The WA AIDS Council (WAAC) is looking for gay men to participate in important focus testing in the second week of December for a recent national campaign.

To do this, we need to have 16 participants. There will be a small remuneration to say ‘Thank you’ for your time and efforts.

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Focus testing is like tuning your car radio – it fine-tunes aspects of campaigns so that the audience hears the message clearly. With focus testing… clear as a bell, without focus testing… buzz-buzz-buzz.

For quite some time now, most national campaigns have been mostly developed, put into action and tested in the major cities in the Eastern States – Sydney, Melbourne and Queensland – assuming that all GLBTIQ communities are pretty much the same across the country. So, they rarely cross the Nullabor to test campaigns in Perth.

Of course, all communities aren’t exactly the same and the individual flavour of the local culture has a major bearing on whether a campaign is heard, and if it hasn’t been heard, why that is so.

But it isn’t a one-way street. By getting the local community participating in the focus testing of national campaigns it gives us a voice. We can say what we believe is effective or ineffective according to our individual context.

There has been a push from the WA AIDS Council to encourage the campaign-designing powerhouses of ACON (AIDS Council of New South Wales), VAC (Victorian AIDS Council) and AFAO (Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations) to consider also WA GLBTIQ community in their campaign assessments.

We have had a major win recently by getting the CONNECT Study conducted here. The community heard the call and as a result we have done as well in the implementation of the CONNECT Study as Sydney and Melbourne have.

There is a criteria set by those design powerhouses over east.

If you are:
• Male
• Gay
• Over 18
• Not, or have not been for the past 10 years, a staff member or volunteer of the WA AIDS Council
• Available for an evening December 12 and 13…

…then please contact Mark Reid or Steve Fragomeni at the WAAC on 9482 0000 by close of business, December 9, for more information.

Steve Fragomeni
WA AIDS Council

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