Semester 3

My last meeting with the project guide Mr. Tarun Deep Girdher, dated 15th June 2010, was about fine tuning the communication need, target audience, approaches and systems. I had established a hypothetical scenario where a campaign would be undertaken by the Ministry of Women & Child Development in collaboration with two other organizations. (Here I have considered Childline as one, for its excellent network, database and field workers across India and UNICEF as the other, for technical support and funds).

In the hypothesized scenario, one of the four communication needs is Awareness among parents and children.

I identified 2 basic problems to be addressed in India regarding this need:

A. The acknowledgement of CSA as an issue in the society - starting at home with parents

B. The need to create possibilities for quality interaction between Parent and child thereby facilitating a foundation of trust.

With this as a communication need, I went on to define my target group and target audience.

The hypothesized scenario entails the entire age range for a child from 2 to 17 years of age as defined by law. In general understanding, child development is divided in 4 stages: 2 to 5 (period of intense learning, development, change), 6 to 9 (period of stabilization, personality development), 10 to 13 (adolescence, confusion about self identity), and 14 to 17 (building self identity, redefining roles with relationships). The aim of the project for founding a relationship based on trust between parent and child would be suited to the first two age groups, which I narrowed down on for this project. Also, after entering adolescence, domain of awareness would be expanded to include sex education.

The concept of "safe" and "unsafe" touches would be best ingrained in the child at the stage between 2 to 5 years. Their parents deal with the child's basic developmental issues related to language, social behaviour etc. The age group from 6 to 9 years is the period when parent-child interaction becomes lower as the child becomes gradually independent. This can be an opportunity to make efforts for quality interaction between mother and child and develop a deep understanding and trust.

Target audience would ideally be both the parents. But due to the special closeness that a mother enjoys with the child (especially so in the Indian sub-continent), my target audience therefore was the mothers. The age group would be 30 - 40 years - working and no-working women.

During my discussion with my guide Tarun, he strongly underlined the significance of designing a 'system' for communication with a holistic approach. Tarun gave a very important direction that one cannot be given all the information at once. A system must be formulated for the information to be organized and disseminated strategically.

I was looking at developing a folded brochure educating parents. This we put under a microscope and the questions raised were: "what would be the medium of distribution?", "how much would it say?", "what else can you provide with it?" and so on.

Schools (Parent Teacher Association), print media, outdoor media, packaging of FMCG products, direct mail etc. were some of the channels I had in my mind. I realized that a communication solution can only be zeroed in on, by considering all factors simultaneously - psychological, socio-cultural, logistical, financial, technical, and so on.

I was also asked to explore more ideas about my end deliverable. I did also feel that I could come up with something more innovative than a folded brochure.