In the last 3 or 4 years, many schools in the UAE started selling junk food and fast food to the students. Junk food and fast food is known for causing obesity among people all around the world. As Dubai Health Authority (DHA) public relation agency we will try to raise awareness about the harmful effects of junk food and fast food on people especially the students who still in schools, and why junk food and fast food should should be banned in schools across the UAE. Dubai Health Authority (DHA), was created in June 2007. The DHA aims to provide a valuable, accessible, and integrated health care system to protect the public health.
Its mission is to guarantee access to health services, advance and continue the quality of these services, improve the health status of nationals, visitors and residents, professional health sector. According to an article entitled “A weighty concern: obesity and fast food in Dubai.” The city fast changing lifestyle have accompanied it with the opening of many new restaurants, and especially the fast food restaurants, because the people are choosing to have a nice and delicious meal in a minute and with cheap price, this habit had transformed to their children. And then this also had made some schools in UAE start selling them ignoring the harmful effects of them on the students. (Faust 2012)
Furthermore, the first step that will be taken is that we will start planning our organization goals and objectives. Second, we will identify our target audiences and their demographics and know more about their backgrounds. Third, we will start researching about the problem and try to find solutions for it. Fourth, we will start planning the tools and the tactics that we will be using; for example: how many news releases we will be using through the year, the media outreach tactic: trying to promote our organization in many types of media. Fifth, we will start making a case study about the problem; we will use the web, newspapers, books, magazines etc.., and try to know more about the problem. In addition, we will be doing blogs and join social networks to promote our PR organization more. Furthermore, we will start our communication plan with :
1- Explaining the organization to the public by: handling press releases all around the UAE to get the people know about our organization. Additionally we will distribute brochures in the schools and to make our organization more known. Additionally, we will join the social networking sites to communicate with the public widely. Also, we will create a website that contains all the information that we want the people to know about our organization and how does it work.
2- We will identify our target audience: who do we want to send the message to. Our target audiences the Ministry of Education, and the schools around the UAE that sell junk food and fast food.
3- The methods for sending the messages: we will try to have media contacts all around the UAE for example: we will spread our message through the television programs, and also through advertising our message in newspapers, magazines, etc.… .
Moreover, we will measure the success of our communication plan by: 1- Count down how many press releases, news releases, articles in magazines, online articles are produced in a given time. 2- Measurements of how much did our message succeeded, did the public respond positively to the organization’s message. 3- Conducting regular surveys to measure the effectiveness of our organization. 4- Monitoring how many people are cooperating with the organization. We will see how many people are communicating with the organization through the social media for example: twitter, Facebook. Post information online about our organization and monitor how many people are visiting our website or blog. And allow the public to make comments about our organization.
According to an article entitled “Crisis Communication Plan: A PR Blue Print.”, There are some steps can be taken if the communication plan fails:
1- Establish a communication crisis team: this team is important to identify what actions should be taken. The job of the team primary is to identify the plan actions and find a spokesperson. 2- Try to know more about what caused the communication plan to fail. List some examples that may contribute to the failing of the communication plan, and try to fix them. Ignoring the situation will only make things worse. 3- One spokesperson will represent the organization, we will try to make official statements and allowing the ask media to ask questions about the situation if possible. (Freeo, 2012) Moreover, this assignment made me learn more about how to make an effective public relation message. Additionally, after writing this report, I feel that makes me an expert in handling public relation plan and how to handle the plan if it fails. Also, it gave me more information about handling any public relation organization messages in general.