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Traveling publicity campaigns

Chapter 4: I INTRODUCTORY
By Mary Swain Routzahn
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About This Book

The work surveys the use of mobile educational campaigns that mount exhibits, demonstrations, films, and services on trains, trolleys, and motor trucks to reach communities. It explains purposes, advantages, and limitations; compares trains and trucks; and reviews applications such as agricultural, health, safety, child welfare, and food conservation tours. Practical guidance covers planning, advance publicity, local organization, program design, exhibit car layout, staffing and logistics, rates of progress, visitor reception, and follow-up evaluation. Case examples and an appendix of past campaigns illustrate costs, publicity techniques, and operational details to help planners adapt methods to local needs.

I
INTRODUCTORY

The tour of the peddler with a pack or cart stocked with goods for sale and a budget of news for free distribution, and that of the patent medicine man with his illustrated lecture of misinformation that sells his dubious wares are forms of traveling publicity campaigns long familiar in rural districts.

Of recent years many peddlers, carrying new ideas and useful information but no goods for sale, have been going about the country representing national and state government bureaus and private organizations. Their wares are helps to better crops, better houses, better health. Their mode of traveling has progressed from wagons to trains and from trains to motor trucks. The size of the enterprise has varied from a single wagon or automobile with a speaker and a batch of leaflets to a train of railroad cars or trucks that carry a traveling exhibit rivaling the “Greatest Show on Earth.” The tours extend from a jaunt through the county or the districts of a city to a transcontinental journey. Whatever its form, if the purpose of the enterprise is to spread information or ideas, or to promote a community program, it is of interest from an educational and publicity standpoint.

Although traveling campaigns have been many and varied and the method has been in use for a number of years, to our knowledge there has been no attempt up to this time to set down the methods and experiences, the successes, failures, and difficulties of the various campaigners.

Believing that this method of promoting social programs will continue to be employed, whatever the type of vehicle used to convey travelers and their outfits, we have gathered information about a number of campaigns and offer it here, together with comments and suggestions for the benefit of those who may be considering the method for the first time or who have tried it and wish to compare their experiences with those of others. The descriptions and suggestions are drawn from accounts of about seventy-five tours of trains, trucks, trolley cars, and other vehicles, obtained from printed reports, articles, letters, replies to questionnaires and interviews, as well as from the observations and experience of the writer.