|
04.09
Engineers
Supporting Local Community Activities, Building
Engineering Awareness
By Pender
M. McCarter
Are engineers really less
interested in supporting their local communities
than scientists? The last Harris interactive
poll on the public’s perception of engineers and
scientists says “yes.” As part of its
approximately $100,000 public-awareness program
to promote engineering and engineers, IEEE-USA
continues a modest, long-term multi-media public
relations effort to counteract misconceptions
about engineers, including that they are less involved in community
activities than their scientific peers.
IEEE-USA volunteer leaders and
staff point to the organization’s long-time
support of community activities during Engineers
Week. For example, IEEE-USA launched EWeek’s
first Family Night at Intelsat Corp. in
Washington, D.C., when the organization led the
multi-society
EWeek outreach effort in 1994. The Family
Night was the precursor to
EWeek’s
Family Day that attracts as many as 8,000
youngsters and adults to the National Building
Museum for “hands-on” and “minds-on activities”
with engineers “to invent something new.”
IEEE-USA is currently one of the
two major sponsors of the Family Day event. Over
the years, local IEEE volunteer members have
joined IEEE-USA staff to interact with
youngsters and assemble engineering kits. EWeek
Family Day has drawn adults and parents from the
most and least affluent parts of the
Washington, and has served as a model for other
events in local communities. It has also
attracted local and national media attention.
To flag IEEE-USA’s support of
this community activity and the organization’s
overall mission to promote the public good, for
the last two years IEEE-USA has underwritten 60
promotional announcements on WETA-FM, the U.S.
capital’s only classical music station. The
announcements have appeared before NPR news
broadcasts, in morning “drive time”; on a radio
simulcast of The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, in
early evening; and during Metropolitan opera
broadcasts, on Saturday afternoons. In the month
before and during the Family Day activity, the
announcements included the time and place of the
event. A similar promotion was posted on the FM
station’s online community calendar.
In this way, IEEE-USA could
reach up to 400,000 Washington-area listeners,
including some 115,000 government and
professional employees. The promotion helps the
organization communicate on its programs with
the Washington area’s influential opinion leader
audience, including lawmakers, journalists and
professionals in academia, government and
industry. In past years, U.S. senators and
congressmen have provided their own classical
favorites to be included in WETA’s programming.
In addition to and in
combination with the Family Day promotion on
WETA, IEEE-USA contracted with Washington, DC
Metro Transit to place posters promoting the
event in 100 rail cars on all five Metro rail
lines and to install two lighted dioramas at the
Judiciary Square/Building Museum Metro station.
The first ads were installed in
Metro cars on Inauguration Day, 21 January, when
a record number of customers, a million-plus
from around the world, rode Metrorail.
Typically, during the week some 700,000
individuals take the Metro trains. During the
four-week period in which the ads ran, almost
one million passengers rode in cars with the
IEEE-USA Family Day ads. Over a week's time
period, some 10,000 riders
entered and exited at the Judiciary
Square/Building Museum station where the
dioramas were placed. In this way, tens of thousands of
Washington residents were exposed to advertising
linking local engineers to a community activity
that supports young people and that helped to
increase engineering awareness.
Adding to their support of
community activities, IEEE National Capital Area
members volunteered to help raise funds for
public broadcasting through WETA-FM and WETA-TV.
A dozen Washington, D.C.-area IEEE members and IEEE
Computer Society and IEEE-USA staff helped to
raise $10,000 in one night for WETA-TV. During a
program featuring popular singers, IEEE
volunteers were recognized and shown on camera
in pledge breaks. Additionally, the IEEE and
IEEE-USA logos filled the TV screen.
IEEE-USA Communications & Public
Awareness Vice President Paul Kostek has urged
IEEE Sections nationwide to increase engineering
visibility by supporting worthy activities in
their local communities, such as Family Day and
public broadcasting. IEEE-USA continues to
support a wide ranging public awareness program
promoting engineering awareness through
collaborative, multi-media efforts directed at
targeted audiences from pre-teens to college
students to adults. For more information on
public awareness activities, see
www.ieeeusa.org/communications/.
Pender M. McCarter is senior
public relations counselor at IEEE-USA and
focuses on promoting engineering awareness,
engineering diversity and technological
literacy. He is semi-retired after a 40-year
career in education, journalism and public
relations, including 25 years at IEEE.
Comments on this article may
be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.
|
E-mail
this page to a friend
