Communication Ethics

EXAMPLE 1

1. Share an example from your own experience where you have had an ethical question related to communications and data.

I was in a student organization that hosts on-campus events for freshmen to participate. After each event, the organization distributed surveys to participants to gather students’ opinions about the events. To increase the chance of winning the campus –wide organization award, the director of marketing inflated the satisfaction level of the survey to show a higher popularity of our events. I think this is unethical because it destroys fair competition among student organizations. In the long run, it might demotivate the real good organizations because their events didn’t get the credit they deserved.

2. Identify a set of guidelines that might have managed or mitigated the impact of this event.

I think for this example, the university can develop a standard evaluation system for events hold by student organizations. This platform can ask the same list of questions to participate of events, and therefore all events are evaluated based on the same KPIs and standards. The downside of this platform is that it fails to capture the unique features of different events. For example, questions asking how many new friends have the participants made during the events might not be applicable to educational workshop events that focus more on learning new skills.

Other guidelines to mitigate the impact of unethical data problems are:

1. Hold mandatory training and workshops for all student organization board members about data ethics.

2. Incorporate ethics principles by documenting and publishing all the rules of conducting surveys.

3. Ask each organization to storage the survey data in a safe place, make sure to abide the privacy and confidentiality agreement.

4. Ask the president of each organization to be responsible for the procedure of gather and analyzing data.

5. Let the organization store all the raw data in case an examination of the data and the survey procedure is required by the university.

6. Disqualify the organizations that fail to abide the rules of ethical conduct of data.

EXAMPLE2

1. Share an example from your own experience where you have had an ethical question related to communications and data. 

I was in a student association in my undergraduate study, there was a time when my department was required to raise funding to support an upcoming event. In order to establish sponsorship with companies including providing financial supports as well as offering convenience for the activity, the director has manipulated some metrics to be shown on the sponsorship proposal. These included providing unrealistic cost estimation, listing the name of guest who may not attend, and overestimating advertising and promotional effectiveness. I think it was an inappropriate way of ethical communication as it advertised outcomes that were not realistic and mispresented facts to the sponsors. Even though we have achieved KPIs as anticipated (e.g. event attendance, ROI, total page views, etc), in the longer run it would be more likely to loss credit.

2. Identify a set of guidelines that might have managed or mitigated the impact of this event. What does this reveal to you are standards for ethical behavior in communication and data.

Internal Control - guidelines supposed within the association

· Establish supervisory mechanisms among departments and ensure a healthy data supply chain has been built. For example, the costs estimation shall be provided by the treasurer and passes along to the public relations department for marketing purposes.

· Incorporate ethical behavior tests when recruiting new members into the society.

· Conduct surveys to ask business partners their satisfaction level for the data outcomes as proposed initially.

· Hold mandatory training and coaching within the society about data ethics.

External Control - guidelines supposed by business sponsors

· Require the society to transform their anticipated marketing results into visualized data and provide supportive materials in detail.

· Implement the marketing strategy as stated by the fundraiser within a testing period to see whether the data provided are realistic.

· Ask the fundraiser to sign a contract which documents the ethical principles and rules of data authenticity.