Evaluation:
As a group, our aim was to create a campaign to regenerate an underused local landmark within the community area. We chose the Baldock museum as it is very underused and neglected. My group consisted of Janvi Bhalla, Megan Byford, Georgina Paulus-Nield and myself. As a group we all contributed plans and ideas on how we could regenerate the museum into a youth club. Our campaign encourages the local residents of Baldock to get involved and help with the physical regeneration and also to encourage other people to as well. We made print and web products to target our audience as best as we could. The variety of media products we made will attract our target group, as stated in the brief. We believe we have fully understand the task given to us in the brief and completed it.
We created two linked media products, these were print products and web based products. We created three posters and leaflets, a website, two social networking pages and a short documentary. On all of our products we have included our campaign name, Youth4Baldock, our campaign slogan, “Make every regeneration count” and our logo. This makes our campaign recognisable to people in the community. Throughout the campaign we have used the same housestyle, similar colours and fonts and language appropriate for the audience. These are key conventions. We have tried to use red and green as they are the colours in our logo. These colours will be ascociated with our campaign. We have used doodles and graffiti styled writing on the posters as they will stand out to our target group, teenagers aged 13-17. We have included more information on the leaflets aimed at parents as teenagers get put off by large amounts of writing. Teenagers tend to use social networking on a day to day basis, this is why we have created a twitter and a facebook page. We put pictures of the museum in its current state across all our media products, then people will know where we are planning to put a youth club and they can see how run down it looks. We also put the same contact details across all the media products so people know how to get involved with the campaign and can find out more information about it. This is also a key convention so we made sure the information is clear to readers.
We carried out a lot of research on the task we were asked to do in the brief. We carried out surveys asking the people of Baldock where they felt was underused and what was missing, for them, in the community. The majority of people said they felt that the Baldock Museum was the most underused and felt it could be more beneficial to the community in other ways. We asked them how they would feel about a youth club and we received a positive response. They felt that teenagers didn’t currently have a safe indoor environment they could go to in their free time. By myself I also carried out research on how to target our audience and about campaigns in general by analysing existing community and national campaigns. I feel I have considered my target groups needs and interests and used local and national media to get a feel for campaigns and understand them fully, as said in the brief.
All of our products have applied the appropriate conventions, we used bright neon colours, graffiti styled writing, images and doodles in colour to attract our target group to want to read the posters aimed at them. We feel that the colours stand out more. We used duller colours and normal font and font sizes on the leaflets and posters aimed at adults. Adults would want to read more in detail about the campaign, therefore we put more information on their leaflets. As said before, teenagers tend to be more put off by large amount of writing so we limited the amount of writing on their posters and leaflet and just mentioned the key things they would need to know about the regeneration. We targeted adults as well as we also wanted the parents to get involved with the regeneration and encourage their children too. We felt the neon colours used were neutral and not ascociated with one gender. Blue is stereotypically ascociated with boys however we feel that the light blue is gender neutral and stands out so it would attract both genders. The website and social networking sites we created make it easy for teenagers to keep up to date with the latest information about the regeneration as they can access them from all forms of technology. Our slogan is very catchy and our logo targets our audience well as it has a graffiti styled circle with headphones and popcorn inside it. This makes it clear that it is aimed at the younger audience and it shows what activities would take place at the youth club.
In the interviews in our documentary, the teenagers look serious, this shows that they are serious about the campaign and there were no distractions in the video. We also had them dress casually or in school uniform to show that we got feedback and opinions from our target group as well as adults. We purposely made our documentary when the weather was cloudy and grey. This made the museum look more run down and gave it a deserted feel.
Throughout the campaign we considered rules and regulations as they are very important. We didn’t use any inappropriate language as it could be offensive to the local public. We made sure the images, colours and language used were appropriate for teenagers. We also made sure that all the evidence used was honest. Everything said about the museum was accurate and truthful.
Overall our group worked well as a team and I personally feel our campaign was successful. We all evenly contributed and came up with our own ideas. We used social networking to talk on a daily basis as a group to share out work and to make everyone in the group know what they were doing. For example, we made a facebook chat, we all used this very regularly to communicate to one another. We could also give each other our own opinions on the productions we had each made. We managed to create our print and web productions fairly early on. I made leaflet two and three and our first web page, the “home” page. Leaflet two was aimed at a general audience and leaflet three was aimed at teenagers. I included the conventions to target these groups such as; colours, font and size, headings and the housestyle.
If we could improve anything, I would have liked to create more and detailed plans for our documentary, we didn’t get any footage of the inside of the museum, just the outside because we left it too late. If we had got more footage, we could have emphasised furthermore how underused the museum is. We could have then added more pictures to our posters and website. We also then could have used more of our own images in the video and we could even have carried out an interview or tour actually in the museum itself. However I still feel that we worked well together as a team and as a group we successfully achieved the task given to us.
