Finding Resources for Your Annotated Bibliography

Your annotated bibliography is the building block for your primary research. It seems daunting and overwhelming, but I am available to assist and review the documents you procure.

To build your annotated bibliography, here are some sites with explanations of what to include and how to build it:
Cornell University Library: How to Prepare an Annotated Bibliography
Purdue University Online Writing Lab: Annotated Bibliographies
University of North Carolina: Annotated Bibliographies

As you start collecting resources, one site that will be helpful is Dr. Kirk Hallahan's PR Bibliography. The site has not been updated since 2006, but the listed books and articles are good jumping off points for your research. (I would strongly suggest chasing the bibliography of your documents to located more materials.) Within the bibliography, I would suggest looking in the following sections: Publics, Public Opinion, Activism (section 1), Communication Theories, Nonprofit/Fundraising.

When doing your online search for documents, develop a list of pertinent search terms. Use the client document as a guide. Pull key words and phrases from that document. For example, your clients have asked you to look at their social media presence. When searching you should look for social networks, social media, social networking, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and online technologies.

(An excellent resource for social media trends is the Pew Internet Research Center. Use this as a jumping off point. I would also suggest Charlene Li's Groundswell, a book on social media trends, and suggest reviewing Danah Boyd's research.)

All of your clients are nonprofits. I would suggest that you look for materials using the term "nonprofit public relations" as well as "nonprofit PR", "nonprofit marketing," "nonprofit fundraising" (or development).

To better understand your public (the group/collection of people you hope to understand) and who it is , I would suggest looking at Census data and looking for psychographic information. I would also recommend that you look to this site for book chapters that may be relevant to your search and understanding of publics.

To understand how to differentiate your publics, I would also recommend that you review the public relations research on publics. This will help you understand the type of public you are reaching (active, latent or aware) and how to communicate to those groups. To start, look at this article on inactive publics, this article on idenjavascript:void(0)tifying key publics using a case study with Louisiana wildlife, this article on segmenting publics.

If you have any questions or concerns, please e-mail me or see me during office hours.