Abuse Awareness Campaign
Abuse Awareness Campaign
Here at Blue Dog Inc, we put our creative and innovative ideas together to create a campaign to promote abuse awareness among the citizens of the northwest region of the state of Pennsylvania. The campaign will be a yearlong series of six segments. Our first segment is the Billboard segment. Secondly, the next portion and largest portion of the campaign will be during the typical college school year consisting of newspaper ads, flyers, and radio spots on WARC. Then, another segment of our campaign will consist of a 5K for Abuse Awareness. Finally, we at Blue Dog will have the Festival for Domestic Abuse Awareness, which will complete our campaign about a year from now.
The billboard segment will kick off our campaign and begin are mission to
raise abuse awareness in the region. This section will start on the first
day of May and last until September 30. Placing billboards is a very complicated
process but we the members of the Blue Dog team decided to undertake the task
because of the magnitude of people that will see our ads. Basically, what
we will do is place a series of four billboards in a row on the North and
South sides of Interstate 79.
These will be twelve feet high by twenty-five feet wide. The billboards will all tie together but also have their own identity in case a traveler does not see the first or second billboard. Our financial team at Blue Dog has made it very clear that billboards will be a great investment at this current time through their research. They have talked to sources at Penn DOT and found that interstate 79 will be under large amounts of construction during the course of this summer. This will mean that a large number of commuters that normally would be traveling at higher speeds will be slowed and see our advertisements at slower rates and have an opportunity to observe them.
The next segment of our abuse awareness campaign will involve newspaper advertisements.
These will run in a six-part series beginning on September 1 of this year.
Each month the segments will be featured in newspapers in the region for a
period of one week. The first part of the series will be in the month of September
(September 1 through September 30). They will feature ads that are vivid to
get peoples attention to our campaign and begin our challenge of increasing
abuse awareness. The second part of the series will be in October (October
1 through October 31) and focus on what abuse is so it will be easily identified.
The third part will be in November (November 1 through 30) and raise awareness
on the abuse of males. We all agreed at Blue Dog that this would create more
attention focusing first on males because it is not often talked about and
could possibly attract people to our campaign. Also, it would show that men
could also be abused, raising awareness on this sheer fact. This will end
the 2004 year because schools and collegiate institutions are now not at school
during December and January so we will wait until February to start this segment
of our campaign again. In February (February 1 through February 28), we will
start to run ads on the abuse of women. Then, we will have ads in March (March
1 through 31) on where to go if you are abused. Finally, we will complete
our newspaper campaign of abuse awareness in April (April 1 through April
30) with advertisements on the options of people that have been abused. We
at Blue Dog have done research around the region and have decided on particular
newspapers that we feel will have the most "reach". We chose two
small college newspapers to place ads in, Allegheny College and Grove City
College. Also, we chose two large state run institutions, Edinboro University
and Slippery Rock University. Finally, we had to decide on two larger regional
newspapers. The first we chose because of our home base here in Meadville.
The second was decided on because it is the largest in the Northwest region
of the state. The Meadville Tribune will reach areas directly around our area
here and the Erie Times is a strong regional paper that has notoriety throughout
the northwest part of Pennsylvania. These are the directions we took when
deciding on our newspaper segment of the abuse awareness campaign.
The third segment of our abuse awareness campaign is a flyer segment. What
we at Blue Dog will do is use our own employees and accept volunteers for
our cause to place and pass out flyers on regional college campuses and also
at regional high schools to raise awareness among our focus group of Generation
Y. The periods of this campaign will occur at the same time as the newspaper
segment. We will print around 20,000 flyers that will be posted on bulletin
boards, handed to students, and placed in student mailboxes so all based will
be touched. This will obviously take much work with traveling around the region
so we can extend our information and ourselves to these young people.
The fourth part of our campaign involves a very popular method in radio broadcasting.
Almost all of Generation Y drives a car and listens to music and the radio.
A station coming from our very own Allegheny College in Meadville will help
in our pursuit in abuse awareness. This segment of the campaign will again
have the six different themes and time periods as our newspaper and flyer
advertisements. The best part about having our ads on rotation at WARC is
the fact that it is absolutely free. Also, another great aspect is that WARC
reaches approximately 30 miles north and 30 miles south of Meadville covering
a large portion of our target region. As we have stated, radio broadcast is
a very popular means of exchange of information and will be a large help in
getting to Generation Y.
The next part of our campaign will take place on Labor Day at the end of the
summer. It will be a 5K walk for abuse awareness. What this will do is integrate
the community of Meadville and surrounding areas in the region bringing them
here to participate. Also, by having a charity event as so we will get donations
from surrounding businesses to cover expenses. This will not only help to
promote our own campaign but also promote these businesses making donations.
We will pass out flyers at this event and also give away shirts featuring
the name of our campaign and information on abuse. This will definitely raise
awareness for abuse and also bring the communities in the northwest region
of the Pennsylvania together. Finally, we will be making a large contribution
to the regional abuse programs so help for victims can be increased.
The final step of our campaign is the Festival for Domestic Abuse Awareness.
This will basically be our "grand finale" so to speak and bring
together a large portion of the region to promote our campaign. The main event
of the festival will feature two large bands and also smaller acts. Again,
Generation Y is very involved in popular music so this will bring them to
the foreground of our campaign. This extremely large event will also have
booths and tents set up for donations and also information to increase awareness
among the mass of people attending the festival. The event will occur at the
Crawford County Fairgrounds, which is one of the largest venues in this region
of the state. To choose bands for the event we must consider the appeal of
the groups, their 2005 touring schedule, and finally the image of the band.
The formulation of these three elements is extremely important because the
wrong image could easily be given off.
Tests of Plan Effectiveness
We have many ideas to test our plan's effectiveness. The first step that we
will take to see if we have raised awareness of abuse in the region is to
see if local abuse hotlines have had an increase in use. Secondly, abuse programs
in the area will be checked to see if there have been more story submissions
and also program increases. Finally, we will survey our target area to find
if education has increased. We will ask questions about abuse in these surveys
that our campaign will teach. The integration of these methods and tests will
give us a "good idea" of whether our plan was successful or if it
was a failure. Hopefully, we will see about a twenty percent increase in awareness
among Generation Y's knowledge of abuse. This will mean that about 1 in every
5 people in Generation Y will be more educated in the topic. We at Blue Dog
believe this will make our campaign a success.