Group Social Marketing Campaign
Due: Wednesday of Week 8
In this course, you will work collaboratively with a team to develop a social marketing campaign for a specific population. Your final project will be due in Week 8 and includes a presentation to showcase your teams’ work. You will be assigned to a team at the start of the term for this project.
Target Audience and Behavior
Each group will be asked to select a target population. After reviewing facts and trends on your group’s chosen population, you will develop a social marketing campaign to address a public health issue that is prevalent among your target audience.
Market Research
Once your group has identified a target population, you will need to conduct market research with your target population in order to understand their needs, wants, and abilities. Ideally, you will conduct your market research first-hand through surveys, focus groups, or interviews. You may also choose to use secondary sources found online (using public health databases) to supplement your data. Focus groups are discussed in the NCI Pink Book: Making Health Communication Programs Work. The results of your market research should drive campaign choices.
Messaging
All social marketing campaigns are based on a primary message, i.e. “Click it or Ticket”, “Don’t Drink and Drive”. The best messages are action-based and are framed in a positive light, i.e. what you want your audience to do (Click it or Ticket) versus what you want them to avoid (Don’t Drink and Drive). Your campaign message(s) should be informed by the problem, target audience, and preliminary research results.
Social Media
The aim of social marketing is to reach a large number of people. Social media provides a platform for connecting with large groups of people in order to communicate your message among your target population. You will choose at least one social media platform to help communicate your message. When selecting a social media platform, it is important to consider your target audience as well as the content of your messaging.
Application of Theory + 4 P’s of Social Marketing
Successful social marketing campaigns are based on theory. When developing your campaign, it will be important to consider (and be able to describe) the theories that have influenced your choices. Compelling social marketing campaigns clearly address the Four P’s of social marketing. The 4 P’s allow you to communicate value to your target audience. Be sure to identify the 4 P’s as they apply to your campaign and describe how the marketing mix is communicating value to your audience.
Communication Plan
Social marketing is a specific example of health communication. It is a way to facilitate behavior change among large groups of people. Consider all of the messages that need to be communicated as a part of your campaign as well as the platforms. Using the worksheet found in Appendix A of the NCI Pink Book: Making Health Communication Programs Work (Communication Plan) as your guide, outline the key elements of your communication plan for your campaign.
Evaluation Plan
How will you know if your social marketing campaign was a success? How do you plan to measure success? Using the worksheet found in Appendix A of the NCI Pink Book: Making Health Communication Programs Work (Evaluation Plan) as your guide, outline the key elements of your evaluation plan for your campaign.
Presentation
You will work together to develop a presentation to showcase your groups’ social marketing campaign. Presentations should be a maximum of 10 minutes in length. You will also develop a transcript to accompany each slide. The script should be written as if you were communicating directly to the audience. Each member of the group will participate in the presentation. As a group, you may decide the best approach for recording and uploading your presentation. Options include narrated PowerPoint, use of screen recording tool, i.e. Screencast-o-matic, or recorded Zoom session where all team members join in synchronously. If you choose to use Zoom, you can share the link to the recording in your team's update in Week 8.
Your presentation should also integrate key concepts from the course including the influence of health behavior theories, principles of social marketing and other relevant concepts as outlined in the evaluation rubric.
Your presentation should include slides and/or visuals and should address the following: an overview of the problem, the target audience and the behavior you aim to change; your market research results; messages; sample creative materials; social media screen-shots or live view, and an evaluation plan. Your presentation should also integrate key concepts from the course including the influence of health behavior theories, principles of social marketing and other relevant concepts.
Be sure to avoid overcrowding your slides with text. Use the script/narration to dive into more detail as necessary. Be mindful of the pace of your presentation. If you remain on a slide for more than 60 seconds, consider breaking the information into multiple slides for improved engagement.
Team Member Evaluation
Students will be asked to complete a confidential Group Performance Evaluation as a means to outline personal contributions as well as individual group members' contributions. You will rate everyone’s contributions and provide comments as appropriate. Individual scores for the group project may be affected if it is noted that one's performance or contributions were poor or inadequate. The group performance evaluation will occur in Week 8.
Team Meetings
While there are only two required team meetings with deliverables due for this project, you will find that regular team meetings (whether synchronous or asynchronous) will be critical to your group's success. The first team meeting deliverable should be completed by the end of Week 2, and the second team meeting deliverable should be completed by the end of Week 4. The deliverables for team meetings are titled "Team Tools Worksheet 1" and "Team Tools Worksheet 2".
