Public Service Announcement

A public service announcement (PSA) is an excellent way for you to reach large numbers of people and make a personal message public, to stand up for your beliefs and be heard.

Click here for more information about PSAs. Once you've completed your project, fill out the PSA Critique.

Effective PSA’s
A well made PSA will motivate people to take action to improve their communities, families and their own lives. Make sure to consider whether the ad will attract attention, whether the audience will recall important ideas, whether the message is personally relevant, believable and interesting to the target audience.

Effective Psa content should:
build awareness,
reinforce positive beliefs
change negative behavior
initiate dialogue

If you want your PSA to be successful, it must do three things for your audience:
Grab their attention!
Hit them with your message!
Get them to act!

Target Audience
Create a PSA that will be targeting our school and faculty as your audience.

Tag Line
Include a tagline.
Most PSA’s have a tag line.
The tag line is a powerful, concise sentence or phrase which sums up the message in your PSA.
Pretest your tag line and concept and see what type of reaction you get from your peers

Accurate, Verifiable Information/Statistics
Back up your statements with at least one statistic that is included in your piece.
You want your message to have integrity and accuracy.
Your PSA will not be taken seriously (or distributed) if you make claims you cannot back up.
Verify your statement with a reliable source and document the source of all information.

Call to Action
Include contacts or references of organizations that that can take them
one step further to action.

Other Requirements Include:
30 seconds in length
all original video footage, stills and soundtrack
no guns, drugs, violence or sexually suggestive content on camera.
Include closing credits
Include closing narration
Include title sequence of tag line, statistics and contacts

printable copy here

Professional PSA Galleries:
Staying-alive.org
Rockthevote.com
thetruth.com
Listen Up
Capuchino's PSA gallery
The AntiDrug
http://www.moveon.org/front/