© 2000 Benton Foundation
Of Special Interest: Model Campaigns Chapter 1: Chapter 2: Television Race Initiative Chapter 4: Positive: Life with HIV Perspectives Strategic and
Contents
POV's High Impact TV
from Partners
Practical Advice
When a Film Doesn’t Receive
National PBS Broadcast
by Janet Cole
It started simply enough with a phone call early in 1992. Would I be interested in advising the Independent Television Service (ITVS) on a programming initiative that would serve the HIV community as a television audience? Before I knew it, I found myself as project director and coordinating producer of Positive: Life with HIV. Four years later I finally emerged from the massive project.
The idea of developing national programming for people living in the epidemic was unprecedented. To its credit, ITVS was looking beyond traditional demographics when it considered the "underserved audiences" it might address through programming. Beyond the decision to tackle this subject in a new way, the initiative represented another groundbreaking possibility: what if public service programming were to be created with the public as a partner? When had television ever gone to the source–the audience–to determine the parameters of programming?
My research–a series of conversations with more than 100 people in different corners of the epidemic nation-wide–confirmed my hunch. People were very mistrustful of how television handled HIV and AIDS. Most were fed up with the tired conventions of victims and heroes that kept news stories at an insulting level of hallowness and, more dangerously, nurtured damaging stereotypes of people with HIV. With every conversation, the challenges mounted: make interesting, innovative television; let the HIV community tell the producers what the shows would be about; find a way to deal with the fact that few people agreed on what kind of TV they liked to watch.
The result of this and 18 months of work by the team at AIDSFilms, Inc. (the New York company that produced the series) and some 20 independent producers around the country was Positive: Life with HIV , a four-hour, multi-genre series that aired on many public television stations in the first half of 1996.
While there has historically been an uneasy relationship between independent producers and public television, the climate in the 1990s has become even more tense. Congressional scrutiny and threats to de-fund public broadcasting have exacerbated fears about offending viewers with controversial material. The producers of Positive: Life with HIV had to walk a difficult line–always keeping in mind the hope for PBS broadcast and thus paying close attention to production values and content. But, they and ITVS were committed to dealing with the difficult issues involved in HIV and were not, unlike most television outlets, going to avoid topics like sexuality, drug use, racism and frank talk.
As the series took final shape in the late fall of 1994, we began
to plan for its release. We had always envisioned conducting outreach, but
ITVS had little money available for the broad campaign we hoped to
implement. We needed to raise funds. Our original outreach budget was
about $225,000, of which we were trying to raise $200,000 from outside
sources. The Ford Foundation came in with the lead grant of $100,000 in
February 1995. Despite many attempts and some near betrothals, no other
major donors joined us until the very end.
Besides the funding, the second major question was how the series would be released. My fantasy was that Positive: Life with HIV would roll out like Absolutely Positive had when it premiered the 1991 P.O.V. season on PBS–extensive reviews and features in nearly every market, lots of attention and response from AIDS organizations we had contacted through outreach and extensive carriage on the PBS national schedule. Many of these hopes would bear fruit. Others, as we soon learned, would mutate.
PUBLIC TELEVISION BROADCAST
Early on, we imagined the worst: what if PBS did not take the series for broadcast? As unthinkable as it was, few were betting they would. Sure enough, about the same time we heard from Ford, PBS verbally responded saying that Positive: Life with HIV "just didn’t look like a PBS series. It looks like it was made by all different kinds of people." Since Positive: Life with HIV was deliberately a pastiche of views and genres by many different people around the country, the irony of this response was particularly acute.
Beyond the understandable disappointment, PBS’s decision had a major impact on the outreach campaign over the coming months. For many stations, the PBS logo is the equivalent of Good Housekeeping’s Seal of Approval. With a difficult topic like HIV, the absence of the badge is especially problematic.
Since Positive: Life with HIV would not run on the national schedule, ITVS had to decide when to make it available to stations. This meant trying to figure out when the series would have its best chance to be scheduled by individual stations. We planned a major, national publicity effort and hoped to get stations to schedule the series within a few weeks of each other to maximize the effectiveness of that effort. In April 1995 in St. Paul, we met with ITVS’s communications staff, Positive: Life with HIV Executive Producer Juanita Anderson and AIDSFilms President Franklin Getchell to plot the strategy. After much discussion, we decided to aim for late January 1996, trying to find a window in between pledges, holidays and what was known of the PBS schedule. This gave us eight months, and the clock began ticking.
TARGET AUDIENCE
By definition, Positive: Life with HIV had a well-defined, core audience: the so-called "HIV community." In the world of HIV, there is a self-identified community of activists, caregivers and people living with HIV who proudly, for the most part, include themselves in "the community." Beyond this inner circle are people infected with, or affected by, HIV who may not know they have de facto membership in "the community" and might never choose to affiliate, even if they knew.
Early in my research in 1992, I came across an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that estimated nearly one in five Americans knew someone with HIV. Coupled with all I’d learned through seven years of AIDS media work, I argued to define the HIV community more broadly, hoping the series might influence public perceptions, if not discourse, about the epidemic.
In the spring of 1995, a colleague passed along a piece published in Advertising that said one in three Americans knew someone with HIV. In three years’ time, public exposure to HIV had grown enormously and represented a definitive hook for the Positive: Life with HIV outreach campaign. To structure the outreach tasks, we decided to focus on two broad audience targets: the identifiable HIV community and the larger "one in three Americans who knows someone with HIV."
STRUCTURE OF THE CAMPAIGN
Our three-member team was spread out across the country. I was in San Francisco and took charge of development, overall strategy, distribution and initial networking with key HIV-related organizations. Suzanne Stenson O’Brien, ITVS’s manager of outreach and advocacy, was in St. Paul where she functioned as the electronic hub, among many other roles. Ms. O'Brien developed a huge database of community-based organizations, cross-referenced by public television markets, which we provided to stations for local networking and outreach, and to which we targeted tune-in mailings.
Ms. O'Brien developed extensive online activities through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Veterans Administration, HIV organizations, the online network HandsNet2, gay and lesbian affinity groups (including those within corporations) and many others to provide broadcast information and resource materials online. She conducted promotional activities using various newsgroups and listservs, created a Web site with a graphically illustrated copy of the viewers guide, and established an automated e-mail system accessible by making an inquiry to positive@itvs.org.
The third person on our team was a full-time outreach coordinator for the six months leading up to broadcast. Anne Gallivan set up the Project Positive outreach office in Washington, D.C., in September 1995 and began working with D.C.-based national organizations to reach our two target audiences. We decided to concentrate on major HIV/AIDS organizations with strong infrastructures, communications and training arms to reach the HIV community. This allowed people to receive locally relevant information at will.
Ms. Gallivan proposed concentrating on labor, religious and health groups to reach the "one in three." Among labor organizations–AFSCME, AFL-CIO, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and others–Ms. Gallivan’s work led to exposure for Positive: Life with HIV through publications, conferences and training sessions. We recognized that the major impact here would be over the long run, specifically with tapes being used in routine trainings, which would be frequently repeated.
We reached religious outlets principally through the AIDS National Interfaith Network (ANIN). Health service organizations included the American Red Cross, the U.S. Public Health Service and its network of more than 500 health care sites, the American Public Health Association, the National Association of Public Hospitals and the Child Welfare League of America.
THE CAMPAIGN BEGINS
Knowing where we stood with PBS and The Ford Foundation, I set out to solidify an alliance with the National AIDS Fund (NAF). There were many reasons to do so, but three stood out: 1) because NAF’s 30-plus local partners are all community funders, I believed they could be influential in pushing for public television carriage in local areas; 2) their boards are typically drawn from civic, business, service and educational sectors, so they represent the crossover potential of the "one in three" audience; and 3) the work of the NAF partnerships involves community-building to engage new constituencies in the fight against AIDS. This fit perfectly with our goals for Positive: Life with HIV .
I soon learned that the relationships between the local partnerships and the NAF central office are somewhat like those between local stations and PBS: each organization is autonomous. It became clear that we were going to have to forge alliances with the individual partnerships. When NAF invited me to attend the upcoming partners meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, in June 1995, I was pleased–and relieved. NAF had made it very clear how sought after they are and how rare it is for them to invite outsiders to their meetings.
The last evening of the meeting, ITVS sponsored a cocktail party, luring people with the promise of free drinks and hot hors d’oeuvres, and I screened a 20-minute promotional reel of the series. There had been many moments over the previous two days when I’d been paranoid that people would see me and plot their escape from "that woman with the video." When people finally saw the reel, it was an altogether different atmosphere. People were impressed. It was really something different that had potential for their local organizations. This laid the groundwork for collaborations during the months to come.
THE REEL DEAL
One of the lessons we learned from Charlotte was the importance of the promotional reel. For the Charlotte group, the 20-minute length was perfect. But in the upcoming months, we had a lot of people to reach–from funders to organizations to programmers. We decided to cut a 10-minute, multipurpose version. Its job would be to project the quality, professionalism, diversity and breadth of the series as well as to establish credibility and community support through endorsement quotes.
Without question, the 10-minute tape was the most effective, efficient and important ambassador and promotional tool for the series. We transmitted it to programmers via a satellite feed and sent copies to all of the NAF partnerships, the statewide American Red Cross offices and more than 100 other national and regional organizations.
DEVELOPING OUTREACH ACTIVITIES
We hoped to avoid burdening already taxed organizations by showing ways that Positive: Life with HIV–and other media–could help them with their own work. We created and distributed an Interest Inventory to help organizations gauge their interest in the outreach campaign and the applicability of outreach activities to their work, and to get a sense of the specific strengths, weaknesses and needs of these groups. We wanted the campaign to be mutually beneficial, where the groups would get the word out about Positive: Life with HIV and also use it for their own program goals as well. Our staff would provide technical assistance, organize materials and offer encouragement along the way.
In approaching organizations, we found it best to lead off with the 10-minute promotional reel and then brain-storm with them about what outreach activities they might want to develop, depending on their resources, priorities and, of course, their reaction to Positive: Life with HIV .
Our association with the American Red Cross was especially fruitful. Anne Gallivan met with Darlene Sparks Washington, program coordinator for the American Red Cross African-American HIV/AIDS program, and her staff. They screened the promotional tape and plotted a strategy. Numerous mailings, trainings and presentations resulted from this, along with contacts with all of the statewide American Red Cross chapters. Darlene sent the Interest Inventory to chapters, and those who filled it out and returned it to ITVS received video sets of the series.
ALL EYES ON THE SCHEDULE
Throughout the fall, I frequently called ITVS to ask whether any
stations had committed to broadcast. Gayle Loeber, manager of station
relations at ITVS, would remind me that public television programmers work
on a schedule, and that they don’t "do January until mid-October or
November." I really believed most of the major market stations would agree
to broadcast the
shows beginning the third or fourth week in January
because everyone would benefit from a coordinated, national publicity and
outreach campaign.
Unfortunately, programmers don’t seem to care about press, at least for a non-core show like Positive: Life with HIV . Their sole focus seemed to be finding a place on the schedule, and many of them had no intention of showing the series before 11 p.m. When confirmations began coming in for the first week in January and others for late February, March, and beyond, I began to panic. Without a doubt, the scattered carriage and late time slots were sure to have a negative effect on the national publicity effort.
But, we had already committed and we needed to get the word out. Whatever press coverage we got, television broadcast was still going to reach more people than anything else. We immediately shifted our strategy to push for as many stations as we could get.
PUSHING FOR STATION CARRIAGE
We called all of the NAF partnerships and asked them to contact station programmers. In many cases, partners knew people at the stations. We revised the Organizing Kit to highlight the immediate need for groups to push for carriage. ITVS also sent a series of mailings with the growing list of national endorsements and resource materials available to stations (Organizing Kits, viewers guides and public service announcements). We worked carefully to foster a cooperative, informed tone to this effort, asking community organizers to assure stations of their active support to ensure successful local broadcasts.
By November 9, we had six stations. I was not in a good mood. A week later, we had 30, most of them airing at 11 p.m.–but one had come in at 9 p.m., so perhaps our luck was turning. Each week it grew: 42, then 61, 81, 120. By mid-February, 144 stations had confirmed they would broadcast the series. Positive: Life with HIV had set a record for ITVS by garnering the highest carriage of any ITVS-distributed series.
Did the outreach campaign make a difference? "It was critical," said Gayle Loeber. "Many programmers first heard about Positive: Life with HIV from community organizations. This was the most successful outreach campaign we’ve ever had."
SUPPORT MATERIALS
In addition to local organizations contacting their public television stations, the other thing that had great impact on both the stations and the community groups was the support material–the viewers guides, Organizing Kits, promotional tapes, series tapes, and public service announcements. These served to give Positive: Life with HIV a promotional profile and, I think, an edge that was especially helpful in the absence of PBS carriage. In particular, the viewers guide stood out as a high-quality piece that would be useful for many years to come. The 16-page, three-color guide includes detailed program information, discussion questions, commentary on issues raised in the series and a national resource directory.
For stations, outreach materials like these were extremely helpful and provided them with a resource to give out in their communities. Likewise for community groups, the discussion questions in the guide and the suggestions in the Organizing Kit provided facilitators, organizers and presenters with accessible and practical ideas for screenings, support groups, staff meetings and the like.
MINI-GRANTS
From the beginning, we decided to earmark a portion of our budget for mini-grants to public television stations to work with local organizations on outreach activities related to Positive: Life with HIV . We decided to require station applicants to designate community partners with whom they would work as well as local matching funders. We received applications from eight stations and gave partial or full funding (maximum $1,000) to all of them.
The projects ranged from station-hosted screenings for community groups, videotape giveaways and targeted mailings, to a plan in Schenectady, New York, to hold public screenings at a public housing facility, a medical college, a public library, and the State University of New York at Albany. We were very pleased to receive proposals from three rural areas: Waco, Texas and the state public television networks of Nebraska and South Dakota, where plans included screening, distribution of materials, promotions and mailings.
From conversations I’ve had and anecdotal reports I’ve heard throughout the process, the outreach campaign seems to have been well worth the investment. Some stations were new to ITVS productions, and certainly the hesitancy surrounding HIV programming was a compelling reason to give stations some assistance. A final observation: smaller and rural stations can and will do a lot more with less money than major market stations.
VIDEO DISTRIBUTION
From the beginning, ITVS and AIDSFilms were committed to making Positive: Life with HIV available at a very low price in order to reach as many people and groups as possible. In addition to the hundreds of tapes we gave away during the outreach campaign, we made the unusual decision to sell Positive: Life with HIV for $19.95 for the entire four hours, in both the English and Spanish-subtitled versions.
We decided to use the outreach campaign as the primary marketing vehicle for Positive: Life with HIV ’s distribution. So in addition to announcing the availability of the video at the end of each broadcast, we concentrated a lot of effort on getting the 800 number placed in all of the organizational mailings, reviews and listings as well as the online sites.
ITVS continues to do mailings and work through the organizational network we built to ensure Positive: Life with HIV’s continued visibility and availability to public television stations and community groups.
LAST WORDS
Despite the fact that the funding has been expended, Positive: Life with HIV’s life cycle continues because the outreach campaign set a process in motion that now has a life of its own. Good media has the capacity to inspire people, to open their hearts and expand their thinking. Its effectiveness, however, ultimately depends on the contexts in which it is seen and the options available to people for follow-through. In the ecology of social action, media makers provide tools, and communities of people bring about change. The outreach process is the vital link, both to get media and support materials into the hands of those who can use them as well as to demonstrate and foster ways to use media effectively.
Did we accomplish everything we set out to do? Of course not. The AIDS epidemic isn’t over, people with HIV continue to be stigmatized, and most people in America don’t seem to know that AIDS is their problem too. But, let’s not pretend we don’t have lofty goals.