Objectives should be meaningful and comprehensible, but how many times have you seen something like the following?
“We will raise awareness amongst employers about the benefits of recruiting young people.”
Communications is all about expressing ideas clearly and yet the industry is littered with pointless jargon. What exactly is raising awareness? When asked people give vague responses about “informing” or “having more people know about something,” but that doesn’t feel convincing.
In addition, raising awareness quickly leads to other questions:
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How will raising awareness lead to campaign success?
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How will raising awareness help the target audience?
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When will we know we have achieved sufficient levels of awareness raising?
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Can we have too much awareness raising?
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How is raising awareness SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely)?
In short raising awareness is confusing, meaningless and is never an objective – so what is?
As always with communications, you must start with your audience and decide how you want them to react to your campaign.
Consider the original example, perhaps you want employers to recruit more young people, but this would be difficult to achieve or measure with one campaign. Therefore, you reduce the scope of your objective to something manageable.
The following objective are more precise:
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We will increase positive employer sentiment on Twitter about recruiting young people by 20%, between 1st February and 28th February 2022
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Between 1st February and 28th February 2022, we will convince 150 employers to sign a public pledge to recruit more young people
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We will help 400 employers to become ‘young people friendly’ by increasing traffic to the ‘YP Talent Market’ portal by 35% by 28th February 2022.
A specific objective with measurable impact is always better than one that is wide-reaching and vague. This approach also ensures that you only take responsibility for the communications. There is probably many ways that employers can be encouraged to recruit young people, but your campaign should only focus on the communications aspects.
So I hope this article has “raised awareness” about why raising awareness is useless, and you have a clearer understanding on what make a better objective. And if you still need convincing (or need some help), then please get in touch.