Archive for the ‘Salt Water’ Category

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

Photo courtesy ricardodiaz11 via Flickr

The Alliance for Sustainable Fisheries has released the results of an environmental poll, conducted by Responsive Management, which finds “the public strongly wants the ocean to be protected, but not with total marine closures.”

The sponsors are upset about the establishment of some new protected ocean areas where all fishing — both recreational and commercial — is banned. It’s a quality poll, but there are no real surprises — the main findings in the research echo other environmental polls and surveys:

“An overwhelming majority of U.S. residents support (90%) legal recreational fishing in general, with most of that being strong support. Additionally, large majorities of U.S. residents support legal recreational fishing in National Forests (80%), National Parks (78%), and Wilderness Areas (72%).”

And also…

“Among U.S. residents, support for protecting U.S. ocean waters and ocean life is nearly unanimous: 78% strongly support doing so, and another 17% moderately support it, for a sum of 95% in support.”

The finding worth discussing is this:

Disagreement is particularly high (86%) with the statement, “All U.S. ocean waters should be fully protected with no human use allowed.”

In market research, the public routinely rejects absolute statements of any kind, from any side of the issue, about any nature protection or pollution control topic. By honing in a the complete closure aspect of the marine protected areas, the Alliance has found the one aspect of the marine protected areas plan that a significant majority of individuals would object to. That’s another poll that goes on the pile in support of this word that works: balance.

Also noteworthy, there is some shoptalk in some of the questions — and this degrades the reliability of some of the findings. For example…

The survey asked respondents if they agree or disagree that some change to the natural
biodiversity in U.S. ocean waters is acceptable to guarantee a continued food supply through fishing and shellfishing: agreement (71%) far exceeds disagreement (20%).

Given the substantial number of people who don’t understand what biodiversity is, I’m not sure if this particular finding (in an otherwise solid environmental poll) can be trusted.

Environmental advertising from the environmental group Oceana

Oceana is one of my favorite of the big DC environmental groups, because they take risks and keep trying to make their point. But what’s the takeaway from this environmental advertising?

If you saw this on the subway platform on your way home, could you explain to your spouse what it was about?

How would you fix it?

News media — newspapers, TV, radio — are about the least effective way to reach and influence local officials about nature protection and pollution control, at least according to the “Market Inventory and Needs Assessment for the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve,” conducted by Responsive Management in 2007. In this survey of “people who, in a professional or volunteer capacity, make decisions affecting the health of coastal resources,” the respondents reported that their top source of information was peers of one type or another — municipal engineers, professional contacts, environmental groups who come calling.

But if you ask everyday citizens tell you about where they get their information, it would be almost the opposite — media (still #1, but losing ground fast), Internet (still #2 but gaining ground fast), and then personal contacts of various kinds. Here’s what I think this means: online and media communications efforts should be directly aimed at citizens and voters, indirectly aimed at elected officials and other decisionmakers.

For example, if City Alderwoman Jones won’t make time on her schedule to meet with you personally about the upcoming pollution control law, run an ad in the local newspaper that tells the voters in her district that Alderman Jones is neglecting her responsibility to hear a balanced range of views about an upcoming pollution control law. It will certainly get her attention!

Do not run an ad that tells her what you would have told her in the meeting. If she’s anything like the officials interviewed for this study, this is not an effective way to get her to pay attention to this.

Click here to read the full report.

While we’re on the subject

You will be better able to interpret market research reports if you know how they are conducted. And you can get some first hand experience by signing up to take some surveys with the Ipsos i-Say Survey Panel.

As a panelist, you receive periodic invitations to take surveys on various topics. It’s not only free, they’ll thank you with various prizes and sweepstakes entries. But do it for the learning experience, not the chintzy prizes. It will open your eyes to see how serious communicators pre-test their messages before launching them. You can do it, too!