The article Stop Raising Awareness Already by Ann Chrisitano & Annie Neimand is an article meant to, ironically enough, raise awareness on how raising awareness can be ineffective and to inform us of ways that work. In the beginning of the article, the authors, Ann Chrisitano & Annie Neimand, show us ways that awareness campaigns fail, like when it leads to no action, backlash, reaches the wrong audience, or even literal harm to the people influenced. However, after, the authors show us effective ways of raising awareness. They state that “there are four essential elements to creating a successful public interest communications campaign: target your audience as narrowly as possible; create compelling messages with clear calls to action; develop a theory of change; and use the right messenger. We will explore each of these four elements in the following sections.”
I think one of the most interesting things about this article was its title Stop Raising Awareness Already. Firstly, it’s because it’s incredibly “clickbait-y”, like it was done for the sole purpose of getting clicks from angry viewers (which is probably why it was titled this way). The title itself, Stop Raising Awareness Already, can stir up some controversy, as if this article is meant to be an article trashing awareness campaigns and telling everyone to stop doing it because it won’t work. Secondly, anyone who is unaware, doesn’t read the article, or only reads the first few paragraphs, can use this article as a way to support an agenda against movements like the Black Lives Matter movements, since it’s in those first few parts where the authors detail the negatives of awareness campaigns
One thing to take out of this article is definitely its structure. It is very similar to how I wanted to structure my literature review, but in a somewhat opposite way (because it described the negatives, then the positives, while I described the positives then the negatives). Taking notes on the four different factors they had on awareness campaigns is also important.
