The Queensland Youth Party advocates the plight of the youth, as our slogan is: ‘Today’s youth is tomorrow’s future.’ Our chief candidate for the campaign was Julie Young, who is a vivacious young woman with a very strong personality. Born and raised in Womansfield itself, Julie has been involved with social work for the past four years.
The Queensland Youth Party’s main objectives are to provide an affordable scheme for the basic necessities of life, such as education and healthcare. We are committed towards ensuring that the people have access to an affordable education system, with the introduction of hostels for the students, and a free shuttle service. Julie is also dedicated towards making available to the women, a better mental and sexual healthcare package, which would include support for the mental health charities –– some of which are already in collaboration with us, such as Beyond Blue, Lifeline and Headspace –– and free health check-ups, along with easier access to contraceptives and birth control measures for the women. More than 6.3% of the youth in Queensland suffer from a mental disorder (Kidd, Kenny and McKinstry 2015), and sexually transmitted diseases have been on the rise. Free yearly sexual health check-ups will enable to keep this within limits (Chow et al. 2014).
The Australian aboriginals or the Torres Strait Islander people are always at a disadvantage when compared to the non-native Australians. The indigenous people have limited access to education facilities, and the level of employment is also low (Gajjar et al. 2014). The health conditions are also in a highly compromised state; there are more natives as compared to the non-natives who smoke, and they suffer from nutritional deficiencies, have a less active lifestyle, and have little or no access to the healthcare institutes (Schembri et al. 2015). Also, they make up for a meagre 1.3% of the student population in Queensland. According to reports, more than 50% of the aboriginal population is aged 22 and below, with a mere 3% above the age of 65. The Queensland Youth Party can bring about a change in the scenario as we are actively involved in the betterment of the youth.
Media campaigning is the use of newspapers, television and the social media to promote and achieve the publicity of any particular cause by any team or individual (Gibson 2015).
Communication during any campaigning exercise is a very important and necessary element, as it is the method by which any team can efficiently relay their messages and strategies to the people. The wider the reach, the better will be the outcome for the political party. The language used is also important for a political campaign. The speaker chosen should be able to deliver a speech that will lend a powerful impact on the audience, while motivating them to join and support their cause. The content of the speech is not the sole area of concern; the way it is delivered is also important. Also, in this age of digitisation, social media has become an indispensable tool in the propagation of any idea (Johnson and Perlmutter 2013). It is beneficial as the preferences of the people can be estimated, and the outlook of the people can be understood.
Our team strategy was important because quite a number of factors had to be considered while selecting our candidate for the elections. We had to apply our knowledge and with the help of the recent trends in politics, we selected Julie as the face of our party.
It was important for us to keep the target audience in mind when trying to gain access to the demographic, geographic and psychographic details of the voters (Connell 2014). That would help in making sure that our policies were relevant to the people and that they could identify themselves with them.
Detailed planning and careful management are the two key factors that need to be considered when organising a campaign for any political party. We followed specific steps to plan the public relations campaign, and to make sure it met the requirements and objectives that we had to achieve. This is because a thoroughly planned publicising structure denotes that the consequences had been taken into consideration (Burton, Miller and Shea 2015).
Our first week was the women’s week; we brainstormed on pill-pricing regulations and the proposal of free sexual health check-ups, including childcare subsidies. The second week was a health week, where we campaigned against domestic violence –– in Australia, every week one woman dies due to domestic violence –– and also for the rights of health workers, and free health tests for men. The focus of the third week was on the economy and the employment status of the people, as job security and affordable housing is an important issue. Education was our core area of interest in the fourth week; children deserve the basic amenities like free uniforms, textbooks, and a convenient mode of transportation to reach school and get back home. We also felt that grants should be made available for differently-abled children so that they can take part-time classes, by collaborating with childcare support groups. Our fifth week of campaigning was on the environmental issues, like chargeable plastic bags, grants for solar power subsidies, and for schools and offices for encouraging recycling.
As the research manager, my main role was to identify the method of research that I had to employ at various times during the campaign. I had to come up with ways and strategies that were unique and could target those audiences who would be willing to support us. Research is pretty much the core part of any activity that is undertaken. I had two categories of methods to consider while researching for the Queensland Youth Party, in addition to initiating a focus group –– primary and secondary. The primary level of research that I had to conduct was to hold questionnaires, organise interviews, focus groups and blogs. The secondary research was the part where I had to do some desk research and it involved collecting information about the operations of the political parties from books, journals, papers, libraries and the internet (Smith 2015).
This is integral to ensuring that the people get the important messages in an efficient manner. The public’s attitude towards the situations helped us to understand how we would have to construct our messages properly to maximise the positive outcomes (Inglehart 2015). We came across several groups that faced problems but were not successful in identifying them –– they were the latent public, comprising mostly of students. The aware group of people were those that recognised and validated the existence of a problem, like the teachers, the parents and the media.
After the kinds of public had been identified and categorised, it became necessary to single out the stakeholders. A stakeholder analysis is not specific like identifying publics, because it takes into consideration everyone involved in the campaign, and not just those who need to be talked to. They can be categorized as stakeholders also. A stakeholder analysis can include employees, identified publics, suppliers, senior executives and investors (Dodge 2015).
We had identified the issues that we were facing –– in both the internal and external factors –– and who we wanted to talk to regarding what strategies we had in mind. Every PR campaign should have a set of messages that constitutes the core momentum of the communication. These messages need to be lucid, concise and easily understood (Austin and Pinkleton 2015). The reason for their importance is two-fold. Firstly, they are an essential part of the attitude forming process and secondly, they portray the efficiency of the communication. Key messages should not be conflicting or doubtful.
In a PR campaign, strategy and tactics are often confused with each other. Strategy is the foundation on which the tactical program is built, and is the theory that would move our current situation to where we want it to be. Strategies are usually the overlying mechanism of a campaign from which tactics are deployed to meet the goals (Dodge 2015).
In tactics, the challenging part is in choosing the right ones to meet the objectives. It depends on the kind of campaign we would be involved in, like media relations, lobbying, interviews, conferences, podcasts and video news.
It was a rather challenging task to serve as the research manager of our group, but it was an enriching learning experience as well. The main issue that we faced was in coordinating the team, and I had to sometimes take over tasks which were not really my area of expertise.
One of the members had the responsibility of outlining the campaigning strategies for each week, but as he was absent for more than once, we had difficulties in getting the group to run smoothly. It is understandable that it was a stressful task for him, but it was obviously not possible for us to manage all of his work as we had responsibilities of our own.
As a research manager, my main area of concern was to research on the ways as to how to publicise and gain the interest of the masses for the political campaign. We had resorted to media and press releases, but there was one area that we faltered in –– the social media channels. In my opinion, we should have paid more attention to this field, as social media is the platform where people express their views and preferences and thus, we ought to have utilised that more efficiently. Our lack of insight in this arena made the publicising of the campaign a bit time-consuming, and definitely compromised our functioning.
References:
Austin, E.W. and Pinkleton, B.E., 2015. Strategic Public Relations Management: Planning and Managing Effective Communication Campaigns (Vol. 10). Routledge.
Burton, M.J., Miller, W.J. and Shea, D.M., 2015. Campaign Craft: The Strategies, Tactics, and Art of Political Campaign Management: The Strategies, Tactics, and Art of Political Campaign Management. ABC-CLIO.
Chow, E.P., Fehler, G., Chen, M.Y., Bradshaw, C.S., Denham, I., Law, M.G. and Fairley, C.K., 2014. Testing commercial sex workers for sexually transmitted infections in Victoria, Australia: an evaluation of the impact of reducing the frequency of testing. PLoS One, 9(7), p.e103081.
Connell, R.W., 2014. Gender and power: Society, the person and sexual politics. John Wiley & Sons.
Dodge, A. ed., 2015. Public relations: Strategies and tactics. New York, NY: Pearson.
Gajjar, D., Zwi, A.B., Hill, P.S. and Shannon, C., 2014. A case study in the use of evidence in a changing political context: an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health service re-examines practice models, governance and financing. Australian Health Review, 38(4), pp.383-386.
Gibson, R.K., 2015. Party change, social media and the rise of ‘citizen-initiated’campaigning. Party politics, 21(2), pp.183-197.
Inglehart, R., 2015. The silent revolution: Changing values and political styles among Western publics. Princeton University Press.
Johnson, T.J. and Perlmutter, D.D., 2013. New media, campaigning and the 2008 Facebook election. Routledge.
Kidd, S., Kenny, A. and McKinstry, C., 2015. The meaning of recovery in a regional mental health service: an action research study. Journal of advanced nursing, 71(1), pp.181-192.
McKinley, C.J., Mastro, D. and Warber, K.M., 2014. Social identity theory as a framework for understanding the effects of exposure to positive media images of self and other on intergroup outcomes. International Journal of Communication, 8, p.20.
Schaumberg, R.L., 2015, January. Self-reliant women are seen as better leaders than self-reliant men. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2015, No. 1, p. 18592). Academy of Management.
Schembri, L., Curran, J., Collins, L., Pelinovskaia, M., Bell, H., Richardson, C. and Palermo, C., 2015. The effect of nutrition education on nutrition?related health outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people: a systematic review. Australian and New Zealand journal of public health.
Smith, J.A. ed., 2015. Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods. Sage.
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