Report on an Educational Campaign: The Cincinnati Plan for the United Nations

Abstract

The Cincinnati Plan for the United Nations, a six-month experimental campaign of information, was used as a case study in mass education. A survey of local opinion and attitudes on the United Nations, made by the National Opinion Research Center before the campaign opened, demonstrated that it is those already interested, even if poorly informed, who will welcome information, while the well informed, if not interested, pay little attention to it, and that the interested also tend to be favorably inclined toward the United Nations. Therefore, the recommendation was made that the campaign be planned so as to interest certain specified classes which were found to be the most in need of enlightenment. But a second survey made immediately after the campaign disclosed that the materials circulated by the plan, voluminous and ingenious though they were, reached few of these people. The principle derived from the experiment is that information, to be disseminated at all, must be functional, that is, interesting to the ordinary man because he has been made to see that it impinges upon his own affairs.