Communication Skills for Conservation Professionals

By Susan Kay Jacobson

Whether you are managing wetlands, protecting endangered species, or restoring ecosystems, you need to be able to communicate effectively in order to solve conservation and resource management problems. Communication Skills for Conservation Professionals can help you do just that—it is a practical and inspiring book that provides user-friendly guidance on achieving conservation goals through effective communication.
Following introductory chapters that draw on research from communication, psychology, sociology, and education to highlight elements critical for effective communication, the book describes how to gather background information and target audiences, explains how public relations can influence attitudes and behaviors, and outlines how to design and conduct a communications campaign. In addition, it provides step-by-step guidance for using print, broadcast, and electronic mass media; demonstrates methods for developing public talks, interpretive brochures, exhibits, and trails; and explores long-term conservation education strategies for students and adults.
This second edition of a widely praised book, originally published in 1999, includes new material on working with stakeholders, volunteers, and other groups to multiply conservation success. It also expands on the use of electronic media with examples of conservation Web pages, blogs, e-newsletters, and other new media. The book’s citations have been updated to include a host of Web sites and other electronic sources useful for planning and implementing communication programs.
Communication Skills for Conservation Professionals is a valuable addition to the conservationist’s toolbox that will help scientists, managers, concerned citizens, and students communicate more effectively.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Sep 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781597269438

Book preview

conservation.

INTRODUCTION

Guess which of the following two scenarios happened. Each involves a meeting of Water Management District staff with a hundred concerned residents whose homes were threatened by flooding from unusually heavy rains.

Scenario 1

At the podium, a Water Management District program director gave an introduction about general budgetary concerns of the district and presented the district scientist as the expert hydrologist. The scientist shuffled behind the podium and put three illegible diagrams on the overhead projector in rapid succession. Only binoculars would have made the print legible. Then he explained probability theory in relation to a five-hundred-year flood event in such a way that even the PhDs in the room were unclear of the point he was making. He mumbled about aquifer recharge, wetlands habitat restoration, and a few other noun clauses, then sat down. The crowd got ugly. The normally civil neighbors raised voices and accused the district of incompetence in dealing with their flooded yards. The local paper described the meeting as a controversial. The opportunity to make a pitch to protect wetlands was lost.

Scenario 2

At the podium, the Water Management District program director thanked everyone for coming and talked briefly about the district’s responsibility for managing water flow and its concern for people’s homes and property. He introduced the district scientist as someone who would explain why the flooding was occurring and answer questions about what could be done. The scientist walked to the podium, greeted the audience, and asked for a show of hands: How many of us have homes that have flooded? (only one) How many of us are worried about flooding? (almost all, including the scientist). The scientist then introduced the main points he would make and said then he would try to answer all questions. He used three clear diagrams to explain why the floods were occurring and how an immediate initiative to remove a harmful water control structure and restore a wetland could result in immediate protection from flooding. He asked for questions and spent thirty minutes explaining aquifer recharge and wetlands restoration using vocabulary the audience could understand. At the end of the meeting, district staff provided the press with a fact sheet with the key points the presentation had covered. The next morning’s paper covered the meeting and explained the problem and solutions to its readers.

Scenario 1 happened. In the optimistic second scenario, the speakers asked themselves a few simple questions: What is my objective? Who is my audience and what are their concerns? What are my main points? What vocabulary or visuals will enhance audience understanding?

This small example underscores the need for communication skills, whether you are managing wetlands, protecting endangered species, or restoring ecosystems. Conservation and resource management problems cannot be solved without effective communication.

This book is meant to guide the student, scientist, manager, and professional in achieving conservation goals through better communication. Whether you are talking to the public or the press, training students or volunteers, designing an exhibit or Web site, working with partners, or raising project funds, conservation involves people, and knowledge of human interaction is critical for effective work.

A decade has passed since the first edition of Communication Skills for Conservation Professionals was published. This book has undergone a complete makeover from seven chapters to eleven in order to incorporate new information technologies, updated examples, and a new section on working with groups, from partnerships to conflict resolution. This book provides the background for understanding the communication process—marketing and mass media, citizen participation, public information, environmental interpretation, and conservation education activities. It starts with how to plan a program, from identifying objectives to understanding your audience. It ends with how to measure results so you know whether your program is working.

A valuable component of the book is the many examples, guidelines, and planning tools provided for all sorts of communication. From the U.S. Forest Service to The Nature Conservancy, from the Amazon to Yellowstone, and from action research to zoo education, activities that worked for other resource managers and conservation scientists may work for you or may stimulate your creative juices. I intend the book to be used as a cookbook. If you need to better understand your audience, look up recipes for audience research (chapters 4 and 5). If you want to prepare a public presentation, see the ingredients for a tantalizing talk (chapter 9). Recipes are provided for starting a volunteer program (chapter 7), writing a newspaper editorial (chapter 8), or creating a kiosk (chapter 9). If groups of students are arriving at your site tomorrow for a field trip, flip to chapter 6, which provides ingredients for a gourmet experience. It’s easy.

My hope is that this book will help conservation scientists, managers, concerned citizens, and students to more effectively communicate their knowledge and concern about the environment with others. Our wildlife and wildlands depend on it.

Chapter 1

COMMUNICATIONS FOR CONSERVATION

Reduce your carbon footprint!

A fed bear is a dead bear!

Only YOU can prevent wildfires!

We want people to save, conserve, or restore plants, animals, and ecosystems. Our pleas and warnings are part of the communication process aimed at changing people’s conservation awareness and attitudes and, ultimately, their behavior.

Consider the following examples of effective communication leading to conservation:

Tourists interacting with dolphins decreased inappropriate behaviors, such as touching dolphins, after exposure to a communication program in Australia.¹

Data collected and shared electronically by local bird-watchers through BirdSource,² a collaborative Web site of the National Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, helped identify the Montezuma Wetlands complex in New York as an Important Bird Area. This in turn enabled conservationists to obtain $2.5 million from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund for habitat acquisition and restoration.³

A study concluded that public education about ways to coexist with black bears would be more cost effective than spending money on nuisance-bear translocation.⁴

Communications in parks have improved public compliance with litter reduction and off-trail behavior,⁵ as well as reduced threats to sea turtles and shorebirds.⁶

Interpretive messages about fire ecology for visitors toYellowstone National Park influenced positive attitudes and beliefs about fire and forests.⁷

Conservation goals focus on biological problems, but solutions lie with people. Conservation strategies must increasingly focus on affecting people’s beliefs and behaviors toward the environment. Conservation communications are an important tool for influencing people and thereby achieving conservation goals. Public support is a primary factor in the success of ecosystem management plans in the United States.⁸ Protection for endangered species depends on political considerations and therefore the public. For example, rearing endangered Florida panthers in captivity is a biological challenge. Yet the public decides whether to allocate required funds, reintroduce additional panthers in Florida, or conserve land needed to sustain the large carnivores. The panther’s fate depends on how managers communicate with public groups and decision makers to raise concern and support for panther conservation.

Lack of an effective communications strategy doomed one panther recovery program goal of reestablishing panthers in northern Florida. Twenty-six animals were experimentally released in Osceola National Forest to test habitat suitability for reintroduction. The experiment was a biological success—the habitat was suitable. Yet poor communications by the agencies fueled local landowner opposition, and a minority caught the attention of the media through its own Kids Not Cougars communications campaign.⁹ Now, an interagency Florida Panther Outreach Working Group made up of federal, state, and local organizations and agencies has formed to help ensure a better outcome for future panther recovery efforts.

Think of a difficult conservation problem you have encountered. More than likely, people are part of the problem and communications will be part of the solution. Effective communications are essential for influencing conservation policy, changing people’s behaviors, garnering funds, or recruiting volunteers. On a broad scale, the fate of our wildlands and natural resources depends on effective communications for a diversity of audiences and settings.

Why Communicate?

We communicate nearly all the time whether we are conscious of it or not. Even a lack of communication is communication. To carry out successful conservation programs, we must better understand how to engage audiences and effectively communicate conservation goals.

Recent trends emphasize the need for conservation communications. For example, the number of constituents, or stakeholders, of public lands and natural resources is multiplying. As a result, conflicts in land management continue to grow in concert with demands of diverse interest groups. Imagine the varying viewpoints on a proposed wildlife refuge from the following stakeholders: landowners concerned with property rights, politicians concerned with votes, businesspeople concerned with the tax base, hunters concerned with access, preservationists concerned with protecting the ecosystem, animal rights activists concerned with individual animals, and parents concerned with outdoor recreation opportunities. Stakeholders’ interests often overlap and conflict.

Constituents of wildlife agencies are shifting. In the United States, from 2001 to 2006 the number of anglers and hunters dropped by 10 percent, while the number of wildlife-watching participants increased by 8 percent.¹⁰ The U.S. public is growing more ethnically and racially diverse, speaking different languages and viewing wildlife through different cultural lenses. Nearly a quarter of U.S. citizens identify themselves as Black, Hispanic,Asian and Pacific Islander, or American Indian.¹¹ The thumb generation with iPhones and BlackBerrys has almost unlimited access to information, but it often lacks access to the outdoors and spends little time outside developing an interest in nature.¹² Because of this complexity, effective communication is one of the most critical strategies for conservation and land management.

Some public opinion trends show promise. The public is concerned about wildlife and the environment. A 2007 Gallup poll found that 69 percent of U.S. citizens worried a fair amount or a great deal about the extinction of plants and animals. ¹³ In a similar poll, 70 percent of the public thought that the government should do more than it is doing to try to deal with global warming. ¹⁴ A poll conducted in forty-six countries by the Pew Research Center found that people in countries ranging from China and India to Peru and Canada rank environmental degradation as the greatest danger in the world, more than threats such as terrorism and AIDS. ¹⁵

These findings may reflect our increasing exposure to conservation issues. Information is available from the Internet, print media, radio, television, satellite, cable, and other communication media. Images of oil spills coating seabirds or of unemployed loggers posed with their families are beamed instantly into living rooms or downloaded to home computers. Yet public knowledge about conservation is still limited. Researchers have found that the views of most Americans are based on little ecological understanding and that concern for wildlife is largely confined to attractive and emotionally appealing species. Public knowledge about the environment is a mile wide and an inch deep. A Roper poll found that 56 percent of adults in the United States say they want to help the environment but don’t know how and that just 2 percent qualify as environmentally literate.¹⁶

If conservation efforts are to thrive, communication initiatives must build on existing positive attitudes toward the environment to expand the public’s narrow focus and limited knowledge. Improved ecological understanding should inform public decisions and actions. Communications efforts can enhance all aspects of this transformation.

Conservation organizations and natural resource agencies rely on good relations with the public. Opinions and actions of concerned individuals and groups influence environmental agendas and the survival of these institutions. Organizations and agencies must be sensitive to their many audiences. The goals of most wildlife agencies and organizations in the United States include the need to communicate with their wildlife-oriented constituencies. For example, one of the Wildlife Society’s four principal objectives is to increase awareness and appreciation of wildlife values.¹⁷ Yet resource managers often have considered public information and education programs superfluous.

Only recently have conservation professionals tested the use of public communications as a tool to meet specific natural resource goals. For example, to better manage park visitors, researchers compared the influence of interpretive techniques on the attitudes of visitors to Ohio state parks.¹⁸ They found that both brochures and personal interaction with park staff increased visitors’ knowledge about park management objectives and resulted in more positive attitudes about preventing problems such as illegally cutting trees, picking wildflowers, and trapping animals. Park visitors reached by communications efforts expressed greater concern for helping achieve management objectives.

Communications efforts can succeed where regulations or disincentives for negative behaviors have failed. Managers at Tortuguero National Park in Costa Rica trained local guides to keep ecotourists from harassing nesting sea turtles. ¹⁹ They achieved their management goals through the use of a communications program for tourists and residents rather than through increased physical barriers or heightened enforcement, which were not feasible in the park.

As a conservation professional, you must include among your communication skills the ability to market your organization’s products—its mission, policies, services, and goods. Marketing entails sparking public interest in the objectives of land management and environmental initiatives. Communicating with the public and decision makers helps increase their long-term support and leads to appropriate behavior and sound conservation policy. Like two sides of a coin, institutional goals must be integrated with the public’s concerns; likewise, institutions must influence public opinion to support their conservation mission. Researchers have shown that appropriate communications can shift public support, improve pro-environmental behavior, reduce vandalism, decrease poaching, increase visitor satisfaction, and influence policies and decisions that affect public lands and natural resources.²⁰ Can you afford not to communicate?

What Is Communication?

Communication is the process of exchanging ideas and imparting information. It involves making yourself understood to others and understanding others in return. If you send a message—verbal, visual, or written—that the intended receiver does not understand, communication has not occurred. Consider the conservation message It’s good to protect biodiversity. The Nature Conservancy discovered that this simple message was not compelling to the public. Based on research with focus groups (discussed in chapter 5), half the audience had no idea what biodiversity was and the other half provided mostly erroneous definitions. Yet participants did reveal that they perceived value in nature conservation and concepts like the web of life.²¹ The Nature Conservancy had three options: change its message, target a more knowledgeable audience, or educate its constituents. This example demonstrates how much effort is needed to understand target audiences and the likely impact of messages and products; otherwise, time and resources are wasted. No wonder public relations is a multibillion-dollar industry.

Communication involves both interpersonal processes such as personal interaction and conversation and mass media approaches such as newspapers, magazines, radio, television, telephone, mail, books, films, mobile exhibits, billboards, and agricultural extension publications. It also involves electronic media such as the Internet and satellite conferences. The public receives much of its environmental information through mass media channels. A survey of teenagers in England, the United States, Australia, and Israel revealed that mass media (not school!) were students’ most important sources of information about environmental issues.²² An international Live Earth concert was broadcast on seven continents to raise awareness about climate change by bringing together environmental advocates from politician Al Gore to musician Shakira. People watching the concerts on TV could text-message on cell phones to lobby for the reduction of carbon emissions by developed countries. ²³Yet impersonal technology is often less effective than interpersonal and hands-on activities in influencing attitudes and behaviors. Selecting the appropriate communications method based on your audience and the goals of the communication effort is critical. The theories and approaches that are the basis of good communication are described below and throughout this book and apply to all forms of communications for conservation—speeches, press conferences, interviews, Web sites, blogs, public events, brochures, interpretive signs, and education programs.

Communication Theory

Much of communication theory is derived from disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Designing effective communications is complex. Understanding the potential detours inherent in the communication process helps in successfully navigating toward conservation goals.

Early models illustrate communication emanating from a source (fig. 1.1). The source sends a message through a medium, such as a poster or television program, to a receiver who responds and decides what action, if any, to take.

This simple model ignores the noise and distortion to which most messages are subjected. New communication models include an encoding stage in which the original message is translated and conveyed to the receiver via a channel and a decoding stage in which the receiver interprets the encoded message and responds (fig. 1.2).²⁴ Both encoding and decoding are critical stages in the communication process. The channels selected for your communication may be interpersonal approaches through speeches and participatory demonstrations, electronic media through cable and airways, or the print media through newspapers and books. The channel you select will affect the encoding and decoding of your conservation message.

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FIGURE 1.1. Simplified model of the communication process.

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FIGURE 1.2. Current models of communication reveal the complexity involved in delivering a conservation message.

Gatekeepers regulate the flow of information from source to receiver. Different channels have different gatekeepers. For example, suppose you speak to a reporter about your organization’s new project to save endangered orchids. The reporter encodes your message in the form of a newspaper article. A gatekeeper in the form of an editor must accept the story for publication. Perhaps the last three paragraphs will be cut owing to a shortage of space. The receivers, individuals perusing the paper over their morning coffee, will decode the article based on their own experience—why should orchids interest them? If you do not catch their attention, they will not read it.

Feedback in the form of action from the receivers allows the source to adjust the message; thus, receivers also are senders if their response is captured in some way. However, sources must be listening in order to modify their communications on the basis of the receivers’ feedback. For example, an agency that fails to respond to constituent anger about changes in a hunting policy will have more problems than an agency that listens and understands the needs of all its constituents. Researchers in upstate New York found that the communication process itself—whether through conversations, group surveys, or a citizens task force—improved satisfaction with the wildlife management agency, even when the management outcome was the same.²⁵ Public agencies, fueled by tax dollars, must respond to public wants and needs. Unless an agency or organization understands its diverse clientele and aligns its products and services to public desires, the agency and its mission are doomed.

Elements of Communication

The vital elements of the communication process are the source, encoding, the message, the medium, decoding, the receiver, and feedback. An understanding of these components can help you design effective conservation communications programs. Failure in any step of the process destroys the entire effort. Ensuring that each component is appropriate for your situation is one key to success.

The Source

The source of the message is the central person, organization, or agency doing the communicating; for example, an agency director gives a public speech on management changes, a ranger leads a guided walk, or an organization publishes a fund-raising brochure or launches a Web site. The source knows how it wants the message to be received, yet it cannot guarantee how the receiver will interpret it. For example, during a speech, the speaker’s body language, looks, voice tone, and vocabulary influence how the audience receives the message.

For environmental issues, the source must be viewed as knowledgeable and honest. Most readers will view an advertisement by an oil company regarding the status of oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge differently than an announcement by an environmental organization. To be credible, sources must be perceived as expert and trustworthy. Understanding the concerns and vocabulary of the audience can greatly enhance communication efforts by targeting the message to the audience’s characteristics and needs. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss methods of collecting information in order to target specific audiences.

Encoding

Once the message leaves the source, it can be ignored, shortened, or passed on unscathed through encoding. Many factors affect the process of encoding a message. News media have gatekeepers such as reporters, photographers, and editors who select, change, or screen messages. The encoding of messages is subject to numerous breakdowns from the source or gatekeepers. For example, a message will not be encoded well if the source garbles it with scientific jargon or offensive language.

Other gatekeepers controlling the encoding process include information officers and public relations staff within government agencies and private organizations. Media editors, whose interests and priorities are different from those of the source, may encode an interview or a speech and give little attention to topics of concern to your cause. For example, radio coverage may change your message by playing only a ten-second sound bite from a longer interview. A biologist studying endangered manatees was disappointed when his only quote in a radio interview was an offhand remark he made about the granting agency, not the point he wanted to make about how speeding boats kill manatees.

Controversial issues, such as arguments about energy development and global warming or spotted owls and the timber industry, are much hotter subjects for media coverage than basic ecological information such as the range contraction of a rare butterfly. Ecological data are rarely deemed newsworthy. For example, one of the few times that the Everglades’ unusual geology appeared on the front page of a Florida newspaper was in the summer of 1996. The day after a ValuJet plane crashed into south Florida’s River of Grass, a detailed, full-color diagram of the Everglades’ vegetation and soil layers accompanied the news.

Words selected for a message also influence audience perception. The term wise use to a member of the Wise Use Movement may emphasize immediate resource exploitation, whereas wise use to a preservationist might mean protecting natural resources for future generations. The term sustainability has been interpreted in many different ways by various agencies. Phrases like property rights or safe drinking water can ignite audiences’ emotions and therefore their perceptions of the message.

The Message

Once the source’s ideas are encoded or translated, they are transmitted in the form of a message. Target audiences can be segregated by factors such as age, education, occupation, or geographic location in order to develop messages to address their needs and interests.

The content of the message, its medium, and its source all influence the perception of the message. Simple messages are most easily understood.

Where’s the beef? was a popular slogan for Wendy’s fast-food restaurants. It made a short, simple point. The ads did not ask, How much ground tenderloin do you get in a bun from our competitors’ restaurants?

Only YOU can prevent forest fires is unambiguous on a poster showing Smokey Bear dousing a campfire.

A fed bear is a dead bear is the direct message of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department to discourage the public from feeding bears.

Messages dealing with more complex issues may be harder to transmit to the public. The concept of prescribed fire as a management tool goes against many people’s early indoctrination by Smokey Bear. An Arizona Division of Forestry’s slogan Rx Fire: Prescription for Forest Health seems difficult to say, much less understand. In a survey of Florida residents, less than half could define prescribed fire.²⁶ In contrast, most U.S. citizens can identify Smokey Bear in surveys conducted by the U.S. Forest Service.²⁷

The Medium

Messages can be carried to audiences via many channels:

personal conversation

speech

public meeting

demonstration

direct mail

blog

telephone

magazine

newspaper

television

radio

newsletter

exhibit

guided programs

listserv

Web site

What medium works best for the job? Using a variety of media may be the answer to sufficiently reaching each audience. From personalized techniques such as speeches or direct mailings, to mediated approaches such as placement of messages in newsletters or specialized magazines, different audience characteristics call for different media. You must choose the medium that will effectively reach the greatest percentage of the target audience. For example, youth aged thirteen to seventeen years send and receive over 150 text messages a month, while people over age fifty-five send and receive almost none,²⁸ rendering this a poor communication channel for seniors.

The use of more than one channel increases the likelihood of reaching a greater audience and reinforces the message. Florida cooperative extension agents used public television to air Florida’s Invaders, a show that interviewed wildlife managers and biologists involved in controlling Florida’s exotic wildlife species. The show discussed the dangers of releasing exotic pets into the wild. Don’t let it loose was the key message. The TV segment could be accessed through a Webcast online, so extension staff can continue to refer homeowners to the program.

When selecting media, conservation communicators must evaluate such factors as potential impact, production expense, cost of dissemination, audience size, frequency, and sustainability. Different channels offer different advantages. For example, mass media play a powerful role in setting the public agenda and reinforcing opinions. However, more detailed publications or interpersonal methods are generally needed to change an audience’s fundamental knowledge or shift its opinions. Adoption of new behaviors, such as planting native species or taking public transportation, often occurs as a result of family members or colleagues introducing people to them.²⁹

Chapter 3 discusses how best to frame your message and strategically select media to most effectively reach your target audience.

Decoding

After a message is transmitted, it must be decoded by the receiver before a response or action is taken. Like encoding, the message is again translated, this time into terms the receiver understands. In decoding the message, many factors affect receiver comprehension. If the receiver is tired or busy, the message may be perceived in a different way than if the receiver is alert or focused. Past experiences and current attitudes will slant the reception of the message. For example, proponents and opponents of a proposed forest reserve may hear arguments for their cause from the very same speech or message. A politician’s remark that government needs to ensure the sustainable use of land may cause reserve proponents to think the forest will be preserved, while opponents may think the statement means maximum yield of forest products to benefit people today. Receivers decode a message depending on their own perceptions and values. Everyone has personal biases and receives messages differently. Understanding these differences is a key to effective communication and is discussed further in chapter 2.

Language is important in the decoding process. If the message is unclear or the receiver translates it differently, then his or her response may not match the intended outcome. Semantics, or the use of words, can change the image of an event. Compare the images that the phrases seal harvest and seal slaughter evoke in a layperson. The phrases deer culling and deer hunting are another example. While the same number of animals may die in the same way, the words create different impressions of the event. Communicators must choose their words carefully.

In addition to semantics, symbols are important in conveying a message. Symbols have been used traditionally for positive persuasion; for example, American flags and bald eagles conjure up nationalistic feelings in the United States. Advertisers use symbols of the wild to sell everything from cars to cologne. Numerous car models are named after wild animals—Cougar, Jaguar, Impala, Mustang—and are photographed atop a butte or zooming through a red rock canyon. They symbolize power and daring, not necessarily getting us efficiently where we need to go. Environmental organizations also make use of symbols in their logos and images to help brand their work, for example, the World Wildlife Fund’s charismatic panda bear, The Nature Conservancy’s oak leaf, or Audubon’s egret.

Commercial companies use symbols of nature to ameliorate bad press about oil spills or toxic waste. Power companies and natural resource industries try to offset public perceptions of negative environmental impacts by advertising in magazines that target environmentalists. A multinational company dealing in forest products ran a full-page ad in Sierra magazine. Under a photograph of a forester working in a lovely forest canopy was the following quote by the forester: We need to take care of the forest and the things that live here. Out here, you understand that the forest is more than just trees. And that caring for the wildlife that lives here is important. To all of us. My company believes that . . . For the company, the price tag of over $20,000 to place the ad in Sierra was offset by the positive public relations the nature symbols and language were expected to evoke.

The Receiver

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a noise? This puzzle has a parallel in communications. If a message doesn’t reach the intended receiver or if it fails to elicit the desired response, does it matter if it made a noise? The results of any communication can vary, from not affecting the receiver to creating awareness in the receiver, shifting the receiver’s attitude or, more rarely, stimulating or changing the receiver’s behavior.

The receiver often is a targeted or specialized audience, such as outdoor recreationists, wealthy urbanites, or middle-aged males. Chapters 4 and 5 describe processes for identifying and targeting audiences. Audiences can be divided into subgroups (segmented) using a variety of characteristics. Sociodemographic information, psychological profiles, consumer behaviors, geographic residence, and a host of other variables can be used to differentiate receivers to tailor the message to their specific needs.

Early theories of mass communication held that an organization sends a message to mass media that deliver the message to the masses.³⁰ But this theory did not explain the observed reality. For example, a newspaper editorial supports Candidate A, yet Candidate B wins by a landslide. Obviously, many factors influence people’s choices and behaviors.

Later communication theories portrayed information diffusing through society from opinion leaders to informed people and then to uninformed people. Researchers claimed that ideas were like ripples emanating from a rock thrown in a pond. Ideas spread in concentric circles from great thinkers to disseminators to politically active people and finally to those who are politically inert.³¹ This diffusion theory assumes opinion leaders influence the public more than mass media. Subsequent research has found that people who are most likely to act on new information or adopt new ways of thinking generally travel more, are better educated, have higher income, and have more social connections or memberships in organizations. Studies of how ideas diffuse through society show groups of early, average, and late adopters of information.³² Knowledge of your target audience can facilitate diffusion of conservation ideas to the critical members—opinion leaders and early adopters—who can help influence other audience members. This will improve the likelihood of getting the response you want from your broad audience.

Researchers segmented an audience of rural landowners to help design specific messages for extension education programming.³³ A survey gathered information such as attitudes, beliefs, land uses, and education from landowners. The study revealed that landowners who had already adopted wildlife management techniques needed practical, detailed information through small-group activities such as field trips and demonstrations. Landowners who had not adopted management techniques but were interested would benefit from introductory information in brochures and mass media. And last, landowners who were unreceptive would require a long-term educational effort. This information helped the extension agents design relevant communications for each segmented audience. Knowledge of the target audience is critical to promote a dialogue or to get the response you want from your audience.

Feedback

Was your message received as intended? Did you increase your audience’s awareness about a conservation issue, shift its attitudes, or change its behaviors ? Feedback tells you whether your communications program worked and how it could be improved. Methods of collecting feedback range from formal before-and-after surveys to direct observations of the target audience or its impacts on the environment. To measure the effectiveness of a communications program to conserve a rare plant, you might count short-term outcomes such as increased public awareness after your campaign or number of new members joining your organization.You also may assess funds donated to purchase lands, legislators’ votes to pass protective measures, or status of the plant population after a certain time period. Chapter 11 discusses methods of evaluation to provide you with the feedback you need to achieve your conservation objectives.

Communications Programs

Communications programs strive to create messages that solve problems or fulfill the needs of their audiences. To succeed, organizations and agencies must understand and respond to their audiences’ existing behaviors. Some communications programs target a broad audience with a public awareness campaign, such as providing information about recycling to all homeowners in Colorado. Other programs target groups practicing specific behaviors that the organization wishes to change, like providing information about hunting practices to grizzly bear hunters (fig. 1.3). To assess the nature of communication needs for a conservation effort, organizations and agencies must ask five questions, as illustrated here by a program to promote male-selective harvests of grizzly bears in Canada’s Yukon.

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FIGURE 1.3. Male and female grizzly bear images used for training guides. (Photo by B. Smith)

Example: A Communications Program for Grizzly Bear Hunters

This program was developed as a communications approach to bear conservation by the Government of Yukon’s Department of Renewable Resources. ³⁴ A shift to male-selective harvest of grizzlies would reduce the number of female bears killed and thereby help increase the grizzly population. A challenge was to convince hunting guides that they could reliably identify male bears and to reinforce the incentive for them to try.

1. What stakeholder groups are involved in the issues to be communicated?

The audience should be defined using socioeconomic, psychographic, or demographic analyses to gain insight into the nature of the audience, its needs and interests, and its behaviors.

The target audience for grizzly bear hunting was identified as the outfitters and guides in the Canadian Yukon. Big-game outfitters from twenty concessions provide guides for the approximately 480 hunters who arrive each year to hunt six species of mammals, including grizzly bears. Past efforts to prevent the unintentional overharvest of grizzly bears included a 3:1 incentive scheme (a system that limits hunters to shoot three males or only one female per quota) to provide an economic rationale for harvesting males as opposed to female bears. After four years of the incentive program, however, the proportion of females in the harvest was unchanged, and evaluation showed that the economic incentive had failed. In addition, all outfitters in the evaluation requested materials to train their guides to selectively hunt male bears.

2. For each audience, what conservation actions are desired?

The objectives must be specified regarding the expected changes in audience knowledge, attitudes, or behaviors that will result from the communication program. These objectives must be measurable in order to later determine whether the communication program or method worked.

The agency wanted to alter the hunters’ behaviors to promote the conservation of female bears. The apparent lack of knowledge about how to avoid shooting female bears guided the development of the following objectives for the educational program:

Hunting guides will gain knowledge and skill at identifying male and female bear characteristics, resulting in passing up bears likely to be female.

The proportion of female bears killed will be reduced from 38 to 25 percent or less.

Outfitters will be provided with a tool to evaluate guide competence in identifying the sex of distant bears.³⁵

3. What messages must be sent?

The interests, needs, and motivations of the stakeholder groups must be addressed. Specific motivational factors must be selected to appeal to members of the target audience.

The most critical message for the Yukon communication campaign was information that gave guides the ability to judge the sex and age of a grizzly bear. A constraint to the program was the initial skepticism among outfitters and guides that morphological characteristics of female bears could be judged at a distance. Thus, the stakeholder groups were motivated by convincing evidence of the ability to determine the sex of bears from a distance. The message the department used took advantage of motivational factors for the outfitters and guides, including the symbolic value of the bear as a lone, powerful, wild figure, an image researchers found appealed to their audience. In addition, it was discovered that outfitters were not interested in cooperation among concessions because of competition for clients. Thus, the educational messages had to incorporate the outfitters’ interests in restricting the sharing of information among concessions or competing

Reviews for Communication Skills for Conservation Professionals

[daumari · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dragged a bit to finish because it's on the drier side, but definitely useful for any kind of communication with the public, from identifying your audience to figuring out how to send your message to evaluating how well your tactics are working. Because it's for conservation professionals, lots of examples from national and state parks, forestry things, etc. but still incredibly useful for any professional-layperson interaction.