CASE ANALYSIS

This chapter will present an analysis of the case of the Department of Health and Community Services (DHCS) in New Brunswick, Canada attempting to communicate with a largely illiterate audience. The analysis will include application of the theory outlined earlier.

The message that the DHCS attempted to communicate was that the receiver, women aged 50-69 in New Brunswick, should make an appointment for a breast cancer screening test. This could be done by the receiver calling a cancer screening centre directly.

A critical step towards the communication of the message, planning the campaign, was conducted and completed without any input from the communications staff of the DHCS, as shown in the case.

Application of the principles

It follows to examine the methods chosen by the non-communications personnel to disseminate the message.

The letter of invitation, to be sent to the members of the target audience, was chosen as one of the "most effective ways to recruit women to breast cancer screening services" (Standards for Breast Cancer Screening Services, 1994). This direction comes from a cited source of an example of where this tool had been used before. As outlined in the theory chapter, it is a fundamental in deciding the tools to use in communicating that the sender should know as much as possible about the receiver. Windahl et al. (1997) see ignoring this as making a predetermined decision about the target audience, saying the "whom-to-reach question" should precede the "what-channel" question.

The sender-receiver relationship comes into play here. It has been stated that the receiver's perception of the relationship between receiver and sender, and the receiver's expectations of that relationship, are factors in the effectiveness of the reception of the message. The more open a receiver is to a message, the more effective the communication will be (Reardon, 1987).

So, in planning the means to reach the audience in the case, the first question asked by the planners of themselves should have been "Who is our audience, what defines its members?", followed by "What do they expect of us?" If these questions had been asked at the outset, the literacy rate of the target group would have been uncovered, with the most likely reaction being to choose a tool other than one that requires reading. Also, an examination of the perception of the receiver of the sender-receiver relationship could have led to much helpful information. One could see the conclusion being that the information normally received by the audience from this particular sender, the local hospital corporation, was negative, or off-putting, and that indeed it necessitated the changing of the sender itself to nurses, community leaders or others.