Fundamentals of Public Communication Campaigns by Peng Huang

Public communication campaigns can be defined as purposive attempts to inform or influence behaviors in large audiences within a specified time period using an organized set of communication activities and featuring an array of mediated messages in multiple channels generally to produce noncommercial benefits to individuals and society. Campaigns across the spectrum of health, prosocial, and environmental domains share some similarities to commercial advertising campaigns. Thus, it is useful to apply social marketing, which emphasizes an audience-centered consumer orientation and calculated attempts to attractively package the social product and utilize the optimum combination of campaign components to attain pragmatic goals. Public communication campaigns use the media, messaging, and an organized set of communication activities to generate specific outcomes in a large number of individuals and in a specified period of time. They are an attempt to shape behavior toward desirable social outcomes. To maximize their chances of success, campaigns usually coordinate media efforts with a mix of other interpersonal and community-based communication channels.

The book examines the difference between communicating with the public and communicating with publics, explore the role of public relations, and learn about the tools and techniques that make public communication possible. The campaign as process is universal across topics and venues, utilizing systematic frameworks and fundamental strategic principles developed over the past half century. Campaign designers perform a situational analysis and set objectives leading to development of a coherent set of strategies and implement the campaign by creating informational and persuasive messages that are disseminated via traditional mass media, new technologies, and interpersonal networks.