Connecting students to knowledge
and its application
Southern Utah University
Lynn White, Ph.D.
Public Health Message and Awareness Campaign
Goal: You and 1-3 of your classmates will use what you will learn about health behaviors and behavior modification to create a public health awareness and message campaign on a health behavior you are passionate about. Important! The behavior you wish to promote must be approved first. To learn about Public Health Campaigns and how to put one together, visit this website and this website. Yours will be a little different from most in that you will not be asking for money or organizing public events. Your campaign will be centered on raising awareness, encouraging change, suggesting techniques for change, and providing resources for people who want more information.
Note: everyone on the team must contribute meaninfully to each phase of the project.
This is a multi-phase project.
Phase 1: Group Presentation of the Health Behavior
To create a successful campaign, you need to have a great understanding of the behavior. Together, you will conduct a literature review on the behavior you chose for your health message campaign and present your findings in a slide presentation to the class. Click on the "Phase 1 instructions and rubric" below to for more detailed guidance.
Online Summer Class Students: you will do the same thing, which means you will need a few "zoom" meetings to put this together. Each of you will narrate and record your slide(s), which will then need to be stitched together into one "movie" - saved as a .mov or .mp4
Phase 2: Health Message Campaign Plan Development
Before you create a plan, you must get to know your audience. To help you do this, you will use one of the health behavior models we are learning about (HBM or COM). Use the model to understand what obstacles/barriers (real or perceived) your audience might have. Your campaign will need to address these. You will also use the same model to identify variables in your target audience that you can take advantage of to facilitate change.
You will then create a plan that includes who your targeted audience is, information on local, regional, and national resources to help people change or engage in this behavior, and locations where you will distribute your message. Click on the "Phase 2 instructions and rubric" below to for more detailed guidance.
DO NOT PROCEED TO Phase 3 until I have reviewed your plan and provided you with the official green light
Phase 3: Creating the Health Message Campaign
Here, you will create a website for your campaign (there are freebies out there, e.g. wix.com), a flier for dissemination, and a poster for dissemination.
Click on the "Phase 3 instructions and rubric" below to for more detailed guidance.
IMPORTANT: If you want to have a chance at proceeding to phase 4 (dissemination), you MUST provide me with a word document that has all the text contained on your website! This will allow me to suggest edits - as necessary. To do this, give each page of the document the same name as the page on the website. This means page 1 of the document should be titled "Homepage", page 2 should be titled "health benefits" etc... The Scoring rubric below contains the different pages your website needs to have. Share this word document with me at the same time as you share the website.
DO NOT PROCEED to Phase 4 until I have reviewed your campaign
Phase 4: Executing the Health Message Campaign
To get an A in this project, the campaign must be very high quality such that I give you the go-ahead to (with official campus approval) put up posters around campus and disseminate fliers. You will set up a "manned" table in the Sharwan Smith Center and each of you will committ to 2 hours disseminating the results. If the Sharwan Smith Center is not the ideal venue, we will figure out what is and arrange for you to disseminate your materials there. You will receive full points for phase 4 if you complete these tasks. Important! This is all or none. You must do ALL of the actvities listed here to get the full 10 points this phase is worth. If you complete only some of the activities - you will receive no points (I know, tough love:)
Is this Project Right for Me?
This project requires certain skills or at least a willingness to learn these skills on your own as a team. You will need to learn/know how to;
create a simple website
create a poster using pptx or similar app
create a flier (this can be a tri-fold or just 1 page)
create a QR code (this is actually easy)
To advance to phase 4, you must have a very high quality product and be willing to interact with the public for 2 hours. You can stop after phase 3, but the most you can score on the project is a B+
Note: You can print out a reasonable number of fliers in the department without charge. I will try to get the department to cover the cost of posters as well. If this is not possible, you will need to find other sources of funding or pay for posters yourself. But, you will only need about 10, so the cost will likely be less than $20 for 12x18 at the SUU copy shop.
If you are successful and actually carry out the campaign, think how amazing this will look on a resume or CV!!
The legal ease
If at some point in the future you modify your campaign to include information I have not seen and approved, monetary requests, and/or public events/activities, you alone will assume full responsibility and liability associated with these decisions. This is also true if you distribute fliers and/or posters in places and times without my expressed written consent. Sorry for the "legal ease" but it is important.
Phase 4: Online Summer Students
This will be a little "tricky". You might be scattered across the country - far away from the SUU campus. If disseminating your materials at SUU is not an option for you, do NOT sign up for this project unless i. you are willing to forgo phase 4 knowing that you cannot score higher than a B+ on the project, or ii. you talk to me first about where you might disseminate the materials.
Using AI and Article Requirements
You may use AI on this project as a means of generating ideas for the content and writing suggestions. However, user beware. AI will sometimes fabricate sources (e.g. articles). You MUST read the articles you use, so you should catch this. To make sure, I require everyone to submit a screenshot of the first page of every article they use. Ultimately, you are responsible for the accuracy of the things you turn in. Blind and uncritical use of AI could result in a lower grade than what you would have received without it.