Community Engagement and Response Generation via Sri Lankan Newspaper Campaigns in Supporting Potential Sri Lankan Migrants

Considering the growing numbers of human smugglers working towards promoting irregular migration messages in the island amidst the global outbreak of the Corona virus, several safe migration related community engagement activities and response generation mechanisms were designed by targeting the Sri Lankan communities intending to migrate abroad.

Safe and regular migration related awareness articles and related crossword puzzles

The early published safe and regular migration related information dissemination five different articles and their related crossword puzzles were selected as the best source to retrieve many responses from the target audience. By looking at the prior achieved success by publishing the crossword puzzle articles via the regional Tamil newspaper in Jaffna district, a similar campaign was designed to disseminate the same content and the crossword puzzle through the island-wide bestselling Tamil newspaper, Veerakesari from 10-14 February 2020.

The entire campaign ran for five consecutive days resulted 600 crossword puzzles by post and 251 SMS in favor of the knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) based questions posed via the safe migration knowledge shift survey. 110 winning respondents were selected based on their motivation to send answers for the KAP questions.  

Safe and regular migration Advertisements and Advertorials (free awareness articles)

Based on the response success received through the crossword puzzle campaign, it was aimed at publishing newspaper articles on safe and regular migration to reach the island-wide reader audience while an advertisement on the same set of papers to be published by emphasizing the IOM hotline number (+94 77 44 100 86) for further information on safe and regular migration.

These newspaper articles and advertisements were intended to be published on both Tamil and Sinhala island-wide distributed daily and weekend newspapers on 18 March 2020, Wednesday and 22 March 2020, Sunday. To enhance more knowledge on safe and regular migration by using visual communications, professional support from a Cartoonist was also obtained and cartoons on safe and regular migration issues were embedded to the free advertorials developed by the newspaper companies.

However, amidst the complete lockdown imposed by the Sri Lankan government as a COVID-19 mitigating measure, the 18 March 2020 papers generated few favourable responses. 22 March 2020 publication was postponed to 29 March 2020 due to the continuous curfew imposed by the law enforcement institutions in Sri Lanka and many favourable responses were received to the IOM hotline requesting for more information on safe and regular migration.