The UNICEF #FightUnfair campaign is trying to influence the viewer to take actions to spread awareness and hold governments accountable to ensure a fair chance and a better future for every child. UNICEF is a non-profit organization who works to transform young childrens lives by protecting their rights and helping them reach their highest potential. The #FightUnfair campaign targets the issue of poverty for millions of children around the world who should have a fair chance in life, but are being disadvantaged, endangered and deprived of everything they need to thrive during adolescence.
The target audience for this campaign is the general public, adults, parents and their kids. UNICEF urges the audience to use social media platforms to drive awareness, attention and donations to this #FightUnfair campaign.
An effective strategy used in the #FightUnfiar campaign is the use of the Extended Parallel Processing Model(EPPM) using fear appeal and presenting response/self-efficacy to the viewer. In particular, the webpage under Meet Juma includes The State of the Worlds Children 2016 report that has statistics about the perceived susceptibility and severity of the threat of poverty to these young children such as a lack of schooling, disease and continued poverty.
Unicef creates many opportunities for response and self efficacy for the individual to get involved to reduce the threat of poverty for these children. Response efficacy is the audiences belief in the effectiveness of UNICEFs proposal in reducing the threat and self-efficacy is the belief that the individual has confidence and is capable of performing the recommended action to reduce the threat of the issue. Unicef includes many opportunities for the audience to get involved with the use of Twitter(share #FightUnfair), Facebook, Instagram and YouTube where Unicef says Change starts when you choose to care. Unicef says to use your mind, voice, energy, skills, wallet and influence as a citizen to create change. I believe this fear appeal with invoke danger control to invoke motivation for the viewer to get involved and they will perform one or more of Unicefs ways to get involved.
Another effective strategy used in the Unicef #FightUnfair campaign is the use of certain means of persuasion such as pathos, repetition and utilitarianism. Unicef continuously uses pathos or appeal to emotions or imagination first through images of young, smiling children or later down the page with the small personal biography of Jhuma to invoke intrigue and link to donations or actions. This campaign also evokes emotion with the repetition of fair chance or for every child to invoke the stimulus of the persuasion campaign more favorably. Robert B. Zajoncs mere exposure theory says, the more frequently an individual is exposed to a novel object, the more favorably he or she evaluates it. #FightUnfair also utilizes strong language such as disadvantaged, deprived, vulnerable and endangered to create emotions for the viewer to make them invigorated to take action. Unicef also uses utilitarianism which by Perloff judges ethics in terms of outcomes and if the moral act is one that promotes the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Unicef provides a straightforward common sense way for the viewer to help these children. Any negative feelings you may feel will be negated by any action you make to help which shows your intention, that donating is a moral, positive and universal obligation. Doing what Unicef promotes the greatest benefits and is the right moral thing to do.
One way how Unicef could improve their persuasion campaign is to establish their credibility by showing how promoting awareness, donations or any other past actions have already contributed to success in previous initiatives. While this campaign uses Katy Perry as an identification tool with the audience to identify with them, Unicef needs to show as an organization their trustworthiness of what their history is or past actions are to fully persuade the audience. According to Perloff, communicators are not guaranteed credibility by virtue of who they are, their title, or academic pedigree, but Unicef certainly has authority which signifies power and control. The #FightUnfair web page provides very few details, statistics or characteristics of what their impact or plan is going to be to promote change in Vietnam. Unicef must provide more expertise knowledge on #FightUnfiar with specific statistics about this issue how they are effective instead of just promoting good will. This campaign also lacks message sensation value to elicit a affective and sensory response from the audience. The videos provide auditory sensation, but they need stimulating images, text and details to also be more effective.
Overall, Unicef implements some positive persuasion techniques, but could increase effectivity by establishing their credibility more and increasing the message sensation value. This campaign will certainly increase public perception and help these children break poverty.