What is This Guide About?

Use of This On-Line Guide

This Public Awareness Action Guide provides practical tools for planning and conducting your events, and for creating all the other components of a dynamic local drive for greater awareness and action on literacy. The ideas presented here have been informed by consultation with a wide variety of stakeholders, including learners, the OLC’s members, and marketing experts. The term “awareness campaign” is used to refer to a set of activities undertaken to move people from knowledge to action on the issue of literacy.

To help you create your own strategic public awareness plan, the Getting Started section presents detailed descriptions and examples of the various sections of a plan. These examples are taken from other literacy organizations and their purpose is to show you typical input for each section. If one of these examples is pertinent to your particular situation, by all means insert it directly into your plan. The templates in Getting Started open into MS Word documents. These contain instructions highlighted in blue and information entry fields highlighted in yellow. It is hoped that these will assist you to quickly prepare a strategic plan, and furthermore, that the time and effort you invest in planning will result in more efficient and effective awareness campaigns.

The Taking Action section contains detailed instructions and templates on the implementation and execution of many typical awareness-raising activities. The Tool Box at the end of the Guide is a handy cross-reference for all the tools presented throughout Taking Action.

While this Public Awareness Action Guide can be used to plan and carry out one-off events, it was specifically designed to support a broader campaign that makes the most of each community’s unique strengths. At the OLC, we hope this guide helps result in  more effective local literacy initiatives and, collectively, more powerful delivery of literacy messages all over Ontario.