Tracking Relief and Development Trends
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From the Chesapeake Bay to Super Chicken: Using Media for Social Change
By Michelle Galley, Senior Writer, Academy for Educational Development
The array of new tools seems endless. The pace is frenetic. The changing landscape of media can be both challenging and inspiring. Organizations working in development must be nimble and creative enough to take advantage of new media outlets, and use traditional media in more creative and lasting ways.
Public-service announcements and paid advertisements have been the traditional staples of social change communications. With the growing competition for viewer’s attention, and high production costs, this type of media is facing stiff competition, and must be edgy and creative to be effective.
When AED took on a project for the Chesapeake Bay Program and the state of Virginia to help protect the bay, the team knew they had to avoid the “preachy” trap into which many environmental campaigns fall.
The final message: “Save the Crabs, Then Eat ‘Em.”
To help spread the message, AED teamed with some atypical supporters. Lawn care companies put bumper stickers on their trucks and restaurant chefs wore T-shirts bearing the slogan.
The result was that local news outlets picked up the story because of the campaign’s witty message and unique partnerships. That “earned media” amplified the reach of the paid campaign.
Super Chicken: People Need to Trust the Message
On the other side of the world, in Cambodia and Laos, AED is employing an unlikely spokesperson to fight Avian Influenza. His name is Super Chicken.
Surveys of backyard farmers and their communities showed both a need and a desire for information on specific steps that could prevent outbreaks of bird flu. That’s where the broad-breasted, red-caped rooster is stepping in.
Through televised PSAs, posters, appearances and booklets, Super Chicken provides credible information on the best ways to stop the spread of the bird flu virus. An informal assessment conducted several months after Super Chicken was unveiled showed that the character had a high level of recognition and that the public trusted his messages.
Great Journalism Means Big Change
In Kosovo, AED is using news programming, as opposed to advertising, to attempt to build awareness and change attitudes. As a result of war and longstanding ethnic tensions, Kosovo Albanians and Serbs do not share their opinions with each other very easily. There are separate news outlets and television stations for Kosovo Albanians and Serbs.
AED saw the media - in the form of television journalism - as a good place to start a conversation between the two groups.
In early 2006, teams of one cameraman and one journalist from three Kosovo Albanian and three Serb television stations met with AED to map out how they wanted to begin the dialogue. The process was delicate, and none of the journalists were comfortable reporting on political issues. Instead, they decided to produce a documentary film series that focused on what average people thought about Kosovo’s future.
After interviewing and filming on their own, the group met again to produce their films together. The end product was three 30-minute films from three different parts of Kosovo, each with both an ethnic Albanian and Serbian perspective. The series, Looking to the Future, was screened first in local communities and then nationally.
The camaraderie that built through this exercise in “peace media” was so strong that the teams continue to work together. Now they are taking on subjects such as unemployment, internally displaced people, and security, and hoping to create more “safe spaces” for discussion.
Going Wireless
In neighboring Macedonia, once the least-developed country of all the former Yugoslav republics, AED helped establish a relatively new type of media - wireless, broadband Internet access.
By connecting every one of the country’s 430 primary and secondary schools to a wireless network, AED built the backbone of a wireless network that eventually expanded to include the whole country. Now Macedonia is the world’s first “wireless nation” of its size or larger and 95 percent of its population has wireless Internet access.
The Avian Flu, Kosovo peace media and Macedonia projects were all funded by USAID.
