Communications for Social Good - Discussion Guide

This discussion guide contains six sets of questions designed to help foundations, and the nonprofit organizations they support, to plan effective communications campaigns. The questions are excerpted from the paper, Communications for Social Good, by Susan Nall Bales and Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., and cover the key elements in the design of successful campaigns: defining the problem, audience, messenger, medium, and evaluation strategy. The questions are included here for the convenience of readers who wish to use them for individual review or group discussion purposes.

Communications for Social Good

Examines foundation opportunities and techniques to leverage social change goals through the use of communications media. Part of the series Practice Matters: The Improving Philanthropy Project

Communications for Social Good - Executive Summary

If foundations are more intentional in using communications as a tool for social change, and if they incorporate what is known about how the media affect individuals and groups into their grantmaking, they will be much more likely to achieve the kind of long-term change in public understanding and opinion that is needed to maximize their impact. This paper presents the latest perspectives from communications theory and practice in order to update philanthropic thinking and help philanthropists judge effective communications practices among their grantees and within their own organizations

Framing Male Circumcision to Promote its Adoption in Different Settings

The effectiveness of male circumcision in preventing transmission of HIV from females to males has been established. Those who are now advocating its widespread use face many challenges in convincing policy-makers and the public of circumcision’s value. We suggest that frames are a useful lens for communicating public health messages that may help promote adoption of circumcision. Frames relate to how individuals and societies perceive and understand the world. Existing frames are often hard to shift, and should be borne in mind by advocates and program implementers as they attempt to promote male circumcision by invoking new frames. Frames differ across and within societies, and advocates must find ways of delivering resonant messages that take into account prior perceptions and use the most appropriate means of communicating the benefits and value of male circumcision to different audiences

Intermedial Relationships of Radio Features with Denis Mitchell’s and Philip Donnellan’s Early Television Documentaries

Writing of the closure in early 1965 of the Radio Features Department, Asa Briggs identifies one of the reasons for the controversial decision as ‘the incursion of television, which was developing its own features.’ ‘[Laurence] Gilliam and his closest colleagues believed in the unique merits of “pure radio”. The screen seemed a barrier’ (The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 5, p. 348). Rather than the screen being ‘a barrier’ for them, a number of the creators of the emerging television documentary were from the late 1950s onwards able to transfer and transform distinctive techniques of ‘pure radio’ into highly effective visual forms. Two key figures were the producers of ‘poetic’ documentaries Denis Mitchell and Philip Donnellan, who employed layered voices, imaginative deployments of music and effects, and allusive juxtapositions of sound and image, to develop an alternative (although always marginal) tradition to the supposedly objective approaches of current affairs and, later, verité filmmakers. And a dozen years after the dismemberment of the Features Department, Donnellan paid tribute to it in his glorious but little-seen film Pure Radio (BBC1, 3 November 1977). Taking important early films by Mitchell and Donnellan as case studies, this paper explores the impact of radio features on television documentaries in the 1950s and early 1960s, and assesses the extent to which the screen in its intermedial relationships with ‘pure radio’ was a barrier or, in the work of certain creators, an augmentation

The "Welfare Queen" Experiment: How Viewers React to Images of African-American Mothers on Welfare

In the midst of this evolving political landscape on which new debates about welfare ensued, the news media played and continues to play a critical role in the public's understanding of what "welfare" ought to be. Utilizing a novel experimental design, I wanted to examine the impact of media portrayals of the "welfare queen" (Reagan's iconic representation of the African-American welfare experience) on white people's attitudes about welfare policy, race and gender

The Politics of Cultural Diversity: Racial and Ethnic Mass Attitudes in California

It is hardly debatable that race and ethnicity play a critical role in American society and politics (Myrdal 1944; Dahl 1972). Even in the face of myriad civil rights laws at the state, local, and federal levels, racial and ethnic inequalities persist (Wilson 1987). This condition is compounded by the fact that America is undergoing significant changes in terms of its ethnic and racial composition (Glazer 1985; Kitano and Daniels 1988). Recent estimates suggest that non-Hispanic Whites will cease to be a numerical majority sometime in the early 21st century and that the state of California is at the forefront of this trend (Bouvier and Gardener 1986).One of the more fundamental questions about the dynamics of ethnic diversity concerns its impact on American politics. Social scientists have tended to concentrate on the behavioral aspects between and among the various American racial and ethnic groups.Thus there is ample literature on Black political participation (Browning, Marshall and Tabb 1984; Danigelis 1978; 1982; Gilliam and Bobo 1988; Gutterbock and London 1983; Jackson 1987; London and Hearn 1977; Miller 1982; Olsen 1970; Shingles 1981; and Verba and Nie 1972). There has also been work done comparing the participation levels and styles of Blacks and Mexican-Americans (Antunes and Gaitz 1975; Lovrich and Marenin 1976). Moreover, in the last ten or so years some research has focused solely on Mexican-American participatory behavior (Buehler 1977; Flores 1986; MacManus and Cassel 1982; Welch 1977; Welch, Comer and Steinman 1975). Most recently, studies have begun to emerge which examine participatory behavior among Asian-Americans (Nakanishi 1986) and which analyze differential participation rates and styles among several racial and ethnic minorities (Uhlaner, Cain and Kiewiet 1987). The social science literature on race and ethnicity, however, has been conspicuously silent on the consequences of ethnic diversity for mass orientations towardpolitics.1The central focus of this paper is on the extent to which racial and ethnic differences account for variations in mass political attitudes. In other words, are group differences manifest as differential policy preferences both between and within groups? To answer this question, I analyze attitudinal divergence among Whites, Blacks, Mexican-Americans, and several Asian-American groups in the state of California. I begin by reviewing three theoretical perspectives on cultural integration in the United States. After a brief discussion of data and methodological issues, I utilize multivariate regression models to test hypotheses generated by the literature