We are seeking proposals for an evaluator to measure the success and progress of our long-standing project with the Mississippi River Network and its public campaign. For full details about this evaluation opportunity, as well as information on how to reply, please download the RFP here.

Public meetings remain excellent and important engagement tools, but it’s nice to have other options in the toolbox, like MindMixer.

Biodiversity Project has been working on an initiative called “Weigh in on the Winnebago Waterways” for which we are providing both the project messaging and also a significant outreach plan.

When we saw the Request for Proposals for a public engagement project in the Lake Winnebago region of Wisconsin, we knew that our proposal would include a new web-based tool to achieve the ambitious engagement goals set out over a tight timeline. With the help of an online engagement tool called MindMixer, we were able to submit a unique proposal, and develop an effective and extensive public engagement program.

The Winnebago Waterways region is home to around 522,000 people, Wisconsin’s largest inland lake, world-class fisheries and a host of other recreational opportunities. The region is an economic engine for the five counties that are working collaboratively to find ways where it might make sense to develop cohesive lake policy or management protocols. Currently neither currently exists for the system.

Before the counties can develop cohesive policies or protocols to collaboratively solve the problems facing the water system, the counties wanted to hear from the people. Therefore, in the first phase of their collaboration, Biodiversity Project is engaging the public to find out how people use these waterways and what is important to them about the waterways.

In a region so wide, with funds and schedules so limited, we looked for the best way to find and hear as many voices as possible, using both traditional and innovative methods. We are mailing a traditional survey to the residents and we are hosting a series of open house style meetings, but we know that only so many people can attend these meetings and that we are limited in the questions we can ask on a survey. So, we turned to MindMixer to help bridge some gaps.

MindMixer functions like a virtual town hall, where everyone who signs up (attends) has a chance to weigh in on the issues. All input is open to be viewed and commented on by other site users. Project administrators let users know that their ideas were heard, and how they plan to use them for action. It is a truly democratic and transparent process that people can take part in at any time from any location where they can get online.

The technology boasts many features, such as the ability to text input to the site, that allow people to engage in the ways that are most convenient to them. Even better, the project team can respond at any time, from any place which makes managing the content and engagement very easy, not to mention more cost- and time-efficient than compiling survey results and hosting multiple rounds of meetings.

We customized a website for our project and needs and have been able to ask questions and engage in conversations that give fuller input than traditional surveys might yield. The technology offers a variety of ways to ask questions, including polls, surveys, open-ended idea submissions and ranking ideas, but the best part is having the ability to ask responders to clarify or expand on their ideas. While still early in our process, we have already seen success in engaging a demographic that has been difficult to capture over the years in this region: the under 55 crowd.

While online forums like MindMixer are not a replacement for traditional public engagement activities, MindMixer is certainly a handy new tool in our engagement and outreach kit.

Environmental coalitions can be both personally energizing (like walking through a beautiful prairie!) and effective by giving participants room to ask the big questions.

If you’ve been part of one environmental coalition or network, you know how they all work. Steering Teams, conference calls, agendas, annual meetings and action items. Coalitions are necessary and often extremely effective ways for like-minded groups to share resources and tools. They can magnify voices and achieve social change and policy victories much faster than anyone one group can do alone.

But they are also predictable.  The work associated with coalition membership—webinars, listserves and committee meetings—can be both slow moving and draining.

So, what if there was another way? What if you could build an environmental coalition that was as personally energizing as it was effective? Vital Lands has done just that.

Vital Lands is a program of the Grand Victoria Foundation. Comprised of people from throughout Illinois, past and present Working Group coalition members all work in some way on land conservation, restoration and protection. Biodiversity Project Executive Director Jennifer Browning is now in her second year as part of the Working Group.

Like any good coalition, Vital Lands offers participants a number of typical benefits, such as a chance to meet interesting, passionate people doing excellent work and opportunities to learn about all of the new projects and progress being made in Illinois. But the structure of the Vital Lands meetings—and the way members work together in between meetings—is where there is a difference. The meetings are designed expressly to allow creative thinking to flow.

For two days several times a year, members shed the constraints and requirements of daily life (“to do” lists, deadlines, cooking, parenting) and gather to answer Big Questions: How do we define a healthy Illinois landscape? What needs to be done to get there? And ideas for solutions that start with “What if…?” By providing a well-organized, facilitated space for conservationists to talk about the Big Questions, the Vital Lands coalition has been able to move beyond policy minutia and governance documents into a new realm where big picture thinking happens and effective action begins.

Big Question conversations produce ideas and thoughts that can be as varied as the participants: simple, complex, inspiring and challenging. But whatever the results are, that they happen at all is the remarkable part. Vital Lands simply provides the luxurious opportunity of time outside of daily tasks to think, listen and share thoughts, uninterrupted, about land conservation in Illinois.

Asking the Big Questions has lead to some great progress. Members of the Working Group have created a vision for the future of conservation in Illinois: “An interconnected system of protected land and water at a scale sufficient to allow habitat, wildlife and people to thrive,” and is busy working on reaching that vision.

By creating a space for free-thinking and sharing, Vital Lands is building a cohesive conservation movement and energizing members. It truly is a new kind of coalition.

Unlike oil and water, communications and coalitions definitely mix.

Biodiversity Project proudly offers two primary services: strategic communications and coalition building. Therefore, we have staff who are experts in each field. We work on our assigned projects and we inevitably develop busy schedules. In this dynamic, it’s easy to get tunnel vision, where the communications people focus on the communications work and the coalitions people focus on the coalitions work.

What we must continually remember is that one cannot exist without the other. It is a truism for us, and for our clients.

Thankfully, other smart communicators frequently put materials out in the world that remind us of what we always need to remember.

For example, the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) included an article in the December 2012 issue of their newsletter titled, “6 Guiding Principles for Advocacy Campaign Coalitions.” NTEN is a membership organization of nonprofit technology professionals whose “members share the common goal of helping nonprofits use all aspects of technology more effectively.”

In their fourth tip from the article, NTEP reminds us to talk about communications to our coalition members. By building and maintaining transparent communications channels from the beginning, coalition managers can keep all members engaged and in the loop from day 1.

NTEN recommends several simple communications protocols to establish early and update often:

1. Who will send out coalition-wide updates?
2. How often will they go out?
3. Who will facilitate meetings/phone calls? Who will write the agendas?
4. Who will gather individual coalition member campaign results and share them with the larger group?
5. How will the coalition make group decisions?
6. How will you track the coalition’s campaign progress? What does success look like?

By answering these questions in the beginning, participants can focus on the work, not continually rehashing governance and protocols. It lets the coalition get to work.

As managers of the Mississippi River Network, a coalition that implements a ten-state grassroots campaign called 1 Mississippi, Biodiversity Project strives to answer these questions and keep all communications channels open between the 40+ members.

But, we are also grateful for NTEN’s clear reminder that our communications and coalitions services (and staff) must continually support each other. Neither can exist without the other.

To develop an Illinois Lake Michigan Implementation Plan that truly represents the entire region, ICMP is gathering input from all people and organizations that work on any related issues, from economic development and tourism to invasive species and water quality.

One of the ways ICMP is prioritizing coastal projects for our region is through an interactive online engagement tool called MindMixer. This virtual forum allows participants to answer surveys, post responses and respond to other posted comments.

The stakeholder input gathered through the online tool is a vital part of the project. It will ensure that the environment, economies and residents throughout the Illinois Lake Michigan Coastal Zone will benefit from this plan.

Visit illinoiscoastalpriorities.org by April 22, 2013, to share your opinion on what the priorities should be in three different regions: Lake County’s Coast and the North Shore, Chicago and Evanston’s Lakefront and Waterways, and South Chicago and Calumet, as well as throughout the Illinois Lake Michigan Coastal Zone.

For the duration of this project, Biodiversity Project has worked with the other partner organizations to develop a communications strategy, consistent messaging and content for the interactive Illinois Coastal Priorities website. This project is a prime example of our coalition management services and communications expertise complementing each other.

The goal of the 1 Mississippi campaign is to recruit River Citizens: people who pledge to take action to protect the Mississippi River. Since legislation and policy can be changed by public opinion, the campaign seeks to educate people on the issues the River faces and moves them along a path to advocacy. Over the past five years, the campaign has grown to over 6,700 River Citizens by talking to people at farmers markets, festivals and concerts.

Successful campaigns have a strong foundation of carefully-crafted messages and materials. Biodiversity Project commissioned and utilized the first ever public opinion research of the entire Mississippi River region to find out what people care about and what they value. Values speak to why people should care about an issue. Answering the why question is central to effective messaging. Understanding the values of potential River Citizens directed the campaign to construct a powerful message. That’s why the campaign talks with people about the importance of the River for future generations, as a national treasure and as a natural resource for drinking water. This message has been very successful with the target audiences: people living close to the River and environmentally minded people living away from the River. In fact, the message has inspired people from all 50 states to become River Citizens!

1 Mississippi is a great example of how Biodiversity Project’s process of incorporating public opinion research into messages and campaign strategies works in the real world. Looking ahead, the 1 Mississippi campaign and the Mississippi River Network will be working hard over the next year to achieve the next big goal: 10,000 River Citizens by 2014. In addition, the campaign will work with the already existing River Citizens to take community and policy actions.

Together, these River Citizens can change the course of the Mississippi River’s future. And a strong message can help get them there.

For more information on Biodiversity Project’s message-writing process, visit the Our Services section of our website at biodiversityproject.org.

Research Resources for Values-based Communications

Since 1995, Biodiversity Project has built communications strategies, campaigns and materials to inspire people to adopt environmental behaviors. These strategies, campaigns and materials are built around the deeply-held values that our audiences hold dear. In a perfect world, we’d be able to conduct public opinion research into the values and behaviors of every audience that we built a campaign for. Unfortunately, the world is not perfect.

So while we conduct our own research whenever we can, we often depend on the fantastic research conducted by groups like Gallup or the Pew Research Center. We’ve recently been impressed by another research company called Responsive Management.

Responsive Management is an internationally recognized public opinion and attitude survey research firm specializing in natural resource and outdoor recreation issues. Their mission is to help natural resource and outdoor recreation agencies and organizations better understand and work with their constituents, customers, and the public.

Because they only research natural resource and outdoor recreation issues, Responsive Management is able to explore unique questions, like:

• what are Washington state residents’ attitudes toward state parks?
• what do Indiana residents think about boating in their state?
• what do anglers and hunters think about global warming nationwide?

Their subject areas range from hiking to fisheries and camping to water resource management; their site offers carefully organized reports on these and other topics.

As you develop communications campaigns to inspire your audiences to take action, these reports can help you understand what behaviors your audience is currently doing, what barriers might prevent them from adopting a new behavior and what values you could invoke to inspire the change.

For example, in Responsive Management’s study on boating attitudes in Indiana, they found that a large majority of the state population said that outdoor recreation is personally important to them (87%), and 38% of the general population participates in boating. This would indicate that campaigns around some types of outdoor recreation opportunities could be well received.

Biodiversity Project is grateful to organizations like Responsive Management for providing great public opinion research on environmental and natural resource topics. Their work helps us do our work better.

Is this white albatross arguing with the brown one? Or is it a mating dance? Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Digital Library

As is reported in the December 2012 issue of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, when animal habitats and human habitats overlap, animals are often demonized in the process.

The journal article explores how communicators and members of the media often misapply human characteristics to animals. For example, to illustrate the fox attack story in London, many newspapers used dramatic photos of foxes with their mouths open and fangs bared like they were about to attack. In reality though, most of these photos actually depicted foxes yawning, and definitely not acting in an aggressive way. The reality of the animal behavior was ignored and reinterpreted to suit the desired plotline.

To untrained eyes, yawning foxes look aggressive, birds with touching beaks look like they are kissing and a panting dog looks like it is smiling. But in reality, these animals are simply exhibiting natural animal behaviors and we are personifying them. Misplaced emotions and analysis can be detrimental to long-term animal well-being as it sets up unsustainable expectations from our wild neighbors.

As communicators, it is our responsibility to inspire, engage and educate, but we must do so without distorting the truth. In fact, we should work aggressively to dissolve stereotypes and provide real resources for helping humans dwell safely with urban and suburban wildlife.

For more information on living with wildlife in the greater Chicagoland region, visit Chicago Wilderness’ Living with Wildlife online resource.

When science challenges established ideas (like the earth is the center of the universe) or religious beliefs (like creationism), the scientists themselves can be made into villains. Because some scientists struggle when communicating about their research, findings and theories to general public audiences, they often also struggle to overturn their own negative publicity.

Yet, there are climate scientists who proudly consider themselves climate warriors—people whose job is to defend science and their research for the greater good. Some climate warriors are incorporating values-based messages into their public speaking engagements and television interviews. Instead of providing just the facts, they are connecting those facts to real-world consequences and actions that we can all take.

In this great conversation between three well-respected climate warriors, Climate One, an organization that promotes ongoing dialogue about climate and related issues, provides some insight into the personal struggles that many climate scientists face as they are vilified by detractors.

As an organization dedicated to creating compelling and strategic communications for environmental causes, we were especially interested in the section of the conversation that begins at the 9:52 mark in the video (below). As climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe points out, facts are not enough to overcome the fear many people feel around climate solutions that they believe could damage the economy and their personal freedoms. She explains that climate science can challenge “the things we hold near and dear to our hearts, not our brains,” so scientists need to learn how to start with the values that we all share and build a case for climate change from there.

Check out these smart—and communications-savvy—scientists here:

http://www.climate-one.org/content/political-science-full-program

As an organization dedicated to preserving biodiversity through inspirational communications, we were thrilled to come across both this graphic and this graphic-making tool.

The graphic has upsetting and exciting data and facts about the loss of biodiversity around the world from the World Bank. Some facts are heartbreaking: Two species have gone extinct every day since 2010. Others are hopeful: official development aid for biodiversity more than doubled between 2005 and 2010. When combined together, these and other statistics in the well-designed info graphic tell a compelling story. (To tell a more complete story, we would have also included a solution to the problem of biodiversity loss, as well as an action for people to take. But it is still a pretty neat graphic anyway.)

The tool is called Visually. They create data visualizations and infographics to help organizations and agencies promote brands and talk about research. The company matches clients with designers and provides tools to help the two communicate with each other throughout the process. According to their website, static graphics start at $1,000. The website also has an incredible trove of  infographics on other interesting topics, like engineering, cholesterol and dating.