their information through local publishers to target more people in the
greater Lafayette.
Goal:
The goal of this campaign is to increase the participation of the greater Lafayette community
Objective 1: To increase the number of lower income families that consult CHF for resources in
Objective 2: To increase the number of staff members with social media skills through social
Objective 3: To increase the number of participants in the resource event from less than 10 to
20.
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Objective 4: To increase the viewers of CHF’s publicity video on YouTube to 200 by sharing
the video with the 89 people following their Facebook page and encouraging them to share the
video to others.
Rationale:
At the moment, CHF has a very low amount of awareness among its publics. Our goal is
to increase participation of the greater Lafayette community residents in order to reach a broader
Our first objective is to increase the number of low income families that consult CHF for
resources in regard to contacting the state legislator to 25. Policy changes cannot be completed
by solely a small part of people. Instead, we need help from the whole community. It is
important to inform people and create understanding for what we are exactly doing, and how
people can contribute. In order to achieve our goal, we have to motivate more publics to seek
knowledge about CHF and its mission. On average, there are only 10 people that come to consult
CHF for resources every month. Therefore, we set the number of 25 as our first objective by the
As part of our campaign, we will increase the amount of staff members of Lafayette
Urban Ministry with social media skills to 10. As one of the most important component of an
organization’s events. In terms of social media, skilled staff members would make the brand
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more appealing to target publics versus non-skilled staff members that struggle to attract even a
small amount of individuals. Currently, there is only one individual at LUM knowledgeable of
social media skills. Therefore, we decided to increase the number of their staff members with
social media to 10. By doing this, they can continue to consistently update information on their
media platforms and post about any resources to get the community engaged without our help.
Also, we intend to increase the amount of participants in the resource event from less
than 10 to 20. The resource event is a the best way to increase public awareness of the campaign
and attract media attention, as well as enhance engagement with the targeted publics. Besides,
CHF can also present more comprehensive information about their mission and services through
this events. As the executive director claimed that no one attended the last special event
“Practical Skills for Digital Age,” the number of 20 this time will be viable for our event.
Moreover, we will be creating a video which will be posted on Youtube. The video is
aimed at raising awareness about CHF and what they do. Based on the number of people that
have liked their Facebook page, which is currently 89, we have decided that it would be
appropriate to set a goal of reaching 200 views for the Youtube video.
Lastly, we strive to increase the number of likes on Facebook to 150. For now, there are
89 likes in total of CHF’s Facebook page. We aim at increasing the number to 150 by the end of
our campaign.
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Strategy for the Campaign:
Based on the issues we have defined above, we detected that most of the problems
originated from the low consciousness of CHF’s mission among Lafayette residents. Ineffective
dissemination of information induces extremely low awareness of CHF among the greater
Lafayette residents. In this case, we determined to spread information through both traditional
media and social media, to reach more variety of publics. Besides, the lack of social media
knowledge leads staff members at LUM unable to run effective social media tools, which causes
a disconnection between CHF and their audiences through the internet. Therefore, our first
strategy is to enhance the skill that the staff members are lacking. Except for the the unskilled
staff members and media tools, we will increase people’s awareness of CHF and their mission,
To better reach our audience, we have segmented the publics into four categories non-
publics, latent publics, aware publics, and active publics. Beginning with non-publics, these are
individuals who are not affected by the issue, thus being individuals who belong to middle and
higher income families. We plan to target them through multimedia platforms, including
traditional media platforms such as newspaper and radio station, and social media such as
Twitter. We will produce more appealing media content and Twitter posts, by transforming
CHF’s content such as press releases, newsletters, and emails from text heavy information into
visual content which is easier to consume. With appealing content, non-publics are more likely to
tune into our information, and be attentive to CHF’s mission and purpose. Thus, they will be able
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to learn how to advocate policy change for low income families and hopefully change their
Similar to non-publics, we have latent publics. Latent publics are not aware of the issue
or situation that they are facing. However with latent publics, these are individuals who are a part
of low income families and therefore are affected but are unaware of how certain policies are
negatively affecting them. Thus they do not know what they need to do to make a change. What
they need is more accessible information and reachable help that can motivate them to realize
their situation. Through the full use of multimedia tools, we plan on making the latent publics
more aware of their situation, encouraging them to participate in CHF and create a change that
Next, we have the aware publics. Aware publics consist of Lafayette Urban Ministry
staff members who recognize the problem that are facing low income families, but do not have
the capability to act and make changes. Currently, the staff members working for CHF at LUM
are limited not only on quantity, but also on practical skills. We plan to target aware publics by
holding a social media skill workshop to train them and increase their social media skills first,
allowing them to be able to organize and help resolve the problems. The goal is to transform the
Lastly, we have the active publics, most of whom are from the low income families.
These families are clearly aware of the issue they are facing, and they intend to organize
something for resolving their problems. Most of them always actively participate in the
Campaign for Hoosier Families, and they are able to fully utilize their rights to induce a change
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in policy. We plan to target active publics through and multimedia tools and some resources
event informing them about the proper resources necessary to bring about change in policies
affecting them. Also, since most low income families may not be able to afford the expensive
technological devices, we will pay more attention to disseminating information to the active
publics via traditional media platforms, such as newspaper and radio station.
established multimedia platforms, and hosted a resource event. All of our outputs and outcomes
The information workshop that we hosted was directed towards the members of CHF to
train them about the basic knowledge of running social media platforms. During the workshop,
our group taught the techniques of how to utilize Twitter and Facebook by creating powerpoints
and presenting the process to the staff step by step. For Twitter, we taught them how to tweet,
retweet, follow, post pictures and videos as well as how to view their tweet activity. We also
talked about the tweet activity feature which helps them identify how many people have engaged
with their tweet and visited their profile through a specific post. As for Facebook, we taught
them how to upload pictures and videos, post and share statuses. More importantly, we educated
the audience on how to use these social media platforms effectively and in a way that would
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benefit their organization. We conducted thorough research and presented them with statistics
that showed the best times to post throughout the day. Furthermore, we talked about the type of
pictures that they should choose for their profile pictures and cover pictures. We explained the
importance of choosing an appropriate and effective picture to represent them on social media,
and what type of pictures would appeal to their specific audience. Afterwards, we held a question
and answer session with the attendees to make sure that our presentation was effective and that
Multimedia Platforms
platforms, including traditional media and social media. For traditional media, we communicated
with the public radio station WBAA and the Exponent from Purdue, to publicize CHF’s
information such as service and events, in forms of news releases, newsletters, flyers and so on.
Apart from traditional media, we enhanced the quality of ICT and social media for CHF, by
writing press release, creating a video, and infographics. The infographic was geared towards
members of the greater Lafayette area, and contained visuals and easily read text that explained
ways to contact state legislators for policy changes in favor of low income families. It became
versatile, being able to be printed as a flyer, poster, or utilized as an image that can posted on the
social media.
On April 4, WBAA publicized our resource event’s information on their event calendar,
which allowed people to find the information when visiting the WBAA website. The Exponent
also posted a news article on their newspaper about the resource event early Friday morning on
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April 22. Furthermore, we utilized print media, social media, and ICT to disseminate our
information. Lafayette Urban Ministry (LUM) posted our flyer and press release on their website
and social media, which allowed most of LUM’s potential and existing followers to see the
information. We created three different infographics, each aimed at raising awareness about
different aspects of the campaign. Our first infographic was an informational flyer promoting our
resource event, the second infographic included general information about CHF, and lastly the
third infographic provided information on how to get involved with CHF. By the end of April 21,
the day before our event, we had given out 64 copies of flyers that we created to promote the
event around Lafayette and West Lafayette area. We also posted the event flyers on Facebook,
the executive director Susan Brouillette talking about the organization’s missions, duties, and
past achievements, as well as multiple scenes of the location and staff working at LUM. In
addition to the initial proposed contents of the video, we have also included an interview with
Joe Micon, Executive Director of Lafayette Urban Ministry. The interview goes further into
details about how CHF relates to LUM and its effect on the community. Furthermore, since the
interviewee Joe Micon was a highly credible individual, we chose to include him as he is the face
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Resource Event
We held a resource event to inform more people about CHF and its mission. The event
was held in the lobby of LUM from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. on April 22 (Friday). In the event, we
provided a variety of information on CHF’s service and events. We provided the brochures made
from the last campaign, three different infographics in flyer form to give out, and the
promotional video was played continuously throughout the event. Furthermore, there was special
consultant at the event that provided attendees with further help and information. There was a
question and answer session organized two hours into the event for those interested but had
questions for staff members. The session included a brief plug about how to advocate policy
change for low income families. At the same time, we provided an information board for visitors
to better understand CHF’s mission, and free food such as pizza and chips. We also made a
survey for attendants to provide feedback about our event, which we will analyze in our
evaluation part.
Throughout this whole process, our agency maintained contact with the client on a
weekly basis; methods of contact included meetings for planning, emails for updates, and phone
calls as a backup in case there is slow response in email replies. Our primary contact was Susan
Brouillette, director of Campaign for Hoosier Families. In addition we had two secondary
contacts, Enosh Kazem and Joe Micon, executive directors of the Lafayette Urban Ministry. As
the campaign came to an end, our agency conducted an evaluation with staff members and
members of the Lafayette community. Through surveys and informal interviews, we were able to
gather data that told us about our efforts and whether they were successful or not.
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V. Campaign Evaluation
We have set a goal and five objectives in our proposal. By the end of the campaign, we
have achieved half of the objectives. Although we have not achieved the rest, there are still
progress made throughout the campaign. The empirical evidence such as screenshots, photos,
Our first objective was to increase the number of lower income families that consult CHF
for resources in regard to contacting the state legislator from 10 to 25. The evaluation of this
objective will be how many people contact CHF for resources, advice on writing letters, and
overall seek CHF for volunteering opportunities to help low income families within Tippecanoe
County. Since our resource event was held on April 22, CHF did not have the opportunity to
reach out to the attendees via email before this campaign concluded. Thus, our objective was not
reached because emails about how to get involved with CHF have not been sent out to the
attendees; therefore we do not know how many individuals will seek CHF for resources.
Lafayette Urban Ministry with social media skills to 10. The aim of our second objective was to
increase the number of staff members who have social media skills from 1 to 10. In order to
achieve this objective, we held a social media workshop for staff members of the campaign.
Before the workshop, there was only one person who had social media skills. Although we only
had 3 staff members attend our event, we had previously anticipated that at least 10 would
attend. The reason for the low attendance at the workshop is due to our client not informing the
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staff about it, even though it was planned and confirmed ahead of time. In the future, we would
make sure to check with the client more frequently and ask for a confirmation on the number of
attendees. Nevertheless, we gave our client our powerpoint presentation and all of the other
important information relating to social media skills and they intend to use them in their next
staff meeting where 15 people will attend. Therefore, even though only 3 people attended the
social media workshop, they can use information and materials that we gave them to help
Our third objective was to increase the number of participants in the resource event from
less than 10 to 20. The resource event is the best way to increase public awareness of campaign
and attract media attention, as well as enhance engagement with the targeted publics.
Additionally, CHF can also present more comprehensive information about their mission and
services through this event. According to the executive director, no one attended their last special
event “Political Skills for Digital Age”. We were able to achieve our goal by increasing the
As for our fourth objective, it was to increase the viewers of CHF’s publicity video on
YouTube to 200 by sharing the video with the people following their Facebook page, and
encouraging them to share the video to others. The video is aimed at raising awareness about
CHF and what they do. Based on the number of people that have liked their Facebook page,
which was originally 89, we decided to set a goal of reaching 200 views for the Youtube video.
By the end of April 25 , we have obtained the number of 144 viewing the video. Despite the fact
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that we didn’t reach the number of 200, we have accomplished 72 percent of our set objective,
For the last objective, we aimed to increase the number of likes on Facebook to 150. At
the beginning, there were 89 likes in total of CHF’s Facebook page. We planned to increase the
number to 150 by the end of our campaign, which meant we had to get at least 61 more people to
follow CHF’s page. By the end of April 25, we’ve successfully achieved this objective by
Although we didn’t achieve all of our objectives, we believe that our general goal had
been successfully reached. We were able to increase participation and awareness about CHF
among the residents of the Greater Lafayette area. Especially through the use of different media
platforms and our resource event, we increased the number of people who know about CHF and
what they do. Besides, we also received complimentary letter from our client, CHF’s director
Susan Brouillette, which has been attached at the beginning of our report.
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VI. Final Schedule and Budget
SCHEDULE:
March
18
April
19
BUDGET:
Total $72.80
All funds for the Resource Event was donated by the Agency.
Our group was able to work efficiently together to produce the best results possible. We
were all committed to this project and dedicated sufficient time to each part of the campaign.
Moreover, all our interactions and meetings with the client were conducted professionally. We
were able to successfully organize and lead a social media workshop for CHF. In the workshop
we talked about the significance of social media for an organization, and how CHF can utilize
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Additionally, we contacted local media outlets including the Exponent newspaper and
WBAA radio station to help promote our campaign. The WBAA radio station publicized our
event information on their website, and the Exponent newspaper invited a reporter to write a
news article to publicize the campaign. Moreover, LUM posted our press release on front page of
website. By reaching local media to win media coverage, our campaign attracted the attention
and interest of more people, got more people involved through different social media platforms,
and attracted more visitors to attend the resource event. By the end of the campaign, we got 153
likes on CHF’s Facebook page. We also got plenty of positive feedback about the campaign after
it was publicized through the news article published on Exponent. For the resource event, we got
22 people to attend and they provided us with positive feedback through a survey. Therefore, we
were successful in using multiple forms media coverage to help us increase awareness about the
campaign.
Our resource event was publicized in an efficient and timely manner. Before the event,
we created flyers and brochures to hand out to different people around the West Lafayette and
Lafayette areas. As mentioned we got the Exponent newspaper and radio coverage to promote
the campaign, and we created a video which was posted on Youtube. During the event, we
provided plenty of useful information and materials, including an informational board, video and
brochures. These materials were provided to help visitors obtain a clear and comprehensive
information about CHF. Visitors appreciated these informational materials that we provided took
some for deeper exploration. Through oral feedback they informed us that the infographics and
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video we created made the information much easier to understand. Overall, we did well in
publicizing the event and presenting the information in a more appealing manner.
This was the first practical campaign we created. There were a lot of things we were not
familiar with. Through the four-month experience and toughening, each of us has been getting to
know what it takes to create a good and effective campaign. We have tried our best to create a
awareness about Campaign for Hoosier Families, from information publicizing, to employee
training and event holding. After evaluating our work and achievements in this campaign, we
found some things that we need to pay attention and do better in our future professional work.
Firstly, CHF is a campaign aimed at raising awareness on political issues, and especially
policy advocacy. As communication students, we have done our best to create a public relations
campaign for CHF. At the beginning of the campaign, we faced somewhat of a difficulty in
determining what CHF’s mission is in a concise way. In the future, we will conduct more
research about our client, especially through primary research method, like in-depth interviews
and focus groups. Therefore, we can have better understanding about our client and their
mission.
Secondly, LUM and CHF have an issue with understaffing, so we did not get sufficient
help from our clients. For example, CHF did not have any staff members working on updating
their Facebook, and Twitter pages to inform their followers about the resource events, even
though we held the social media workshop event for them. In the future, if our clients have the
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understaffed problem, we will hold volunteer recruitment event at the beginning of the
campaign. Therefore, volunteers not only can help with our campaign events, but they can also
Third, we created a survey to understand people’s feedback about our event, the result of
the survey showed that we need to change the location for our special event in the future. We
gathered fifteen surveys in total, and five of the them said we should change location. One of the
attendees wrote on the survey “you should choose the location at a more popular place to attract
more attention in the future”. In the future, we should conduct more research before we hold a
special event, in order to determine the best location, and thus get more people to be involved in
Finally, although the client was cooperative throughout the entire process of the
campaign, we did have one minor challenge. When we contacted the client to set up a meeting
we would occasionally wait up to a week before we receive a response. This made things
somewhat difficult for when we had a deadline to meet. Additionally, our client did not inform
the staff members about the social media workshop, which led to a low number of attendees.
Furthermore, the client requested more work from us every time we met face to face. She was
persistent about gathering as much resources as she possibly can from the event. In the future, we
will make sure that the client is invested more in the campaign and set clear guidelines in regards
to what type of resources we will produce, in order to avoid these issues. For example, we will
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VIII. Our Agency
Mount PR was established in January of 2016, with members from diverse backgrounds
and experiences. With our diverse backgrounds and experiences, we are able to analyze
situations in a variety of unique perspectives. This is a benefit to our clients in that we are able to
see different viewpoints that the client may have not seen beforehand. Mount PR gets its name
from our motto of “always striving to be the top.” Our members are dedicated to providing only
the best services to our clients. Our clients are primarily non-profit organizations.
Group Members:
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25
like to travel as much as possible, and thus have exposed myself to a variety of different and
unique cultures from around a world which has helped me expand my horizons and perspectives.
I initiated my first campaign for a non profit as a sophomore in high school. That sparked an
interest in me to continue working in this field, and to mainly focus on working with nonprofits.
concentration in Public Relations strategy. I have experience from a previous internship in which
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Xiaoyu Zhou | Communications &
Event Coordinator
Also, I used to be a research assistant for the consumer decision-making research in Brian Lamb
School of Communication. Since I took filmmaking and television production courses before, I
possess basic skills of using cameras and broadcasting. I am a multilingual person and able to
speak excellent Mandarin, English and basic Japanese. My common skills are: public speaking,
interviewing, feature stories writing, social media running and strategic planning.
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IX. Appendix
1. Infographics………………………………………………………………………...........29
2. Video………………………………………………………....…………………………..30
3. Event Publicizing..……………………………………………………………...………..32
a. WBAA
b. Exponent
4. Resource Event….....…………………………………………………………………….36
a. Photos
b. Survey
c. Checking Sheets
a. Previous Situation
b. Outcome
28
1. Infographics:
29
2. Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV8NkZbOaF
30
31
3. Event Publicizing
32
33
34
35
4. Resource Event
36
37
5.1 Social Media Workshop
38
5.2 Social Media Workshop PowerPoint
39
40
6. Social Media
41
42
7. Letter from Client
43