COMM 402
Campaigns

Syllabus
Grades
Presentation Schedule
Bibliography
Map
P&P Ch. 3
Hbook of Persuasion
S&D p. 226 Plan

Final Grades Posted (see link "Grades" to the left)

• Persuasive Communication Campaigns, by Michael Pfau & Roxanne Parrott (1993). ISBN 0205139779
• Marketing Public Health: Strategies to Promote Social Change, by Michael Siegel & Lynne Doner (1998). ISBN 0834210711
• Presentation Schedule
• Bibliography

Check in the USC bookstore for availability before ordering online. If you are having difficulty locating the Pfau and Parrot text, you may contact a number of online book sellers including amazon, barnes & noble, borders, campusi, ecampus, and others.

Instructor: Dr. Kelton Rhoads
USC Office Phone: (currently unknown!); USC Office Room 226
USC Office Hours: Monday 5:00-6:45 pm,Wednesday 6:45-8:00 pm. (Note: I'm often in the computing lab, room 329, during my office hours. If the door is closed, please knock.) You can also use email to arrange a phone appointment with me at other times. Brief communications are welcome via email, but I try to avoid lengthy email discussions, and prefer face-to-face meetings during office hours.

Please note that I rely heavily on filters to keep my mailbox free of spam, so if you want to send me an email, it's important that:

1) you put the words "COMM 402" in the title/subject line of the email (this will allow the message to pass through the filters);
2) please do not send your email as an attachment only (some programs, particularly web-based mail programs, place nothing in the message body, and place the message itself in an HTML formatted attachment. I need your message in the message body portion of the email--no attachments please);
3) please do not send email with HTML formatting, or turn HTML formatting OFF before sending an email to me;
4) Please don't send unsolicited attachments. If I've asked you to send me a particular email attachment that we've discussed, please send textual material with either Microsoft Word, RTF, or TEXT formatting, and send graphics as JPG, EPS, Photoshop, or Illustrator files. You can "zip" or "stuff" documents before sending them, and you can use binhex or mime encoding to send them.

This course is designed to teach you how sophisticated commercial, social action, and political communication campaigns are planned and executed. We'll take a "behind the scenes" tour of how attitudes are changed, how opinions are created, and how behaviors are triggered on a mass scale through carefully orchestrated communication campaigns. This course will also teach you how to evaluate and design effective communication campaigns of your own. In addition, as a class project, we'll find, present, and archive information that's relative to staging effective communication campaigns.

The first several lectures will serve as a theoretical "influence boot camp," where we'll learn basic, effective persuasion and compliance tactics. After we've completed "basic training," we'll go on to examine applied techniques used by masters of commercial advertising, by experienced social action activists, and by the political elite whose goal it is to achieve and maintain political power.

Jan 10
Syllabus Review
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 1 (optional reading, not on test)
Complete and send the on-line questionnaire to me. Click here to go to the questionnaire.

Jan 17
History of Campaigns
Power of Campaigns
Persuasion vs. Compliance
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 2 (optional reading, lecture covers this material)

Jan 24
Mindful & Mindless Behavior
Senders vs. Receivers
Behaviorism
Segmentation
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 3 (scanned and available here!)
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 4
Interested in Segmentation? See the PRIZM primer here, & the VALS primer here.
Demonstration of a Presentation
Assignment: Find Your Articles and Chapters!

Jan 31
Influence I
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 5
Read: Rhoads & Cialdini (online, available here)
Assignment: Find Your Articles and Chapters!

Feb 7
Influence II
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 8
Student Presentations: See Presentation Schedule

Feb 14
Commitment &
Framing
Read: Siegel & Doner, Chapter 6
Read: Siegel & Doner, Chapter 7
Student Presentations: See Presentation Schedule

Feb 21
Midterm Exam (Multiple Choice)

Feb 28
Campaign Management
Campaign Measurement
Read: Siegel & Doner, Chapter 10
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 7
Student Presentations: See Presentation Schedule

March 7
Free & Paid Modalities
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 9
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 10
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 11
Student Presentations: See Presentation Schedule

March 14
Spring Break

March 21
Commercial Campaigns
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 12
Student Presentations: See Presentation Schedule

March 28
Social Action Campaigns
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 14
Student Presentations: See Presentation Schedule

April 4
Social Action Campaigns
Student Presentations: See Presentation Schedule

April 11
Political Campaigns
Read: Pfau & Parrott, Chapter 13
Student Presentations: See Presentation Schedule

April 18
Political Campaigns
Guest lecturer - political campaigns.

April 25
Make-up Day

May 2
Final Exam 2-4pm, ASC room 225 (Multiple Choice)

A typical class will consist of:

1) A review of important points from the previous class period;
2) A lecture, sometimes followed by an in-class exercise;
3) Concurrent student presentations.

Readings & Attendance: Please read assigned text readings before class, so we can have informed discussions. It's important to keep up with the reading. If you wait until the week before the test to read the assigned material, you won't learn or retain the material as well and you'll likely do poorly on exams. Readings that are assigned in addition to the texts will be found linked to this website under the calendar section. A thorough understanding of the assigned readings will be necessary in order to obtain top grades on the exams and in your project. Attendance is important in this class, so attendance will be noted. What happens if you get sick, or an unavoidable emergency occurs? For this reason, you're given one unpenalized absence, for which no reasons or excuses are required or requested. Even if you miss a single class for a good reason, please don't ask me to excuse it, because no excuse is necessary. Each additional unexcused absence, however, will erode your grade by a third of a letter (a B, for example, becomes a B- on the second unexcused absence and a C+ on the third, and so on). So it goes without saying that you should save your no-penalty absence for when you need it. If you must miss a class, please contact a fellow student for notes, since class notes are not available from the instructor. Not allowed in class: phones or pagers or other electronic or manual devices that are audible; audio or visual recording devices. Allowed in class: computers (if they are used for taking notes and don't become a distraction) and PDAs (ditto).

Exams: There will be two multiple choice exams which will count for 50% of your grade. The exams will concentrate on your knowledge of the material we've covered and your ability to apply the principles we've learned. You should know the material assigned as reading, the material presented in lectures, and the material given in the student presentations, to do well on the tests. I rely on the tests to motivate your reading of the text assignments, so don't expect to ace the tests if you just come to class and take notes. Some of the standardized test questions that come with the textbooks will be used in the construction of tests.

Information Presentations: One of the "deliverables" of this class is a database of information to which you may refer later in your career. In other words, one of our collective goals is to acquire and understand the campaign-related information that's found in journal articles or book chapters. To this end, information of this sort will be collected, analyzed, and presented in a number of student presentations that pertain to various aspects of communication campaigns. It's likely that you will make several "mini" presentations (the actual number is determined by the size of the class) based on articles or chapters you'll read. You will present your findings to small subgroups within the class (depending on class size, subgroups may be as small as only 5 people). Those of you who have participated in "poster sessions" already have a good idea of what these student presentations will be like. The presentations are given in a casual and interactive atmosphere. Past students have told me they liked the presentations--both doing them and listening to them--because peer-to-peer teaching is an effective and fun way to learn. Our class will foster a supportive atmosphere for the presentations, which are graded in such a way that most of the presentations will receive 'A's. You will not be graded on your presentational style, but rather on your ability to convey the information you've been assigned to understand and encapsulate. In other words, it's the preparation for, not the execution of, your presentation that's graded. Questions from the student presentations will show up on the tests. Your presentations will be worth 50% of your grade. (See "More About Presentations" below. We won't be able to start working on presentations until I have a stable count of the number of people in the class; I expect to post assignments during the second or third week of class.)

Paper: At this time, I'm planning on having no final paper for this class. I think students prefer a modest amount work all along (the presentations) rather than a big assignment at the end of the semester, when everything else is coming due simultaneously. If we pace ourselves, there'll be no need for "finals week heroics." (If you think otherwise, tell me in the questionnaire.)

Starting February 7, students will begin giving "mini" information presentations. What are information presentations all about, you ask?

To give a presentation, you'll read and thoroughly digest a well-known journal article (or two), book chapter (or two), or several short magazine articles that I'll assign you. You'll find these articles or books in the library, or some may be online. Some of you will have a choice to choose one of the options I've given you, or to combine both into your presentation. Many of these articles are dense, so you'll want to read your assigned article several times until you feel you thoroughly understand its content. Your goal is to reduce the information you've learned into a clear (but not oversimplified) encapsulation of that information for your peers. You'll summarize the various sections of the article, chapter, or book overview into a few paragraphs, and present the articles' or chapters' conclusions with the help of visual aids, such as graphs and charts (use the example I gave you in class as a guide). You'll put your summaries and visual aids onto a posterboard and display your poster during your presentation. (Several of your colleagues will be doing the same thing at the same time; there may be three or four of you presenting simultaneously, so you will be presenting to a small subgroup of your classmates. During presentations, it's a casual atmosphere.) The class will break into subgroups, and rotate around the room, listening to your short, 15-minute oral presentation of the article(s) you've read. Following your presentation, there will be a chance for your small audience to ask you some questions.

Your goal is to create an interesting, informative summary of the information you've gleaned from your reading. You are trying to compress of hours of your reading and study in 15 minutes or less. Although I have assigned specific readings, you have considerable leeway to highlight the information you find most interesting, and to choose the course that your presentation will take (especially those who have been asked to review portions of books). Keep your goal (underlined above) in mind. As you work, ask yourself, "What would my peers find interesting and useful from this information? How can I present it in a compelling and accurate way?" If you ever feel you don't have enough information to present, you always have the option of doing some additional research on your own in order to buttress your presentation. I have given you minimums, not maximums, in terms of bibliographic references. I don't expect you to engage in additional research, but you should if you feel you need more information to do a good job. Keep in mind, however, that you've got 15 minutes maximum (and one poster board) to present your information. You may be surprised, when you practice your delivery, that you have difficulty keeping your presentation limited to 15 minutes--especially when you consider you may need to take some time to answer questions and respond to comments.

I strongly recommend that you practice your summary live in front of a colleague before presenting to the class. Your colleague can help you find unclear areas and logical gaps in your presentation.

You should also make two multiple-choice questions based on your presentation, for possible inclusion (perhaps in a modified form) in our tests. Your questions should go to the heart of your presentation and reflect the main points you're making. (Think through the questions carefully on a piece of paper, and after you've got two good questions written, write these questions on the back of your poster.) Both questions should be multiple choice, and each should have five choices to choose from. After you've finished your presentation, and during the question-and-answer period, feel free to discuss the questions and answers you've written with your fellow students.

In addition to creating the poster itself, you will be required to hand out a single-sheet hardcopy of your presentation to the class (similar to the example you received during the demonstration of a poster presentation I gave in class) so the class can keep a copy of your presentation in their notes. This handout should be distributed to your subgroup at the beginning of your presentation, so students can follow along. The handout should also simplify the article and include graphs and charts (that are probably on your poster) which make the article easier to understand. (Remember that people learn best from visual representations!) Make enough photocopies for the entire class, and a few extra to keep for people who lose theirs and ask you for an extra copy. Keep a couple of copies with you, to give to people who may have missed a class.

Finally, you need to hand in a photocopy of the complete journal article, book chapter, or in the case where I ask you to choose which portions of a book to review, the pages of the book that most influenced your presentation. Photocopies of specific journal articles or book chapters on which you based your presentation must be complete, from the abstract at the beginning to the final bibliographic pages at the end.

To recap, a presentation is not considered complete unless it includes all of the following. Check them off below:

1) the poster;
2) enough class handouts so each class member can have a copy, and a few spares;
3) graphics on the poster (and the handout) that make the presentation easier to understand;
4) two multiple choice questions written on the back of the poster;
5) the oral presentation itself, about 15 minutes in length;
6 a, b, c) one copy of the original journal article or book chapter (complete with references), one copy of the handout, and the poster itself, all given to the professor at the end of class, after the presentation is completed.

The part of the presentation process that takes the most time and planning is, surprisingly, actually getting a copy of the article (or book chapter) in your hands in the first place! Therefore, I'm asking you to find all your assigned articles early. Find your articles or chapters, photocopy them, and just put them on a shelf 'till you're ready to create a presentation--you'll save a lot of last-minute headaches this way.

Finding articles and books: You'll want to start your journal hunting at Doheny or Leavey. You may need to request that your journal articles be retrieved from storage, which takes a couple of days. Journals can't be checked out, but articles in books can. Since others in the class may be assigned a different chapter from the same book, coordinate with those who also need the book. You'll want to issue a recall notice if the book you need is checked out. A recall notice takes 2 weeks before it goes into effect, so plan ahead! I've heard reports that Global Express (the USC interlibrary loan service) will sometimes take several weeks to produce an article so (do I need to say it again?) plan ahead! The earlier you get your articles, the less running around you'll have to do to find your article at the last minute.

Finding an article is not like buying a can of soup in the supermarket. You may find that the shelf is empty and you have to go to another store to get what you need. Or your soup may be backordered. Stick with the plan and have all your articles in hand by the end of the 3rd week of class (or at least have the article in active retrieval at that time).

There are lots of ways to hunt for journal articles. Here's one way. Go to Homer (you can access Homer by going to the USC home page at www.usc.edu, then go to the research, libraries, & computing link, then under electronic resources choose library catalogs, databases, & journals, then choose the link to Homer on that page). In Homer, type in the journal's title and then search by periodical title. After you've found the journal's title and its call number, you can retrieve it or request it. You can also request a journal online by following the online instructions (see, for example, the "Obtain Doheny Journals from Off Site Location" form).

If the article isn't easy to find, don't give up. Hunting for articles is a valuable skill for young academics, so press on. Your second step is asking a reference librarian for help (drop by or call 213 740-6938 or 213 740-4350). Reference librarians are available in the lower level of Leavey, during most days. I recall that they're there 10-8 Mo-Th, 10-5 Fr, 1-6 Su, but check to be sure.

Your third step is to search for your journal article online. Many journal articles are now available through PsychInfo, a huge database of journal articles that you can search at Leavey. A reference librarian will be glad to show you how to obtain journal articles via PsychInfo. (Some Libraries also feature PsychLit, another database.)

Your fourth step is to request the journal article from Global Express, USC's interlibrary loan service. Chances are very, very slim that Global Express won't be able to find your journal article for you. Global Express takes time, so plan ahead.

Your fifth step is to visit a nearby library (such as UCLA or other UC schools) to obtain a copy of the journal article. If you choose this option, by all means call ahead and be certain the book or journal you need is available. You can start a search at UCLA by going to http://www.library.ucla.edu/ and searching MELVYL (or ORION, if you're actually on the campus). However, MELVYL won't tell you if a book is checked out or not. You'll want to call 310 825-1938 or 310 825 5756 (option 4) and ask before you go to UCLA to hunt down a book.

If you have completed all 5 steps, and have been unsuccessful in tracking down your assigned article, you can request that I assign you a different article or book chapter. But if you request an alternate journal article, I'll double-check your detective work to see if I can obtain the original article that you couldn't, by going through these same 5 steps. If I find it and you didn't, I'll consider your search to have been incomplete. Incomplete searches can count against your grade! Finding specific journal articles is one of the most important skills you can develop in preparing for further study in communications or psychology. It isn't always easy, but it's rewarding to finally find that elusive article or book chapter.

Rating of the information: Your peers will rate the information you've presented, as will I. Instructions regarding these ratings are very specific, and exclude a rating of presentation style, of personal mannerisms, of previous knowledge or familiarity with the topic, and so on. Your final grade on the information presentations will be a combination of my ratings and peer ratings. You can see the rating sheet here.

Copyright © 2001 by Kelton Rhoads, Ph.D.
www.workingpsychology.com
All rights reserved.