Prevention of Euthanasia Digital Campaign — Euthanasia Free Aus
Oppose the legalisation of Euthanasia in Australia.
Every individual should live their life to the best of their ability. In Australia, a social issue has been raised whether euthanasia should be legalised. This has caused continuous arguments within the government and residents, voicing many opinions and views on why it should or shouldn’t be legal. euthanasia or also known as ‘assisted suicide’, is where an individual has chosen to take their own life ( Sikora & Lewins 2007 ). As a group, our digital campaign “Euthanasia Free Aus” has focused to oppose against the legalisation of euthanasia, as we firmly believe that individuals should not be able to take their own life or have assistance in it. It is important for our campaign to focus on euthanasia because life is valuable and it shouldn’t be easily taken away from someone. Since Australia is a religious dominant country, our campaign has acknowledged that religion and ethics have a strong view on life and death and that it should only be taken from a higher being. Individuals who participated in a survey in 2007, who were classified as Christian were against assisted suicide acts (Sikora and Lewins, 2007). We hope to get our message across through our digital campaign on Instagram to raise awareness and fight against the legalisation of euthanasia. Our report will discuss our reasoning on why we have chosen euthanasia, the spread of our digital campaign, how we got it out to the online world and lastly how engaged individuals were towards our campaign and the results.
The main reason we have chosen euthanasia as our digital campaign is because it isn’t well known and as a group, we want to spread why euthanasia is important for people to know about what this social issue is and how we as a community can improve on the way this social issue is promoted in the future. Euthanasia is the painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable and painful disease or in an irreversible coma. Euthanasia is categorized into three different types, they all involve different ideas such as voluntary, involuntary and non-voluntary euthanasia. “The intrinsic value and personal dignity of every human being do not change depending on their circumstances” (Pope John Paul II, 2004). As a group we develop the idea that people should value their life as it is precious that why our campaign is to stop the euthanasia from being legal in Australia our slogan is “Australia Free Euthanasia”, the idea is that we want to raise awareness that your life matter and you shouldn’t take it. Through research, it was mainly about morals and ethics that different people from different cultures and religion have and their views on euthanasia. This would help us with our digital campaign as it allows us to target specific groups in Australia to get a better response and convey the message out to everyone. The main groups that we are targeting are people with a multi-cultural and religious background. We seek to engage with people for our digital campaign through the uses of a social media platform called Instagram which we as a group decide to post pictures once a day on our Instagram page to engage with the people following the page. The second method is using a survey which has a set amount of question on it about euthanasia and what people think about this social issue. The survey will be a pre-questionnaire to see what people think about euthanasia to help us gather results and information on how to set up our digital campaign in the right way to get people to engage with this digital campaign. The main key message that we want people to take away from looking at our social media platform is that your life matter and that it is precious that why we should stand together and say no to euthanasia. Overall, the main objective of this digital campaign is to ensure that people in Australia are aware of what the social issue euthanasia and for them to find a way to help improve the different ways you can promote an “Australia Free Euthanasia”.
To promote our prevention of euthanasia digital campaign, as a group we created an Instagram page, created a survey, posted in our “Living, Learning and Working (unit) Facebook page” as well as spread our campaign through word of mouth.
We created our Instagram page “Euthanasia Free Aus” on the 16th of May and by the 25th of May the account has posted 4 pictures as well as accumulated 14 followers. The page was advocated on each of our social media pages (Instagram, Snapchat and unit Facebook page). However, this method of publicisation did not meet our expectations as only a few people followed the account. This may have been because people didn’t really care about the issue or were disinterested. However, the people that were interested and followed the account were activate on the page, looking and liking at what our digital campaign had to say. Our survey on euthanasia was used to gain an understanding as to what our targeted audience (our target audience was our colleagues and friends on social media) thought of the social issue. The results suggested that more people were in favour of euthanasia and legalising it, which is the opposite of our beliefs and digital campaign. The survey was spread around using the unit Facebook page as well as word of mouth. All up only 9 people participated in the survey, discredited most of our results as our participant number was so small. On the 20th of May, our survey and Instagram were promoted on the Living, Learning and Working Facebook page (our post). Since then 68 people have seen this post however, this does not translate to our follower count on our Instagram page and the number of participants of our survey. By posting our digital campaigns here, we had hoped that more people would have looked into and engaged with our survey because everyone on this page has been promoting their own digital campaign, however this was not the case. This could have been because people were not eager to help out fellow colleagues, they were disinterested with the topic or they were just too busy to help out. Lastly, we promoted our digital campaign through word of mouth to our friends and family, as well as colleagues. We told them about our digital campaign as well as how to support it. However, because of how hard it is to test the reliability of how well this method of promotion worked, we are unsure about how much this affected our results (more about this in engagement paragraph).
The engagement from our campaign “Euthanasia Free Aus” was very minimal to our audience as our Instagram page did not have the following that would be able to expand our message. Through the creation of our open Instagram, where anybody can access our page, we posted images with captions to showcase our fight against euthanasia. On our Instagram, we have managed to get a following of 14 accounts. Across all four posts we managed to get a total of 30 likes, with each image averaging around 5 to 8 likes. As you can see our foundation of our digital campaign was not able to get our message across like we intended it for it to, due to the exposure of our social media page. We were not able to establish a following that would be able to reinforce our digital campaign and help us get our message across to larger audiences. In addition to our digital campaign we created a prior survey for individuals to anonymously answer their opinion and views on euthanasia. The survey was posted on our living, learning and working on the web Facebook group. The survey was also given out through private messages to our colleagues on Facebook messenger. The Facebook post on our living, learning and working on the web asking page members to partake in our survey and follow our campaign on Instagram was viewed by more than 60 people. However, the numbers of participants were not that great and we could only accumulate a total of 9. Our aim for the survey was to use this as a pre-questionnaire to get an insight of what individuals thought about euthanasia and from that we could cater our campaign towards the results of the survey. This did not go to plan as the results from our campaign survey, 56% supported euthanasia and 44% did not support. Participants thoughts on euthanasia were generalised as “it should be a personal choice” and the statistics to support that 88% voted that an individual has the right to choose to die. 11% voting no. Although the results from the 9 participants did not go in our favour, the results may have changed if the survey could have reached a larger audience. This may have impacted our campaign as we were against euthanasia and majority of the participants were for, this may have been why our campaign was not followed. We also engaged with people through word of mouth, but the results of this is unknown and how effective this was towards our campaign. The engagement from our campaign did not reach the intended target number of people we would have liked to, but there are things we have discovered as a group that would help us next time improve our creation of a digital campaign. As such, we could have aimed at pacific sociocultural groups and receive their results from their point of view, rather than looking for results from a non-targeted audience. As a group, we needed to be more vocal about our digital campaign, this may be through posting on our established social media accounts such as Facebook, Instagram where we already have a connected social network of people. Our campaign could have been twitter, as twitter is more known as a political social media platform. Our posts could have been more enthusiastic and more engaging with the audience; this could have been done with like more popular types of posts such as ‘memes’. Overall through “Euthanasia Free Aus” we were able to be vocal about our opinion and get a message across to a small audience about euthanasia and why it shouldn’t be legal.
Our digital campaign was aimed to raise awareness as well as demonstrate the cause and effect of the legalisation of euthanasia in Australia. We believe we have achieved this through our digital campaign (Instagram page and survey), however the campaign did not reach enough people as we had liked. We started our digital campaign only 10 days before the due date, thus by setting up our social media and survey presence earlier could have allowed more people to see our campaign. The expansion of our digital campaign to different websites such as Twitter could have brought in a new audience adding to its effectiveness. The other uncapped promotion that we could have used could have been flyers, giving people more of an idea of euthanasia in Australia which may have persuaded them to help our cause. We believe that our digital campaign has not contributed to the social change as we would have liked, as the exposure of the campaign was limited. However, as euthanasia in Australia is illegal in most states, this social issue may not need immediate action.
