Public awareness

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Public awareness is a term used in external communication and describes the goal of launching a topic in public and anchoring it in public awareness. External communication means the comprehensive representation of an organization (or institution) to the outside world , communication with the world outside of one's own structure.

term

The term comes from business English and has the meaning: “to be aware in public” or “public awareness”. This meaning means the announcement of problems or separate interests.

Public awareness is to be distinguished from

• Commercial advertising that involves goods and services.
• Public relations and public relations that deal with the image of a company or branch.
• Marketing, the generic term for all sales efforts of a company in the market.

method

Strategically, this happens in two phases: The topic must first be made known, that is, the people being sought must first find out that this topic exists. Secondly, the target groups must be made clear that it is worth thinking about the topic or that the topic affects the target group directly.

Public awareness is the primary instrument for external communication by public administration and non-profit organizations, and less so by commercial enterprises. In the latter context, public awareness mostly serves indirect strategic purposes, such as location marketing, recruiting young people or the communication of sustainability projects.

A mix of media and methods is required to achieve this . In addition to classic public relations work, all available media channels must be used, people who are sympathetic ( informers ) must be won over to the topic, and it must be made accessible to the people addressed as being in their own interest. Where the people are - in the pedestrian zone, in the supermarket, in the company - actions must take place that bring the topic and the local people together.

A well-known public awareness project - the first of its kind in Germany - was DefiDay , an action and information event on the subject of early defibrillators by laypeople to combat second-hand death , which was designed and carried out by communications specialist Martin Lutz. This project was further developed into the HerzRetterTag , on which an entire federal state ( Hesse ) was comprehensively and simultaneously informed about the socially relevant topic while maintaining the thematic arc .

In Germany, public awareness is operated by a handful of specialized, commercially operated agencies, most of which draw their expertise from the field of cultural and social sciences and less from the areas of marketing i. e. S.