Communication Plan: It's Called a Pad. Period.

1. Define the communication campaign goal(s) effectively

Change university policy with regards to feminine hygiene products and their subsequent distribution throughout the campus. In addition, we wish to convince the university to install bins in each individual bathroom stall in order to improve hygiene standards. 

2.  Define the intended audience effectively

• College students: Since our main purpose is to change policies regarding female hygiene products on campus, we target college students since female students are directly affected and others who aren’t, can empathize and help make the campus more comfortable for half of the student body.
• University Administration: The Administrative staff is made up of men and women. These women spend just as much time on campus as the student body and are equally affected by the lack of hygiene products. The administrative body is the ones in charge of making these decisions. We predict that the majority of the female staff would be in support of this change.
• Women: Women are obviously the most affected group, and the campaign’s purpose is to create a more comfortable environment for all women who spend time on SLU’s campus.

3.  Create message effectively

Our message will be distributed via social media, posters in the hall, and email blasts to the school. We plan on focusing on Instagram as our main social media platform because more college students check it regularly. The best times to post are at lunch, after dinner, and just before bed. According to Instagram’s insights, that’s when the app has the most traffic. Although some people may just walk by posters at school, by using bold fonts and colors we hope that our posters will catch the attention of students. Especially if we strategically place them near the bathrooms or on the door. As a final effort, email blasts to the SLU Madrid population is guaranteed that the message at least reaches their inbox. For our campaign, we decided on colors for our posters that were related to periods and St. Louis University. The women on the graphics do not have specific facial features to highlight the fact that this is not the problem of few, but of many. We want the attention to be on women as a collective group, not just one person. We additionally decided on the PP logo because it is an easy alliteration “Period Project”. The graphics will be uploaded to Instagram and additionally printed out for women to fill out themselves. That way we can easily collect the opinions of the female student body. 

4. Pre-test and revise messages and materials effectively

We will have a focus group of the intended audience and ask questions about how effective the messages are and how the media messages influenced + educated them, what changes could be made. Also, a survey will be implemented in order to get the people in the focus groups’ opinions on how to campaign is going. Some questions that would be asked are: What is your opinion on providing sanitary bins, How has the campaign educated you on the importance of these bins, What are some other aspects that we could touch on, How clear was the message of the campaign, Is there anything that was not included that could be?