Source: David Paul Olmer via Flickr
Harbor seals and polluted runoff are a bad mix, and the San Francisco Sustainable Watersheds Alliance, a project of the Earth Island Institute, is trying to clean up the waterfront in their namesake town. They’re pretty advanced in using the Internet to coordinate their activist coalition. For a while now, they’ve been using a Google Group to coordinate the activities of their various members, and recently they launched a Facebook group, as well. Both of these things should be standard practice for coalitions and smaller organizations these days.
So good job for that — but here’s the problem: The group has only managed to attract 62 members to its Google group and just 17 members to its Facebook group. And we’re not talking about a rural group here, we’re talking about San Francisco, a major metro area, with a large left-wing and high-tech population. It looks to me like SWAle is suffering from a serious lack of traction in its community.
And I bet the group’s name is a big part of the problem. Two of the five words in the name — “sustainable” and “watersheds” — have serious shortcomings with the citizens at large. Consider this finding from a 2007 market research study:
… just over half (54%) of consumers claim any familiarity at all with the term “sustainability” and most of these consumers cannot define it appropriately upon probing.
Source: Hartman Group, 2007
Or this one: The Roper Starch group, in a separate study, interviewed citizens about the term, and found
Negatively, ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainability’ are ‘buzzwords/spin,’ vague or pretentious jargon. Several respondents said they didn’t know what the term means. More highly educated owners are familiar with the terms, but a number find them distinctly annoying.
And the term “watershed” is nearly as bad (Click here if you want some citations). So when you put these two terms together, you have a profoundly confusing combination. For all but the most committed elite environmentalists, the name “San Francisco Sustainable Watersheds Alliance” evokes a rousing “huh?” … followed by a shrug.
If Earth Island Institute and SWAle ever want to grow their membership beyond the highly educated environmentalist elite choir, a good next step would be to go back to the group’s previous name: “Alliance for a Clean Waterfront.”
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It’s a good reminder about the term “watershed.” I use it second nature, but probably shouldn’t. And maybe it wasn’t a good idea that I used it as a central term in the title of my blog. But that was partly strategic, I didn’t want to box myself in to only “water.” Still … your point is made.