Fact sheet: Designing a crime prevention education and awareness campaign

This fact sheet has been developed to assist in the development of targeted education and awareness campaigns to reduce opportunistic crimes in your community, such as residential and retail burglaries, theft of and from motor vehicles and theft from the person.

Research shows that initiatives targeted and delivered in local communities have more impact than state-wide or general campaigns. People take more notice of information that is about their local community.

Reducing the rates of targeted crimes can be achieved through activities that promote behaviour change and increase the uptake of relatively simple crime prevention measures, particularly when delivered alongside other crime prevention interventions.  

This fact sheet outlines key elements that can help you to maximise the success of your crime prevention initiative, and provides links to case studies of local crime prevention campaigns. 

Understand the problem

Do some research and collect data to help define the specific problem you are addressing and the need for the project. If residential burglary is an issue in your community:

• Are there areas that are more at risk?
• What are the most common points of entry?
• For campaigns about theft from motor vehicles, are there local hot spots such as shopping centres, train stations or car parks?
• Are cars being left unlocked, or are valuables being left in cars?
• Is number plate theft the main problem?

Set the campaign goals or objectives

Once you have defined the problem you want to tackle, the next step is to set your project objectives. These should be clear, concise and achievable outcomes that are capable of being measured, tracked and evaluated.

Provide incentives

Awareness raising and education strategies delivered in isolation can have limited impact. Many members of the community may not engage in prevention strategies unless they are supported and encouraged to do so. This includes members who have recently been victims of crime.

To get the best outcomes, awareness and education strategies should be delivered alongside other interventions designed to encourage action, for example:

• property-marking days, or loan of property marking equipment
• home security assessments (by appropriately trained police personnel) for particularly vulnerable groups, such as those who have already been victims, those in identified high risk locations, or the elderly
• provide access to discount or subsidised services or products through local businesses to encourage people to act on security advice.

Plan your communication

Clear, simple messaging is important, focusing on the need to utilise basic precautions, such as locking doors, windows and vehicles.  Supporting messaging should then focus on encouraging the installation of appropriate security infrastructure and other precautionary measures.  

Care must also be taken to ensure the messaging of the public awareness and education campaign is empowering and not alarmist, and should not be perceived as blaming or lecturing the potential victim.  This includes warnings that the victim may be committing an offence, for example, by not locking their vehicle.  Research shows people tune out moralistic messaging which focuses on their shortcomings. Empowering messaging has also been shown to have benefits for overall community confidence. 

Design your campaign messaging with the knowledge that potential offenders are a secondary audience.  An effective campaign should also alert offenders that police and the community are doing something new or paying more attention to the problem, and consequently increase offenders’ perception of the risk of committing offences in the area.

Identify the channels and tools your campaign will use

How will your campaign deliver its messages to your target audiences? The most effective campaigns consistently repeat messages and combine different channels, such as:

• local media
• printed materials
• information sessions
• social media. 

Councils, local traders’ associations and community groups may also have newsletters, websites or other channels to help promote your campaign.

Evaluation

How will the performance of the campaign be measured against its objectives? Consider what methods, qualitative and/or quantitative, will be used to assess the performance of the campaign. This may include crime statistics data and surveys measuring perceptions of crime. When developing your campaign, you will need to establish a benchmark of the key measures you will use to assess the success or otherwise of the activity.