Recognize That Facts Are Often Insufficient to Change Attitudes and Behaviors

Research has found that facts alone are usually insufficient to change a person's attitudes, much less behavior (O'Keefe, 2002). For example, relying on factual information about government performance to change citizens' attitudes about government will likely fail. When confronted with facts that make them uncomfortable, people tend to ignore or distort those facts to reduce their cognitive dissonance. This explains in part why so many people continued to think “death panels” were part of the Affordable Care Act, despite numerous explanations by officials and health experts. Careful audience analysis is required to detect feelings, personal experience, prejudices, and other factors that influence human behavior. It may help to recognize that instead of attitudes influencing behavior, behavior often precedes and influences attitudes. For example, if citizens can be motivated by inducement or threat of penalty to adopt a different behavior, attitude change may well follow. Often behavior, and thereby attitudes, can be altered by getting people to simulate or role-play issues. Fu, Gress, and Caron (2013) found, for example, that using simulations helped change the transportation behavior of baby boomers in New England.

Know the Purpose and Pitfalls of Message Direction

The direction of communication—downward, upward, lateral, or external—affects the kinds of information conveyed and how that information is perceived.

Avoid Making Faulty Assumptions about Audiences

While all communications have three elements—the source, the message, and the audience—many public administrators consider only the source and the message. Ignoring an audience's past, present, or future roles risks acting on potentially false assumptions (Mathes & Stevenson, 1991). You cannot safely assume, for example, that you have identified the key audience or that your audience cares about your message or is knowledgeable about the subject. You cannot safely assume either that your audience has time to read or listen to the entire message. Garnett (1992) adds two potentially false assumptions: only the target audience will receive the message and one style of writing or speaking is appropriate for all audiences and all situations. Yet another faulty assumption is that the same media are appropriate for all audiences. Public administrators know from experience how risky any of these assumptions can be. An e-mail to a colleague airing frustrations over administrative red tape may end up on the desk of the department head or appear in the Washington Post. A budget request briefing may assume more technical knowledge than a legislative committee possesses. A safer course than making such assumptions is to analyze the audience.

Audience analysis usually involves audience mapping to identify intended and potential (unintended) audiences, their functions, and their priority (immediate, primary, or secondary). Analysis may also involve constructing an audience profile for particularly important or recurring audiences to learn about their organizational position and role, educational and professional background, key affiliations, communication preferences, and interest in and knowledge of the message. This will help in gauging the impact of the message (Garnett, 1992). Analyzing audiences is crucial to knowing what an audience needs from a message, how much background and detail to include, and what media to use. For example, public health information campaigns have been made more successful through effective use of formative evaluations before and during the campaign to determine the target audience's level of literacy, health needs, lifestyle, communication preferences, and other relevant information (Connelly, Turner, Tran, & Giardano, 2010). Profiling all potential audiences is counterproductive and usually impossible, but it is highly beneficial to profile recurring audiences and those who can make or break a message. Profiles can be stored on mobile devices and referred to when appropriate. Public administrators and staff professionals can avoid errors and much wasted effort by sharing their audience profiles with colleagues and others who often speak or write to (or for) these audiences. Avoiding faulty assumptions will make you a more effective communicator. As government workforces and constituencies become more diverse, it becomes even more necessary to be aware of their interests, motivations, and communication preferences (Froonjian & Garnett, 2013).

Target Specific Audiences

Disaggregating a mass audience into smaller, homogeneous audiences is a useful tool (Rice & Atkin, 2013). Segmentation avoids the shotgun approach of sending the same message to everyone using the same medium, a tactic that is often inefficient, ineffective, even disastrous. For example, using billboards in key places can be an effective tactic for reaching motorists, but it is ineffective for reaching the elderly and the homebound. Careful segmenting of the general audience would indicate use of a variety of media, including the telephone, television, radio, and door-to-door contacts. Segmenting may require more effort and expense than disseminating an all-purpose message to the public at large, but it is more likely to achieve the desired results and may save money if letters, fliers, or public service messages can be targeted to smaller, more appropriate groups. Segmenting can also help avoid information gaps created by selective attention (the tendency for people to seek out or be receptive to only those messages that interest them or coincide with their preferences) or selective perception (the tendency for people to interpret messages based on their own positions, experiences, and preferences). For instance, people who are better informed about and more favorably inclined to AIDS prevention measures are more likely to be reached by public health education campaigns than are those who are less informed, less receptive to the message, and less likely to seek out, receive, or retain AIDS information. Public health education campaigns can therefore widen the information gap unless the uninformed, uninterested, and hypercritical publics are segmented out from the general audience and specific messages and media are tailored specifically for them. This means identifying the primary audiences (those most likely to get or spread AIDS through shared needles, blood transfusions, or sexual transmission), identifying the barriers to reaching each particular audience (illiteracy, fear of knowing one's HIV status, desire for anonymity, bitterness and desire for revenge), and planning communication accordingly This may involve translating messages into different languages or finding credible sources to convey information to key publics (e.g., using organizations for homosexuals to relay information to their members).

Even with proper attention to audience segmentation and communication strategies, reaching crucial audiences and changing their behavior can be difficult. Professional government communicators are increasingly able to perform market analyses and communication planning and should be involved where possible. The White House concluded that getting young, healthy males ages eighteen to thirty-four to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act was crucial to balancing the insurance pool and making the entire plan viable. Reasoning that this audience segment would unlikely be persuaded by official, typically older people, the White House launched a communication campaign using pop singers, sports heroes, comedians, the website Funny or Die, and others more likely to appeal to young men. Communication occurred using television, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other media geared to the target audience. At the same time, opponents of the Affordable Care Act launched a campaign to reach young people on college campuses, enhancing their appeals with free iPads and beer (Leary, 2013).

Make Direct Appeals

Research generally shows that public information campaigns that try to change people's behavior by remote appeals (“conserve energy” or “improve education,” for example) will likely fail (Rice & Atkin, 2013). Most audiences are more likely to change their behavior if the problem or change is shown to affect them directly. For example, research shows that campaigns to involve citizens in crime prevention (e.g., the “Take a Bite Out of Crime” campaign) communicated to groups and individuals that they are vulnerable to crime but can do something to prevent it by organizing locally and cooperating with law enforcement (Mendelsohn & O'Keefe, 1981).

Apply Marketing Concepts

Governments now make more extensive use of marketing concepts and techniques, especially in areas where government services produce revenue—parks and recreation, the postal service, and public transit, for example. Because the social or nonprofit marketing techniques more common to governments are generally regarded to be more difficult to apply than for-profit marketing, not all private sector marketing experience is applicable. Some concepts are highly useful, however. The degree of citizen involvement a message asks for is an important variable to consider. Generally the greater the involvement solicited, the greater the audience's perceived benefit must be relative to the perceived costs. For example, recycling paper and aluminum requires more effort from citizens than does using the public library. Thus, while a local government's campaign to increase library use can be somewhat easy-going, its recycling campaign must clearly and forcefully stress the benefits of recycling in order to outweigh citizen concerns over the costs, both monetary (extra trash cans and bags) and nonmonetary (extra time and work sorting and carrying recyclab1es). Nonmonetary costs include time, inconvenience, and psychological factors (e.g., fear of getting an AIDS test). Benefits can be communicated by positive reinforcement (better conservation, cleaner environment, feeling of civic-mindedness) or negative reinforcement (higher trash collection fees).

Governments can improve a message's appeal if they make the associated outcome or “product” more attractive by increasing customers' benefits and lowering their costs. For example, municipal governments or regional sanitation authorities might supply trash cans and bags to households and businesses, make sorting easier, and give cash for recyclables. This point cannot be overemphasized. A tendency exists for governments to simply repeat or magnify a message when the targeted public fails to respond. These tactics have some value but only if the “product” the government is promoting—fire prevention, prenatal care, voting, among others—is attractive enough that public demand exists for it. The armed forces have made effective use of advertising in recruiting, and they realize the importance of using multiple media. Advertising attracts people to recruiters, who play a major role in persuading recruits to enlist. Advertising alone has a marginal effect on enlistment, but it augments the effectiveness of recruiters. A more important factor in enlistment success has probably been improvement of the “product” as the armed forces made enlistment more attractive than in the past. Benefits now typically include signing bonuses, money for college tuition, choice of training, full health coverage, housing, paid vacations, and a retirement plan.

The lesson is clear: slick communications and public relations campaigns cannot compensate for inferior or unwanted government products or services. Government agencies have the responsibility of first providing quality services and products that meet public demand. The trend toward magnifying government's role as communications receiver, in order to find out what its publics want and are willing to support, will undoubtedly reduce the effort necessary to “sell” government products and policies. Nevertheless, although it is useful to think in terms of audience segments when formulating a communication strategy, public administrators must always remember that they are dealing with people, not some lifeless abstraction. Treating people as numbers or profiles whose voting patterns, economic behavior, program support, or other policy compliance can be manipulated through adroit communication violates the spirit of democratic government and the ethics of public administration.

Make Extra Efforts with Hard-to-Reach Audiences

Certainly one of the biggest challenges in public communication is reaching those groups and individuals who are most difficult to reach. Audiences can be hard to reach because they speak another language, are poor, are transient, lack transportation, distrust government, lack or cannot use communication technologies, have disabilities, or for other reasons. Other audiences are difficult to reach because they want to avoid contact—drug users, criminals, the psychologically alienated, and others. Governments and nonprofits often become frustrated trying to reach these audiences. Governments in the United Kingdom and Australia have made considerable efforts to close this communication gap (Cinderby, 2010; Winkworth, McArthur, Layton, & Thompson, 2010). In the United States, the Bureau of the Census (2009) and a number of state and local health agencies have taken this challenge seriously (Williams & Rosenbach, 2007). Research and program experience summarized in Froonjian and Garnett (2013) finds that several communication strategies have proven useful in reaching the hard-to-reach:

1. Identify target audiences, and build relationships with them. This is more difficult than for conventional audiences, but the extra time and effort may make the difference in reaching them at all. Listening and building trust take time. The Audience Analysis tool advocated by Garnett (1992) can help in this process.
2. Use existing relationships others have with the hard-to-reach audience. Community service agencies, churches, and local schools, among others, often have better relationships with immigrants, the elderly, the homeless, and other challenging groups than do governments. Finding and using these relationships saves time and effort and can improve results. Care is needed, however, to avoid damaging or dominating relationships among the other parties.
3. Reach adults through their children. For years, school districts, health agencies, and other governments have communicated to parents messages about their children. With immigrants, non-English-speaking, homeless, and other hard-to-reach audiences, targeting them through their children often works better. The US Census Bureau, for example, launched a Census in School program that targeted school children from kindergarten through sixth grade, figuring that the children were more likely to be in the mainstream culture and speak English than their parents.
4. Make use of the proliferating media that target ethnic minorities or other special interests. One national survey in the United States found that ethnic media reached 82 percent of African American, Hispanic, and Asian American adults (New American Media, 2009). Focused media can be used to reach more than ethnic minorities. Television, radio, newsletters, blogs, social media pages, and other targeted media can be used to communicate with elderly; youth; gun owners; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender audiences; and other audiences with common interests. These targeted media should be used for listening to and learning from the hard-to-reach (the key receiving role of communication) as well as sending messages to them.
5. Simplify messages, and get feedback. This practice makes sense for virtually all communicating, but especially with challenging audiences. Even after trust is developed, communication can still fail. Simplifying message content and format, using examples and models, repeating the message in different ways, and getting feedback through a teach-back or other means improves the odds for understanding. The teach-back process involves having individuals repeat back the message, instructions, and any action required on their part (Connelly et al., 2010).

Know the Strengths and Limitations of Different Media

Communication media differ in terms of richness, range, speed, and accuracy. Richer media are those with characteristics (instant feedback, multiple cues like expression or body language) that reduce message ambiguity and improve accuracy. While richer media like face-to-face conversations are impractical and counterproductive in many situations, having instant feedback and extra cues can be essential for others (e.g., interrogating suspects of administrative wrongdoing).

Media also differ in range. Mass media can reach more audiences (and faster) but can fail to tailor messages to specific audiences if a one-size-fits-all approach is used. Using audience-specific television and radio outlets can help improve segmentation.

Creative use of modern technologies enables governments to reach audience segments better than before. Cable television and computerized radio systems provide means for segmenting communication to groups with different interests, languages, and geographic locations. Information kiosks are being used to issue licenses and permits, provide legal documents, and convey expert advice.

Government agencies at all levels now use Twitter to disseminate information by news releases, photos, links to website, blogs, and other means. Less used are the more interactive uses of Twitter that allow dialogue and even resolution of disputes. Waters and Williams (2011) offer research-based advice for government users of Twitter, including clearly identifying themselves to increase accountability and credibility, using search capacity to find other users who share common interests, and retweeting or sharing information from other organizations that helps build coalitions.

Technologies can help segment audiences more effectively, but they require accurate information about audiences to avoid the garbage in, garbage out problem. The logistical advantages of high-tech channels may be offset by the anxiety many groups and individuals experience with technology they do not understand. For these people and others who prefer social contact, the coffee klatch may be the most appropriate communication channel.

Speed is another key criterion. For example, the faster transmission of mass media and newer information technologies can be constructive, such as with saving lives in an emergency response or a public health warning. Speed has downsides, though. Messages now are often sent, received, and responded to in shorter time frames than before. If public administrators succumb to such quick exchanges without giving an issue time for reflection and “settling,” such time compression can lead to hasty, ill-conceived responses.

The ability to reach wide audiences quickly can be a trade-off for accuracy. Public administrators and their communication professionals will need to develop response strategies for countering inaccurate (or accurate) messages, whether through high- or low-tech media. Is a response needed? Some messages are best ignored, others ignored at peril. How fast a response is merited? Can you afford some “thinking-through” time or is an immediate response required? Can another source, such as an advocacy group or political fact-checker be used to counter a claim? A rumor that Affordable Care Act medical codes confirm that execution by beheading would be implemented in America circulated over the Internet in late 2013 and 2014. PolitiFact.com refuted this claim, explaining that beheading was a cause of death used in categories by the World Health Organization and American health statistics to compare causes of death with other nations, some of which use beheading for capital punishment. Beheading had no relation to care provided under the Affordable Care Act. Other fact checkers are available on the Internet, and many local news or public research organizations perform fact checking. Visual media tend to have more impact than audio media. Social media are fast and far-reaching but not rich or always accurate. Face-to-face is rich in cues but is often slower and more expensive. In summary, different media have different strengths and weaknesses for different audiences and purposes. There is no substitute for knowing which medium works best for a particular audience or purpose.

Use Multiple Media

Some research indicates that conveying a message using multiple channels or media interferes with message retention, but the bulk of research supports the value of redundancy, especially when the message is within the audience's ability to process it and conveyed by different media to prevent feelings of overload (Stephens & Rains, 2011). The importance of backing up oral messages with briefing papers, memos, or other documents is also supported by administrative experience, as is supplementing written messages with oral explanation. Using different media can also help audiences encumbered by various physiological barriers. Many senior citizens, for example, need written and spoken information to piece together messages that they might because of their diminished sight or hearing alone. Governments that fail to use a multifaceted media strategy are ignoring the realities of their publics' communication preferences and needs.

Multiple media or channels are just as important when public administrators receive messages. Providing multiple media for citizens to communicate with government enables people who may be inarticulate in one medium to voice their opinions or needs with another. In many localities, citizens reluctant to write or appear at a public hearing, for example, use routine reporting to compensate for the natural tendency of subordinates to exaggerate their telephone hotlines, computer bulletin boards, or radio call-in programs to communicate with public officials. Multiple channels also help in gaining feedback from government subordinates and field offices. Kaufman and Couzens (1973) found extensive government use of routine reporting, site visits, studies, and meetings to gather information about the activity and progress of subordinates. They noted the importance of using different media to supplement capabilities and minimize their deficiencies.