#PassItOn: A SOCIAL CHANGE CAMPAIGN (Term Paper Sample)

#PassItOn: A SOCIAL CHANGE CAMPAIGN Author’s Name Course Number: Course Title Due Date Introduction A perplexing 26 million refugees are currently displaced in the world—half of these victims are juveniles under the age of 18, and only under 1% of the total refugee population has hope of ever permanently resettling in their homeland. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported over 135,000 refugees in the UK alone in 2021—83,000 of these are pending asylum cases and another 4,000 have been rendered stateless (UNHCR, 2022). Most asylum seekers in the UK are from Iran, Syria, Eritrea, Iraq, and Albania, and since they have no allowance to work in the UK, depend on state support amounting to £39.63 per capita per week. The alarming statistics on the refugee crisis lend urgency to the need for a social cause aimed at lobbying for exigent government support in addressing this issue. The proposed societal transformation strategy will be a social media campaign running under the hashtag #PassItOn. The campaign will be a sweeping social media cause designed to spread awareness and actively lobby government promptness in passing legislation for the protection of refugees in the UK and elsewhere across the world. The campaign strategy will combine a curation of awareness messages shared across four major social media platforms (SMPs)—Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram—and a series of participatory posts incorporating captivating visual cues, such as infographics and photographs, to help engage more effectively with the audience. Campaign Rationale Social media incorporates all forms of communication that facilitate electronic, networked, interactive, and rapid strategies of disseminating public information. The proposed adoption of technology-driven communication for the social change campaign warrants a comprehensive exploration of the question: what experiences can be adopted from previously successful social media campaigns? The last decade has witnessed tremendous growth in social media campaigning, especially in the political arena. What was initially a niche endeavour gradually evolved into an all-encompassing tool for promoting messages of intent and persuasion and in certain instances for throwing ill-intentioned cannonballs. The proposed campaign strategy borrows from a finding by Bright and colleagues (2020) who investigated the attributable worthiness of social media platforms in winning people’s hearts during political races. The study suggested two logical pathways into thinking about interactions on social media platforms—the first, direct mobilisation, hints at the possibility of the SMP as a direct channel for communication between participants and the relevant targeted authority such as a political candidate (Bright et al., 2020). Second, indirect mobilisation involves generating third-party interests, such as media coverage, and engaging in the conversation using go-between techniques such as inter-media agenda setting. It is this third-party intervention that spreads out and sparks interest within the larger target audience. SMP messages such as those on Twitter can easily reach the “active activist” in the public eye who may be well equipped to mobilise further public opinion. Expectedly, this kind of advocacy would involve opinion leadership directed at smaller organized groups consisting of highly activism-active social media users who then effectively influence more interested listeners within their private social circles (Litterio et al., 2017). The use of SMPs like Twitter could also be a strategy for reaching out to other human rights activists who may also actively contribute to the envisioned campaign efforts. The study by Bright et al. (2020) has provided arguably the most robust empirical assessment of the link between Twitter campaigns and amassing public support. Their key takeaway was that the use of Twitter as a campaigning platform was more likely to lead to indirect rather than direct outcomes—that is, Twitter either motivates media coverage or energizes opinion leadership but does not strengthen the direct connection between campaigners and their audiences. Going by the deduction reported by Bright et al. (2020), the proposed social media campaign will combine awareness posts with participation campaigning to ensure that the audience interacts adequately with the material and knowledge embedded in the shared posts. A meta-analytical review of the role of audience participation in social media campaigns suggested a significant positive relationship between the two variables (Boulianne, 2015). However, it was unclear whether these findings were associated with causal or transformative effects. On the one hand, transformative effects could likely emanate from groups of intensive social media users who have relatively weak activism tendencies and a generally undeveloped acumen for human rights advocacy. From a causal stance, however, the trend is largely indeterminate—campaign participation could just as easily be a consequence of individual personality differences as it would be of an acquired interest in activism (Boulianne, 2015). Other plausible yet unfounded postulations include that social media interaction empowers in-group identity, the mediatory role of interpersonal communication, and networking size/efficacy (Dimitrova & Matthes, 2018). The proposed campaign is meant to be a tool for spreading information about social action targeting refugees. The primary goal is to challenge the spread of fake news, misinformation, and misrepresentation of facts about the refugee scourge. The campaign will also be a tool for incentivizing audiences to do the best they can on their part to encourage deeper understanding, collaboration, and willpower to intervene. To most people, the idea of a refugee cause might feel like a far-fetched agenda especially noting that refugee encounters are few and far between for most people. At any one time, only a handful of people will have interacted with, come across, or heard about a displaced person in their vicinity—this reality might tend to take away from the impact of a social campaign like the one proposed here. Social Media Plan The proposed campaign will follow a six-step procedure for creating content that appeals to as many people as possible. Step 1: Defining the Starting Point Deriving an understanding of where we stand as a campaign team should be the first agenda. Before inventing the social media plan, we take a closer look at our intended profiles and what currently exists on social media to this effect. Notable social media profiles by UNICEF, The Refugee List, Refugees International, Refugee Action, International Development and Migration, Refugee Strong, Refugee Council, Humanity First International, and HA International have been at the forefront of spreading awareness about refugees. Our proposed starting point will be creating a social media profile “Refugee | Human” using the handle @refugeesarehuman or any of its variants, including @refugeesarehumantoo or @humanbutrefugee. Step 2: Learning the Most About Target Audiences Understanding the audience, including who sees what and when, is an important factor in our cause. Our approaches to creating content will focus on content that is likeable, relatable, sharable, and worth commenting on. Audience characteristics such as age, location, interests, and emotionality will be important predictors of how we curate our content. Facebook will serve as the key platform for data gathering owing to its openly available user data, including age, location, and interests. Step 3: Social media Auditing Understanding what works and what will not is a key feature in determining how to curate content that appeals to a large audience. Shortlisting social media messages that have elicited the highest user response and noting common themes among them is a step in the right direction. We will identify and scrutinize content posted by major refugee advocacy organizations along with hashtags that have generated a high volume of responses. We will monitor user traffic under the hashtags #refugee, #supportrefugees #peopleinneed #refugeeswelcome, and #refugeestories on Twitter and Instagram, and the search terms refugee, refugee support, and refugees welcome on Facebook. In addition to auditing social media to understand our audiences, we also aim to understand the social attitudes of the people this campaign hopes to uplift, in this case refugees. Findings reported by Pittaway et al. (2016) showed that a social change project like what we are proposing is likely to fail in achieving its objectives if we do not “concurrently aim to strengthen social capital enablers.” (p. 415). At worst, a project like this one may be viewed as a disrespectful gesture to the refugee community owing to a sense of misguidedness in how we apply bureaucratic benchmarks to our cause. Social capital, in the sense described by Pittaway et al. (2016), is not a tangible item afforded to refugees but rather an attitudinal totem held, to varying degrees, by different members of the refugee community.   Step 4: Setting Up Accounts and Getting Recognized As stated, the three target networks for our social change campaign will be Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter—we choose Instagram for its highly visual communication style, Twitter for being largely content-driven and curated for brief yet concise messaging, and Facebook for its versatility and massive usage. A mission statement will govern the media we post on each of the three platforms: Mission statement 1: We will use Twitter as a platform for engaging the attention of policymakers and government representatives to impact change from above. Mission statement 2: Instagram will be our medium for reaching out to the younger generation of active yet desensitized audience who can impact change by s...