NAPCAN's social marketing approach to child abuse prevention in Australia

¶ … Social Marketing NAPCAN Prevent Child Abuse Case Study

The threat of child abuse is still very real within even our modern society. Child abuse and neglect is still a major issue within Australian society and politics. According to the research, about 5-10% of all children under the age of eighteen have experienced physical abuse, 4-8% witness abuse within the family structure first hand, with between 12-23% being abused verbally (Horsfall, Bromfield and McDonald 2010). Over 55,000 cases of child abuse were investigated in 2008-2009 alone (Horsfall, Bromfield and McDonald 2010). This is creating a situation were nonprofit organizations like NAPCAN are struggling to find effective preventative measures to help curb these unacceptable rate of child abuse and neglect within Australia, as well as setting a model for success for similar programs across the globe.

NAPCAN's more recent campaigns to prevent child abuse have used innovative strategies on social media platforms in order to better spread the message of their campaigns. The 2006 campaign's purpose is clearly to open parents' eyes to their own behaviors in an attempt to direct new modes of behavior that prove to have a much more positive impact on their children. NAPCAN began its 2006 campaign on Youtube, with the message of "Children see. Children Do. Make your influence positive." (NAPCAN 2006). It was a broad strategy that is targeted to parents. Essentially, NAPCAN's campaign is taking a primary intervention approach. Thus, it "carried the message that all adults are modeling behavior to children all the time, and encouraged all adults to consider their behavior and make their influence on children positive" (Horsfall, Bromfield and McDonald 2010 p 9). It was an innovative approach to prevention of child abuse and neglect within Australia.

Prevention of Child Abuse through Parent Education

The campaign remolded older strategies of parent education as its primary vehicle for prevention. Parent education strategies are one of the most commonly used to combat child abuse. Parent education is "a systematic and conceptually-based program intended to impart information, awareness and skills to the participants on aspects of parenting" (Tomison 1998 p 3). It is the targeting of parents in order to change potentially harmful behavior that could be contributing to the abuse or neglect of Australia's children. According to the research, "parent education programs are based on the premise that interventions that promote caring, consistent, and positive parenting are central to creating safe and supportive environments for children" (Holzer et al. 2006 p 8). These strategies aim to educate parents on how their behavior impacts their children. Many parents have no idea how their behavior can be negatively affecting their child's development, because they do not see themselves as being perpetrators of abuse. As such, "research has documented that the risk of child maltreatment is heightened when parents lack necessary child rearing skills, social supports, and knowledge of child development," (Holzer et al. 2006 p 8). Prevention strategies focusing on parent education aim to increase parents' awareness of their own knowledge and impact on their children. These strategies aim to increase their positive parenting skills in order to avoid having a negative impact on their children's development. Here, the research suggests that "all parent education programs are thought to assist families primarily by increasing parental knowledge and reducing parental stress" (Holzer et al. 2006 p 9). Parent behavior directly impacts the welfare of the children within the family (Barth 2009). Thus, parent education has proven a huge element to most modern prevention strategies. Due to its power as a strategy, "parent education is currently advocated as a significant component of any comprehensive set of preventative services for parents at high risk of abusing or neglecting their children" (Tomison 1998 p 1). The notion has dominated popular prevention strategies since the late 1980s here in Australia. As such, programs and strategies aimed at prevention have long utilized elements of parent education, and thus target an audience that can specifically benefit from such education. Here, the research states that "proactive programs are targeted at parents who have not already developed severe parenting problems or become abusive or severely neglectful" (Tomison 1998 p 4). NAPCAN used this strategy as a platform for its 2006 campaign, but also many others and often its strategies revolving around parent education went beyond just what parents could do to protect their own children, but also what they could do to help protect other children as well.

Social Media Campaigns

Social media is a modern innovation that has adapted with the spread of social networking programs and technologies. It is now considered a very cost effective strategy that can be easily disseminated by the very audience it is targeting. Therefore, "social marketing campaigns are a common strategy for raising awareness about social problems such as child abuse and neglect" (Horsfall, Bromfield and McDonald 2010 p 1). The power and capabilities of social media make it a potentially successful medium to deliver messages promoting prevention and adaption of behavior to fit prevention strategies. Essentially, "social marketing involves the application of commercial marketing techniques and technologies to influence the voluntary behavior of target audiences to improve their personal welfare and that of society" (Horsfall, Bromfield and McDonald 2010 p 1). Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) show how Youtube is an incredibly popular social media platform, with over ten hours of content being uploaded onto the site each minute. Social media platforms attract a number of users that cross over major demographic boundaries, thus making it a tool that can access an incredibly vast audience quickly and efficiently. In fact, social media is a lucrative tool for nonprofit and government agencies because of its cost advantages (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). Thackery et al. (2008) also illustrate the positive benefits of social media. Social media campaigns "directly engage consumers in the creative process by both producing and distributing information through collaborative writing, content sharing, social networking, social bookmarking, and syndication" (Thackery et al. 2008 p 338).

NAPCAN has recently adjusted its strategies to structure its dissemination of its campaigns through social media platforms. Social media campaigns have proven successful in fighting other child and adolescent issues. Its current strategy has been to employ social media campaigns directed at prevention of child abuse and neglect is essentially primary methods of prevention. These "interventions are strategies that target whole communities in order to build public resources and attend to the factors that contribute to child maltreatment" (Holzer et al. 2006 p 3). In NAPCAN's 2006 campaign, the organization was promoting parental education through social marketing. NAPCAN's campaign is directed at individuals in order to bring awareness of how their parenting can negatively impact their children.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

One of the biggest strengths the campaign boasted was its price tag. The cost effectiveness of social media is a major strength to the overall campaign. Prevention programs are often less likely to be rigorously funded and supported by government agencies and institutions, with most funding coming only for short periods of campaign management (Tomison 1998). As a result, social media serves as an extremely beneficial platform because of its cost effective nature. The cost of the campaign is much less than other forms of media, and thus is a major strength.

Moreover, another strength is the use of a broad strategy that appeals to a wide audience. The campaign does not limit itself by isolating a very small target audience, but rather appeals to parents in general. Most social marketing campaigns either rely on a positive emotional connection to the message, or one of fear, where the individual is shocked into producing the desired change in behavior. NAPCAN's ad is clearly a shock to many parents, who might then be prompted to examine and possibly adjust their own behaviors based on what they had seen.

Weaknesses

Still, there are some issues that could be improved from an internal standpoint. There is no clear link to other supportive services -- no mentioning of other programs NAPCAN offers within the context of the actual ad that is at the center of the campaign. As such, audience members may want to know more about what they can do to change their behaviors, but are forced to go search for such information elsewhere. The Youtube page does not have clearly defined links to NAPCAN's website or any of its other programs. As such, it is not using the integrated approach that further supports social media strategies. Including more information in the side bar of the Youtube video, along with more identifiable links to NAPCAN's website and other programs would help strengthen the campaign's approach and support it with more integrated elements.

Opportunities

Social "media present the opportunity to communicate to large numbers of people and to target particular groups of people" (Saunders and Goddard 2002 p 2). This allows the campaign to open up to not only parents in Australia, but also around the world. Even more beneficial, Youtube does not have time constraints on how long videos can run. Thus, NAPCAN can keep the campaign up for the world to see for years to come, and can continue to reference back to it in future campaigns. This further maximizes the cost effectiveness of the campaign as a whole and creates new opportunities in the future.

Threats

Again, there are still issues that could threaten the overall effectiveness of the campaign. More abstract concept how behavior has been changed -- this means that the campaign's success will be harder to evaluate. There is little empirical research on how use of social media strategies has actually impacted the prevention of child abuse, and so evaluating its success will be difficult.

There are several types of evaluation of campaigns. Process evaluations "investigate whether a program is doing what it intended to do in a consistent fashion" while impact evaluations "measure the direct effect of a program according to its operational aims and objectives" (Holzer et al. 2006 p 5). Moreover, an outcome evaluation "attempts to measure the direct consequences of the program under investigation on the underlying goal" (Holzer et al. 2006 p 6). All three are typically used in evaluating the success of advocacy programs, but because of the abstract nature of this campaign, it would be difficult to implement such a cohesive analysis. In order to strengthen the ability to more successfully evaluate the campaign, analysis would need to focus on one method, how well the campaign succeeded in raising awareness. Thanks to the listing of views on Youtube, this is the only method which can actually provide any sort of measurable outcome with any sort of validity. This method of evaluation would focus on the systematic measurement of Youtube views in order to record how well the campaign is doing in spreading awareness of the issue.

Conclusion

Overall, NAPCAN's innovative use of social media is an added benefit to its advocacy programs aimed at preventing child abuse and neglect. It is cost effective and successful at reaching a wide target audience, thus helping expose the general message to a greater population for a longer period of time. Still, there are some weaknesses and threats that could be better addressed to increase the efficiency of the campaign.