Promotional Communication and Campus Ministries: Branding Religion in the Digital Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The contemporary media environment is dominated by promotional culture, a force which has captured not only commercial brands, but non-profit ones too.This thesis examines how four Christian campus ministries in Canada (Power to Change -Students, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, The Navigators, and Catholic Christian Outreach) use Facebook to market their 'brands', recruit potential adherents and mobilize supporters to the Gospel.Drawing on the work of Peters (1999, 2006) it asks critical questions about the benefits of dialogue and dissemination, explores how these principles are implemented in social media environments, and considers the benefits and limitations for faith-based non-profit organizations.The study finds that campus ministries use some dialogic principles in their posts and interactions with users online, meeting certain prerequisites for dialogic communication.Yet it also shows that dissemination can be valuable for organizations that need to connect with audiences and compete with established brands in what is increasingly an ad-saturated mediascape.The study contributes to a broad range of scholarship, including literature on promotional culture, media and religion, non-profit communication, and social media.To my committee of Dr. Joshua Greenberg and Dr. Liam Cole Young: thank you for your time, suggestions, and sharing your expertise to produce this research project.Many other professors and faculty in the department have also been helpful in gathering resources and forming this research design.I also thank my peers
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".