Rice and Atkin (1989) offer this footnote: Campaigns must set reasonable goals. Often, public communication campaigns set higher standards for success than the most successful of commercial campaigns.

Theoretical codas

Society may well consider that everyone should have the same opportunity to be healthy. If some portions of the population have better access to health information because of having more resources, they will be healthier (Windahl et al 1997).

Rogers (1983) suggests that the adoption of an innovation usually widens the socio-economic gap between earlier and later adopters. Rogers suggests three strategies for narrowing the gaps.

1. When the resourceful have greater access to information:
   - make the information appropriate and interesting to the lower socio-economic status portion of the audience, even if it becomes less interesting to the higher socio-economic status portion - use communication channels that target the underprivileged
   - form small groups of the resource-poor to discuss the innovation
   - concentrate the efforts of those carrying out the communication on late adopters
2. When the privileged have greater access to information from peers than do the underprivileged: - identify the opinion leaders of the lower socio-economic status portion of the target audience and feed them information
3. When the privileged have more slack reso1!fces available for complying with the message to innovate than do the underprivileged: - recommend innovations and behaviours that are appropriate to the lower socio-economic status portion of the target audience
   - invite the lower socio-economic portion to take part in the planning of the program

In conclusion, the principles that open this chapter can be and should be applied to most public relations efforts. They are not only specifically instructive to the case presented in this dissertation, but to many cases.

Additionally, the two-way asymmetric model lends itself to this case particularly in how it informs the boundary-spanning function of public relations practitioners. The model illustrates how the management of communication between the publics and the organisation can be organised. Within the case this points the way to how the public relations function should be perceived as crucial to developing communications strategies of the DHCS because the function must by definition play the role of understanding the publics.