In a time, long, long ago – well January to be truthful – I was approached by a group of our PR students about Corona Virus.
As Chinese nationals, some of whom had recently returned to the UK after spending the Christmas holidays at home, they were concerned about the impending crisis and particularly the impact on the large international student body here in Newcastle. You may recall that disturbing media reports emerged at that time which suggested that Asian students in the UK had been targeted in incidents of racist abuse.
In an effort to dispel myths and build relationships with other students at Newcastle and the wider community, the group devised and then implemented a campaign over several weeks – using guiding PR principles at its heart.
The campaign was as simple as it was effective with PR and communications strategy as its anchor – raise awareness and change attitudes and behaviour via two-way balanced communication. Once the campaign was over, I interviewed the students for a podcast which I have shared with the cohort. If you would like to listen to that, then please send me a comment (the file is too large to post on here!).
I have summarised below the campaign plan. Reading it back again, several months later, fills me with both admiration and pride at what these young people were able to achieve.
Background：Many cases of xenophobia against Chinese and other Asians recently across the world
Objectives: 1.Improve students’ motivations of engagement in anti-racism campaign 2.Raise awareness of conventional differentiation of mask-wearing between east and west. It is a major root of the prejudice and misunderstanding.
Aims and Strategy: 1.Use social media and brochures to promote our campaign.2.Attract as many passers-by as possible to sign our banner and book ,or to be interviewed by us and by other reporters.3.Negotaite with NUSU actively to let our fully signed banner and book be collected by history room of Newcastle University.
Tactics:1.Make a team in our PR class(eight people) and allocate following tasks 2.Make brochures promoting the mask-wearing difference and the discrimination cases 3.Take portrait posters of our classmates from different nations 4.Make banners ready to be signed.5.Engage with NUSU and StandUpToRacism Society to gain financial support for printing and use their social media to promote our campaign.6.Get media access to display our posters on NUSU screen.7.Engage in the rally held by StandUpToRacism to have a speech and be interviewed by Global Radio 8.Invite journalists of CNN London and Channel 4 to report 9.Request to Chinese Association for promoting our article
Outcomes: 1. 700 messages and signatures that truly goes beyond our expectations. 2. Media coverage on CNN London,Global Radio and Channel4. 3. The NUSU anti-racism society wants to cooperate us continuously 4.It’s the first time I saw a numbers of Chinese students who dared to have a speech or other forms about anti-racism publicly. 5. Via brochures we made and interviews,many Westerners firstly learnt the conventional difference of mask wearing.
It was truly an inspiring effort by all those involved, a glimpse of hope and light in otherwise dark times.
Finally, a name check for all of those involved – a huge congratulations to Jason Jiao, Emma Ma, Sherry Liu, Chelsea Zhao, Shan Xiong, Jayden Zou and Shawn Zhang. Apologies to any I have missed!