Campaigns Efforts to Gain Public Support for An Opinion
The short essay is a 2-page (double spaced and 12-point font size) analysis of the quality of a persuasive campaign. The essay should be uploaded to Canvas.
Instructions:
The essay asks you to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of a persuasive campaign: https://www.conservation.org/nature-is-speaking/julia-roberts-is-mother-nature (Links to an external site.)
You will examine this website and its contents. Please focus on the main contents including texts, images, and videos, etc.
Your task is to provide your evaluation of the campaign. This will require you to examine the webpage contents carefully and write a short essay on its strengths and weaknesses. Your essay should use what you have learned about persuasion to describe what is strong and why; and to describe what is weak — and especially what is missing — in terms of message strategies in successful persuasion.
First, you will write a short paragraph addressing the following questions: What problem does the persuasion campaign target? Who are the potential interested target audiences (*describe the target audiences’ characteristics, such as demographic, socioeconomic status, ideology, education backgrounds, etc.)?
Then, you will delve into analyzing the persuasive messaging. A well-written and well-received essay will include: (1) Two elements of the webpage that are likely to be particularly effective in fulfilling the persuasive goal. Justifying your statements of support from your knowledge and that of other experts (that is from class lectures and/or readings) will be crucial to establishing your credibility.
(2) One messaging strategy that is missing from the webpage that you think the organization should be aware of in their messaging. Here you will likely go beyond the existing contents to include other messaging elements. Once again, the credibility of your essay will hinge on citing messaging elements that have an established base in research and theory (that is, from lectures or readings).