Term Project - The Persuasive Campaign

The term project for this course involves putting together all your knowledge and skills relevant to persuasion in the form of a persuasive campaign design.  A campaign is a process that involves persuasion taking place over a period of time using multiple messages, often with multiple media and several different audiences, normally seeking to gain favorable behavior from the audience.  The key to an effective persuasive campaign is learning to plan strategically.   

For our class, the project will develop in stages and involve three separate assignments, each with its own specific requirements.

1. The first assignment requires you to set goals and analyze the target audience(s) for your campaign. 

2. The second assignment asks you to prepare a message that you might use at some stage in your campaign - and present to the class the strategy  behind that message (not the message itself).

3. The third assignment completes the process by having you describe the overall campaign plan and the strategy (informed by theory and research) that you will use to attain your goals.

There are a wide range of campaign ideas that would be suitable for this project and I am willing to entertain your specific ideas.  However, let me suggest that one useful approach to the assignment is to develop a campaign to promote or sell a service or product (broadly defined).  [This is NOT to become a public service campaign.]  The product or service you seek to promote might one you invent yourself or it may be a real product or service.  I suggest your campaign be directed at college students in general or Monmouth College students in particular, although you may use a different audience/target market with my permission.  Almost any good commercial sales idea will work if it could be attractive to your chosen audience.   Remember, a comercial product or service campaign needs to be linked to buying and selling for MONEY. 

If your campaign involves an actual product or service, you cannot use actual advertising concepts and materials from that campaign.  That would be plagiarism.

In order to begin you need to define for yourself the three primary concerns of any persuasion effort.  What is the rationale for your campaign (thesis - exigence)?  Who exactly is your target audience?  What is the outcome you want from your audience (purpose --> attitude and/or behavior change)?

On the card provided in class, please describe for me, in a few sentences,

• what the subject (product or service) of your campaign will be,

• who the target audience will be, and

• what outcome or goal you have for the campaign, if successful.

I would like you to turn in the card provided no later than Wednesday, February 24.  Please feel free to be creative but do consider how well the idea you develop will fit the requirements of this three-part project.  You are not restricted to doing only public service campaigns or only targeting college students, but you might want to check with me before going too far with a different idea so we can be sure your idea will fit the requirements of my assignments.