Task 4

SOCIAL ACTION AND COMMUNITY MEDIAResearch - Task 4

Questionnaire – Question 1

The purpose of this question was to determine the age of my potential target audience in order for me to understand my audience fully and make sure that the product that I produce will be appealing to them in order for the message depicted within my products to be understood by the audience.

As you can see the majority of people that answered this questionnaire were aged 16-20, this tells me that there could potentially be a large number of younger people of this age who will be interested in the subject of SASH, therefore it would be a good idea to produce designs that will be appealing to this age group, for example make sure that the language used is not overly complex in order to ensure that the product will be fully understood by the viewers.


The purpose of this question was to determine the gender of my potential target audience in order for me to understand my audience fully and make sure that the product that I produce will be appealing to them in order for the message depicted within my products to be understood by the audience.

The below image shows that just over half of the people that answered the questionnaire were male, I can use this information in two ways – I could decide that potentially the majority of my target audience will be male and produce products that will be appealing to mostly men by using dark colours and masculine typography etc. or I could notice that nearly fifty percent of people were male and the other fifty percent were female, meaning that I could produce products that will be both appealing to men and women by having neutral colours and fonts that will not be appealing to a specific gender.

After the age and gender of my audience had been specified I was then able to ask the below question in order to understand the audience’s tendencies when it comes to charity donations. I thought that this question would be vey useful to me as it would determine how much persuasive techniques I would have to use within my products, for example if the majority of the audience had not made donations to a charity, then I would make sure that the products that I produce were heavily persuasive in order to influence the audience’s characteristics so that they help with the charity SASH.

A very large percentage of the people who answered this questionnaire answered ‘Yes’ to this question, this means that they will be more likely to donate to a charity when seeing an advertisement and could also mean that they are more influenced by advertising by charities. This means that I can be more subtle with my campaign and the way in which the message is put across because my audience are heavily influenced by charity advertisements and have donated to charities in the past.



The purpose of this question was to find out how much money people are comfortably willing to donate to a charity, I asked this question because I thought I could use this piece of information within my advertising campaign as a way of getting as much information to the audience as possible and making it even easier for them to donate to the charity as all of the information they need ie, how much to donate and how to donate would be available to them which would make it more likely for them to donate to the charity.

Over half of the people who took part in this questionnaire decided that between one pound and five pounds would be an acceptable amount of money to donate to a charity per month, this is very useful to me as I now know and understand that this is what would please my audience, which means that if I were to use this piece of information within my advertising campaign I will be more likely to attract my target audience.


By asking this question I though I would be able to clearly see the kind of charities that most people are aware of so that I could look at the most successful charities and see what it is about their advertising campaigns that are successful. Also I would be able to see, after creating a graph, what genre of charities are most well knows, for example animal charities or homeless charities.

Below there is evidence that the people who answered my questionnaire mostly knew about the Caner Research UK charity, then the RSPCA, closely followed by the NSPCC. Now that I have this information I can look into these

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Name 5 charities that you are aware of

charities and past advertising campaigns to see what has made them so successful. I can look at the imagery they have used and look at the specific angle they have taken in order to catch people’s attention. In doing this I will then try to embrace some of these attributes to attract my target audience when producing my own products within my advertising campaign.


After looking into different advertising strategies that are used by popular charities, I realised that there are two main angles that are used when advertising – positive or negative. So I decided to ask my audience which one they would prefer and think would be more effective in an advertising campaign. I asked this so that my knowledge of what my audience likes and dislikes would be developed and so that the final product that I create would be attractive to them specifically.

The majority of people who answered this question said that a campaign poster based around the positive effects that a charity has had on their clients would be more effective that a poster based around the negative problems that the charity are trying to tackle and resolve. This is useful to me as it means that I can easily decide to create a product that has more of a positive impact on my audience as this is what they prefer and in producing my product I want to make sure that it will attract the correct target audience.


I wanted to find out if the people that answered the questionnaire thought that it was important to use bold and bright colours within a campaign poster. I thought that their responses would help me to understand my audience fully and for me to consider them when designing the product, if I designed a poster and wanted it to appeal to my target audience, it would be a good idea to use a colour scheme that I knew my target audience preferred.

In the bar chart below you can see that over half of the audience answered ‘Yes’ when they were asked if they thought bold and bright colours were mandatory for a charity campaign poster. Most of the people said that it was important for the poster to be eye-catching and lively, however the people who did not agree with this said that they think that a muted colour scheme could be just as effective and attractive as a colourful poster. I could decide to use this information and make my product bold and colourful to attract the correct audience, or I could decided to have a black and white colour scheme to make the campaign more striking, and therefore eye-catching as well.


The aim of this question was to find out where people have seen charity posters before and where they would expect to see a poster promoting a charity. Finding out this information would mean that I could plan where I would place my own products in order for it to be seen by my target audience.

Even though all of the responses were different from the people who answered my questionnaire, I was still able to see a trend within their answers. Mainly public places were stated, places that are very visible to all people. Having my product in such places will mean that it can be viewed by as many people as possible, getting the message across to the public more effectively. Also because SASH is a homeless charity I will make sure that it will be in places that are designed to help people such as youth centres etc, to try and get my product noticed by people who are homeless to make sure that hey know they can ask for help.


I decided to ask this question so that I could find out what my audience would prefer on an advertisement and if they though having a larger text : image ratio would be more effective. The answers that they give will determine the amount of text and imagery I will use within my final products, if the audience prefer more text I will use more text and vice versa. This is because I want to make sure that my product is refined to match the needs of my target audience in order for it to be appealing to my audience.

A very small amount of the people who took part in my questionnaire said that they would prefer more text over images, a larger amount of people said that they would prefer more imagery over text, and over half of the people asked said that they would prefer an even amount of text and imagery. I will therefore try to please my target audience and take this into consideration when designing my final products for my advertising campaign.


This question was very basic and its aim was purely to decipher what form of print advertising I was going to chose to create within my advertising campaign. I would take into consideration what products my audience say they thing would be most effective when making the decision as to what to produce.

The two most successful options that my audience chose where billboards and posters. I could decide to produce a poster that could also be used as an image for a billboard, thus means that I would be using the most effective form of advertising that my audience think is the most appropriate too, making it more appealing to them.

Education

Task 4