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Jialin LiJ250Prof. BishopNov. 16, 2015

Happy Teacher Professional Development Campaign Analysis

Company Description and Executives

PrimeTime Public Relations and Communication is a start-up PR Company

located in Washington DC and is headed by Caroline Brewer, a former journalist,

education consultant and the Pulitzer Prize nominated writer. Due to Caroline’s

extensive background working in education field and abundant experience

interacting with children and teachers, this PR firm is basically education focused.

Upholding the goal of making a positive and demonstrable impact, PrimeTime offers

online consulting services, including multi-media campaigns and website design and

maintenance. Its clients mostly are children’s book author and education leaders.

Below Caroline Brewer, there are several teams of university students interns

responsible for different ongoing projects. Major tasks assigned to interns involve

media relations, strategic thinking, and advocacy, supporting outreach campaign,

digital communication, writing, editing and publishing.

Campaign Overview

I started my internship at PrimeTime Public Relations and Communications

during the first semester of freshman year, where I assisted the Happy Teacher

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Professional Development Training. It is a campaign that aimed to bring teaching

and learning revolutions to DC schools and instructors through equipping teachers

with practical, proven strategies to help struggling students succeed in reading,

writing and independent thinking skills. To achieve the outcome of successfully

empowering teachers and students, Caroline organized multiple professional

development training seminars in Washington DC area. The seminar focused on the

importance of inter-active learning, good relationship with students, classroom

management strategies, and literacy improvement. She hoped to make a difference

in DC education through using her revolutionary teaching strategy in DC education.

The execution of this PR campaign was based on a rough PR campaign plan

and schedule, which listed the definition of success, in other words, objectives. Then

dates, activities and staff who would be responsible for each task were listed below

objectives.

An ideal PR plan is made based on the Eight Steps PR Strategic Planning

Model: problem and opportunity, situation, objectives, audience, key messages,

strategies, tactics and evaluation. In this PR campaign analysis, I am going to break

down this campaign into eight steps and analyze respectively each step.

Problem and Opportunity

Findings: Problem is that the pressure of Common Core standards and

student-performance evaluation systems are causing a growing number of teachers

to quit the profession. Many teachers struggled to keep the attention and interests

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of their students. Also, students were commonly undisciplined in class and not

respectful to their teachers.

The opportunity was to offer instructors who were suffering the problem an

approach to create magic and inspire success in the classroom and thus students

could enjoy and succeed in school.

Analysis: There can be multiple problems and opportunities coexisting in a

PR campaign. This campaign realized the main problem and opportunity, but didn’t

sufficiently consider other stakeholders besides students and teachers. More

research on the causes of current issues would be recommended.

Participation of family, local government and local communities is equally

important to children’s education. Therefore, other problems I think of can be

family’s negligence in children’s education and uneven distribution of education

resources and insufficient funding to DC public schools. The more problems are

found, the more likely it is to accordingly come up with more opportunities.

This campaign is not only an opportunity to offer teachers an approach to

revolutionize their teaching skills and thus improve students’ performance, but also

an opportunity to encourage students’ family to be more engaged in educating their

children and mobilize local government in offering enough financial and

materialistic support to underdeveloped DC school districts. For local communities,

this campaign would serve as an opportunity to educate about the significance of

education to children and strive for the improvement of DC public education.

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Situation

Situation is the foundation of strategies and tactics. A relevant research is

often needed as part of the situation analysis. Through internal and external

environmental scanning and research, we can conclude the internal strength,

weakness, external opportunities and threats in a PR campaign. Making adjustments

grounded on a situation analysis reduces unexpected frustrations in later campaigns

and thus significantly helps with the campaign success.

Findings: No substantial situation analysis was conducted in this PR plan.

This campaign realized one major external threat, the increasing number of DC

public school teachers quitting their jobs and students being indifferent to school

disciplines and academics. This threat was found from a feature article on the

National Education Association website.

Analysis: The failure of doing a thorough situation analysis is a significant

drawback, despite the fact the realization of an external threat from an officially

recognized organization helped with the credibility. Lacking a situation analysis

endangers company program’s relevance, learning of the environment and finding

out effective strategies.

Research, information collection from multiple credible sources, such as

government websites, and company internal examination are strongly required in

this process. Regarding the external environment, research can focus on collecting

data, mapping out DC students’ withdrawal and graduation rate, from primary to

college level, in different school districts, local government’s annual funding to

school districts, poorly performed students’ family background, a comparison of DC

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public education statistics with those from other states and etc. Another plausible

research could surround outside competition and conflicting interests, because

Happy Teacher Professional Development Training was impossible to be the only

ongoing education campaign. Also, conflicting interests with advocacy groups for

animal rights, medical care and others can pose extra threats.

Regarding the internal environment, PrimeTime should examine its

executive, available staff, available financial capability versus estimated campaign

cost, established contacts, design of the events and time factors.

Updated Situation Analysis:

Strength: (1) Caroline Brewer is an excellent education consultant, teacher,

and author of 13 children’s books and she has made presentations to over 25,000

parents and teachers (2) The executive is highly responsible, directly supervises and

interacts with every each team member. (3) Happy Teacher training offers free trial

and supplementary bonus.

Weakness: (1) PrimeTime is a start-up company with low-budget, low brand

recognition, fresh-handed staff and limited contacts. (2) The price of training fees is

over hundreds of dollars and might scare away prospective participants. (3) Time

pressure in regards to hosting the seminars.

Opportunities: (1) Offer teachers an approach to revolutionize their teaching

skills and thus improve students’ performance. (2) Encourage students’ family to be

engaged in educating their children. (3) Promote the fair distribution of funds and

resources to DC school districts by local government. (4) Increase public awareness

about the significance of education for children.

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Threats: (1) High turnover rate among teachers in DC public schools. (2)

Students’ indifference to school rules and academics. (3) Parents’ negligence in

educating their children. (4) Uneven distribution of education resources and funds

by government in DC school districts. (5) Attention and resource competition with

other interest groups and education authority.

Objectives

Valid objectives cannot be set without a clear understanding of the situation.

The criterion of making objectives is time-based, quantifiable, measurable and

attainable. Objectives can be divided into two types, informational and motivational:

what we want our audience to know, feel and do and what the organization wants to

achieve.

Findings: Definition of campaign success is (1) At least 20 teachers to attend

the workshop and reception (2) Media coverage for the workshop (3) One interview

of Caroline Brewer (4) The majority of public informed about the workshop and

reception.

Analysis: Each of these objectives does not meet all three elements in the

criterion. All objectives are not time based. There should be a specific date or period

of time after each objective to indicate by when these objectives are expected to be

accomplished. Besides a lack of time-based factor, objective 2, 3, 4 also failed to have

the rest of elements. For example, “The majority” cannot be quantified, as it is

abstractive. Instead, there should be an exact number, such as percentage, to specify

how much “the majority” is. “One interview” is quantified, but should be specified by

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adding which type of media this interview wants to be covered, for example, by

either Washington Post or WTOP news. Likewise, media coverage is a broad

concept, should be not only quantified, but also measurable. Considering the fact

that Happy Teacher Professional Development Training is carried out in DC, it is

more realistic to seek media coverage and interview for the campaign from smaller-

scale local publication and television station.

Objectives should match up with campaign strategies and tactics, which will

be discussed later. For example, this campaign utilized social media massively, but

objective section failed to touch on anything about social media. Each strategy/

tactic should be able to link back to the objective. One of the objectives that can be

added, for example, is “have 500 likes on Facebook within first month of campaign

launch” etc.

Moreover, Public relations is an strategic communication process between

the organizations and their publics, so objective-making should always take

audience into consideration. From a public relations perspective, five possible

objectives for a communicator is message exposure, accurate dissemination of the

message, acceptance of the message, attitude change and change in overt behaviors,

which means that doing campaign is a communication process that should

emphasize on the audience and what it does with a message. This objective section

failed to have enough on informational and motivational objectives: what we want

our audience to know, feel and do.

This campaign’s informational objective has “wanting the majority of the

public informed about the event”. However, this campaign also should strive to let

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the public know that it is worth attending the seminar because of certain reasons,

either Caroline’s excellent qualification or the meaning of accepting good education

for children and the nation etc.

Simply put, the organization should strive to let 60% of the public to know

the seriousness of problem with teachers and students in DC public education,

believe that Happy Teacher Professional Training is an effective approach to solve

current problems. Moreover, the organization should achieve make 60% of the

public feel trustworthy and supportive over the Happy Teacher campaign. Only

when an organization accomplished informing the audience about and issue and

have them emotionally connected, will they proceed to achieving motivational

objectives.

As the company description said that its goal is to make a positive impact, the

motivational objective of this campaign should be focusing on making a difference in

DC public education by audiences. Therefore, motivational objectives should be

relevant to shape stakeholders’ attitude and behavior that aim to improve DC public

education. Besides wanting to have at least 20 teachers attend the seminar, we want

students to obey school rules, teachers to stay at their jobs etc. Definitely all these

objectives, no matter what, have to be measurable, quantifiable, time-based and

attainable.

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Audience:

Public Relations campaign should be directed toward specific and defined

audiences or publics, who are have stake or interest. A thorough understanding of

the publics is the key to accomplish a program’s objectives.

Findings: This campaign identified elementary school, high school,

university faculty and students in Washington DC Metro area (including Washington

DC, northern Virginia and a small part of Maryland) as its key audience.

Analysis: Faculty and students are ideal primary audience, since they are the

most direct stakeholders who are highly interactive in school environment.

A few crucial segments of audience are missing here. The secondary audience

can be parents, education activists, and taxpayers in local communities, local

government officials and legislators. The secondary audiences above all have stakes

and interests in education issues.

First of all, children interact most often with their parents before they start

school, so parents play a fundamental role impacting their children’s behaviors. It is

acknowledged that many students’ misbehaviors often resulted from parents’

negligence, so parents have the responsibility to motivate their children to do well

in school and teach their children to obey school rules. Education advocacy groups

are interested in issues relevant to education and are committed to promote a good

cause. They may own more resources and funds as well. Government is probably the

most powerful stakeholder and is influential in decision-making. Besides students

and teachers, if parents, interest groups and local government all are involved in

this campaign, very likely the situation of DC education will improve significantly.

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Admittedly, cost is a driving force for narrowing the audience. For a small

company like PrimeTime that has insufficient fund and staff, it is especially hard to

make the campaign massive enough to target at both primary and secondary

publics. At least PrimeTime correctly identified and targeted primary audiences.

Secondary audiences can possibly be taken into consideration once the campaign

becomes effective enough and the company accumulates more fund and resources.

Key Messages

Key messages are what we wanted to get across to the target audiences and

media. Key messages should be appropriate, meaningful, memorable,

understandable and believable, in order to inform, persuade and motivate the

audience.

Findings: Key messages are summarized in four aspects: Caroline Brewer’s

qualification, event’s uniqueness and effectiveness, and testimony from other

education experts.

Firstly, DC public education is confronted with serious challenges, with

teachers quitting their jobs, students being undisciplined and schools being

insufficiently unfunded. Secondly, Caroline herself is a qualified education

consultant, author of 13 books, and has made presentations to nearly 25,000

teachers, students and parents. Thirdly, Happy Teacher Development Training is an

exciting seminar that focuses on the importance of active learning, Fourthly, other

education consultants assured the necessity of Happy Teacher Professional

Development Training.

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Analysis: Key messages are well designed in this campaign. According to

media uses and gratification theory, communication process is interactive.

Audiences can make better decision through actively processing these key

messages. Key messages in this campaign are formulated well regarding language

clarity, source credibility and appeal to self-interest.

Key messages here are clear and use effective language. For example, “Happy

Teacher” is simple and concise so that audience finds it easy to remember the

message. Source credibility, which is based on expertise, sincerity and charisma, is

another important factor measuring key messages. In message content, introducing

Caroline Brewer’s expertise and using testimonials from other education experts

add credibility to key messages and help audience believe the message and further

act on the message. Messages from an official education website on the undesirable

situation of DC public education have the equivalent effect of boosting the

credibility. These key messages also smartly took “appeal to self-interest” into

consideration, since publics become involved in issues or pay attention to messages

that appeal to their psychological or economic needs. Since this is an education

campaign in the hope of elevating teachers’ skills and spirit, obviously teachers will

automatically associate their career self-interest with this campaign. On the other

hand, if a message taps current events or issues of public concern already in the

news, the audiences will more be likely to pay attention. Bringing up the problem of

DC public education as a key message such effect, because it is current and touches

on public concern.

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Key messages always have enough space to be supplemented and

replenished, when the campaign outreach was suggested to expand to secondary

audiences, such as parents and local government officials. If so, this campaign

should then formulate other new key messages that will target those secondary

audiences. For example, this campaign can add “ Family negligence results in

children’s later misconducts in school”.

Strategies/ Tactics

A strategy provides guidelines for the overall program and a rationale for the

actions and program components that are planned. Tactics describe the specific

activities that put each strategy into operation and help to achieve the stated

objectives. Strategies and Tactics altogether serve as tools for communicating key

messages to the targeted audience and thus accomplishing the objectives.

Findings: This campaign utilized social media, press materials, events as

major strategies to inform the public and promote the Happy Teacher Professional

Development Training.

(1) Researched on journalists who report about education, teachers from

local school networks, relevant organizations and education bloggers and

recorded their names, workplace, e-mail and phone number.

(2) Sent out pitch letters, press releases, media advisory, and and made pitch

calls to journalists.

(3) Created event pages in online event website, such as Eventbrite and

Facebook.

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(4) Made and sent out information kit (Power Points) to interested

educators.

(5) Utilized Facebook page and Twitter with frequent updates of photos,

Caroline Brewer’s experiences, FAQa and relevant quotes.

(6) Host multiple Facebook page contests. For example, sharing favorite

nursery rhyme as a child or teacher and most likes, shares and comments

would win.

(7) Distributed the campaign trailer on Facebook page and Youtube

(8) Sent out e-mail blasts to teachers and education bloggers to invite them

to attend the seminar invitation, based on previous research.

(9) Marketing letters, flyers and posters.

(10) Events: Happy Teacher Professional Development Training Seminars

Analysis: The strategy/ tactic section of this campaign is nicely elaborated,

with initially a considerate research process. Pitching is a fine art and it is always a

correct strategy to do some research about publications and television stations

beforehand. Then the creativity of pitch increases the appeal to journalists, as the

headline used attention-grabbing words such as “secret”, “revolution” and

movement.

Agenda setting theory says that media tells the public what to think about. As

people often tend to talk about what they see and hear from mass media, getting a

subject on the media agenda is an accomplishment. This campaign fully realized the

important function of mass media and took advantage of pitch letters/ calls, news

releases and media kit to increase the chance of media coverage.

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According to the media uses and gratification theory, communication process

is interactive, as the audience makes intelligent choices about which messages to

adopt and fulfill their needs. Media uses this theory to tailor the messages in order

to get audiences’ attention. One approach is to understand the intended audience.

Prior knowledge and interest make people pay attention to the messages, so

teachers and faculty members are intended to be categorized as active audience,

who are already engaged, in search of more sophisticated supplemental

information. The information kit, in which contained thorough description about

revolutionizing teaching strategies, served as good tool to satisfy their needs over

information.

Individuals learn through five senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste.

Individuals are estimated to learn the most through sight. The combination of news

releases, publicity photos, events, trailer videos and banners in this campaign not

only assists learning and retention, but also the repletion of a message in a variety

form that accommodate audience needs. Also, these tactics are helpful to have

audiences remember the message with constant repetition via different channels.

Message exposure and accurate dissemination of the messages are the most

foundational ones among five communication objectives. The campaign organizer

has a good understanding of the five-stage adoption process. In the awareness stage,

different vehicles, such as press release, trailer and social media were influential in

making people aware. Happy Teacher information kit and brochure accommodates

the interest stage, in which interested audience seeks information to detailed

information. For the final evaluation, trail and adoption stages, the campaign

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organizer identified educators and bloggers as opinion leaders who are perceived as

credible sources and experts. This is a crucial tactic, as audiences sometimes believe

more in testimonials than advertising or promotion materials.

Social media has a big advantage of two-way communication, because it

offers a platform between the organization and individuals to start a dialogue and

engagement. Through this approach, the organization could better adjust to the

audience and build relationships from collected feedbacks. This campaign

successfully engaged the audience through social media by frequently updating on

Facebook page, Twitter and hosting social media contests. Besides Facebook and

Twitter, this campaign actually can adopt other popular social media, such as

Instagram, since social media campaign is cost-effective, widespread and

interactive.

Event has the greatest value to let the audience participate, face to face, in

real time, in which audiences can utilize all five senses and are more emotionally

involved. Happy Teacher seminar is a form of event that successfully increased the

influence of the campaign in public and worthwhile story material for media

coverage.

There are also two concerns about this campaign. Firstly, to compete over

others, this campaign should take the evolution of digital media into account, as

press materials have developed into a big variety beyond the traditional format.

Secondly, social media is widespread mostly among young people, and so it will be a

thoughtful move to utilize the power of traditional media, such as TV, radio,

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newspaper and other publications to reach out other age groups who are less tech-

savvy.

Other Suggested Tactics:

Create a website

Create an Instagram account, use special hashtags and start Instagram

contest.

Consider creating an app about the Happy Teacher campaign.

Improve the news release into multimedia news release with Internet links,

social media tags, and more visual elements.

Send B-rolls from past seminars to media

Recruit student representatives on campus

Sponsor on-campus events

Evaluation

PR evaluation is strategic and designed to assess how effective the

communications campaign has been, rather than merely conducting strategies and

tactics regardless measuring the results. On the most basic level are compilations of

message distribution and media placement. The second level, which requires more

sophisticated techniques, deals with the measurement of audience awareness,

comprehension and retention of the message. The most advanced level is the

measurement of Changes in attitudes, opinions and behaviors.

Findings:

Counting the number of media coverage

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Counting the number of attendees at Happy Teacher Professional

Development Training seminar.

Analysis: Evaluation has to be a measurement of communication results against

established objectives. This campaign evaluation won’t reflect correctly the success

of this campaign, because each evaluation has to match up with an objective

previously made.

For the basic level, the most widely practiced form to measure message

exposure is “clips”, a compilation of print and broadcast mentions. Compiling and

calculating clips is far from enough, but the content analysis of media coverage is a

necessity during the evaluation. Event attendance can be measured by not only

number, but also behavior, which is an indicator of audience’s acceptance of

message.

In addition to the number of media placements, it is significant to evaluate

the media impression, the number of people exposed to the message. Besides

learning about the circulation of the traditional media, social media management

makes up a large part in measuring media impression. The number of likes, shares,

comments on Facebook Page, visitors to the page and involvement of social media

contest are all good ways to reflect the success of message exposure.

To assess motivational objectives, available approaches are baseline study

and surveys, in which seminar attendees can give their feedbacks via e-mail, phone

call, online polls etc. To measure the whole improvement of DC public education

after the Happy Teacher campaign would be an extremely tough task for a small

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company with limited budget, resource and staff, like PrimeTime and thus has to be

assisted by outside forces, such as interest groups and government etc.

Conclusion

Happy Teacher Professional Development Training aims to enhance the

overall undesirable DC public education. This campaign didn’t overall follow each

step of an ideal 8-step strategic planning model, which emphasizes significantly on

the function of situation analysis and evaluation. However, this campaign did a good

job implementing its strategies and tactics, identifying the appropriate audience and

designing its key messages, despite some details that should be further replenished.

This campaign requires a substantial supplement in its situation analysis, objective

and evaluation, which I already made improvement suggestions in each segment.

However, due to the size and resource of PrimeTime Public Relations, certain

objectives and evaluation are considered to be tough to achieve and can be counted

tentative. Simply put, I hope this PR analysis can serve as a good reference for

making a more thorough and effective PR campaign in the future.

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