Archive for the ‘1. Begin with Behavior’ Category

I sure enjoyed presenting for the NC Conservation Network’s “Rainmakers” program last week. As promised, here are PDF versions of the presentations.

• Water Words That Work Overview
• The Water Words That Work “Environmental Message Method”
• More Than A Message: Planning a Campaign for Results You Can Measure

Click this link f you are interested in using the Due Diligence Test Panel to evaluate your upcoming end of year appeals:

Environmental Message Testing Service

Good luck!

“An investment in our waterways is an investment in our future,” that’s the well crafted closing line for an otherwise puzzling and pointless commercial that the American Waterways Council is spending big bucks to air these days. It’s a refreshing reminder that industry trade associations can as inept at the communications game as we are.

Here’s what I expect the waterways folks were trying to do — build political support in Congress to pump more tax dollars into locks, dams, river dredging, bank hardening, and other nature destroying activities. Their pitch: Less pollution because barges move freight for less fossil fuel.

The pitch is pretty well worded, but without an opportunity for viewers to express their support, it’s just boilerplate. The ad provides no number to call, no petition to sign, no label to look for on a product, nothing. And that means that if people notice the ad, the waterways association won’t know it. And if voters agree with the ad, Congress won’ t know it.

My hunch is that this ad will vanish without a trace, taking a large sum of waterways association dollars along with it. And I’m OK with that!

It was a great pleasure to deliver the Water Words That Work presentation to the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore this week. As promised, here are the links to the presentations.

Click the link below for part one of the workshop:

Environmental Awareness Presentation

Click the link below for part two of the workshop:

Environmental Message Method

How can we inspire him to believe he can beat offshore drilling? Or save the tuna?

Remember Charlie the Tuna? If you haven’t seen him on the air in while, it’s probably because he was caught and eaten long ago. Overfishing has decimated the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Populations are shrinking fast. Stricter international regulations to prevent overfishing are long overdue.

At the urging of Oceans Conservancy and Oceana, and allied groups, the United States recently proposed stricter protections for the Atlantic Bluefin to the United Nations negotiators. Sadly, the U.S. didn’t get enough votes from other nations to put its proposal into action.

So what went wrong? The ocean protection community worked hard to to persuade voters the speak up on their issues. They know if voters pay attention to ocean protection, U.S. negotiators will work harder to get other nations behind conservation proposals. So the groups circulate press releases, distribute electronic petitions, ask their supporters to call elected officials on the phone, etc. This time around, it wasn’t enough.

In the wake of the disappointing bluefin vote at the U.N., I was curious about how the ocean community’s environmental communications efforts stack up to other conservation organizations. So I gave samples of their petitions to the Due Diligence Test Panel to review. The petitions were Oceana’s “Offshore Drilling is NOT the Answer to Energy Crisis” petition and Ocean Conservancy’s “Ask Your Representatives to Support Responsible Fish Farming” petition.

Compared other issue advocacy pieces that I have tested this way, these two ocean pieces earned basically average overall results. Oceana’s petition — which uses words that work like “clean” and “safe,” earned a 2.98 overall. The Ocean Conservancy’s petition, which uses shoptalk like “parasite amplification” and “benthic communities,” trailed slightly at 2.83. The average for all similar pieces I have tested so far is 2.83.

Both groups fell short at convincing the test panel that signing one of these electronic petitions was a meaningful act. Here are some excerpts from the panelists’ feedback.

• “The Government is not likely to pay attention to one person.”
• “It is likely, to me, that the congressperson with never even see my email, because his/her assistant checks the email.”
• “It is difficult to imagine that a large enough of a population will act on this issue to really make a difference.”
• “Is the president really going to see my little signature on some petition? In fact, is the president even going to see the petition?”

Every time the test panel reviews a policy message from the environmental community — any issue, any group — many panelists respond by sharing these cynical and doubtful feelings.

This (admittedly small) sample suggests that the ocean protection community isn’t doing anything noticeably worse — or better — than the environmental community generally. But they still came up short on their efforts for the bluefin tuna. When you read the test panel feedback, you don’t find much feedback from test panelists who doubt the problems facing the oceans. You read the feedback of people struggling to see how the problems affect their families — and what they could do about the problem that is meaningful.

Which brings me to my broader point: until our community can raise the overall level of environmental communication we put out, we’ll probably come up short next time, too. We’re like a failing school system — we’ve got a few star pupils that help us keep our hope alive for doing better tomorrow. But today, across the board, our communications test scores just don’t make the grade.

The environmental community simply cannot meet the challenges that are on our plate until we try harder to inspire everyday citizens with hope that they can make a difference with the things we ask them to do.

So how do we get this turnaround started?

Here are links to the petitions and full review reports:

• Oceana: “Offshore Drilling is NOT the Answer to Energy Crisis” petition
• Due Diligence Test Panel: Review of this petition
• Ocean Conservancy: “Ask Your Representatives to Support Responsible Fish Farming” petition.
• Due Diligence Test Panel: Review of this petition