Brad Smith, Flickr

Every successful communications campaign is rooted in sound planning. It is far too easy to simply produce a pamphlet or a Web site for the general public and check communications off your to-do list. However, the Biodiversity Project encourages organizations to move beyond this. We provide planning services for individual organizations and coalitions that strengthen their communications work by:

• Facilitating Logic Model based planning sessions where we help clients to define their long and short-term goals, identify who they need to reach in order to achieve those goals (i.e. their target audiences), and work backwards from there to design communications materials and activities that will reach and move those audiences.
• Incorporating public opinion research into the planning process to help refine target audiences, develop values-based messages, and identify the messengers target audiences trust and the communications pathways (e.g. newspapers, public radio) that they are exposed to most often.
• Producing comprehensive reports that outline our recommended communications strategy, which integrate the results of the two tasks mentioned above. These reports can be used to guide communications campaign implementation or to seek funds for implementation.

Bill Bumgarner, Flickr

An Example of Our Work:
Driftless Area Restoration Effort Outreach Plan

In the fall of 2007, Trout Unlimited hired the Biodiversity Project to develop an outreach plan for their multi-partnered Driftless Area Restoration Effort (TUDARE). This effort focuses on restoring watershed health in the Driftless Area.

The Biodiversity Project was tasked with identifying ways that communications could support TUDARE's restoration efforts, and produce a flexible outreach plan that could be implemented over the following five years.

To accomplish this task, the Biodiversity Project facilitated a one-day planning meeting with the members of TUDARE to identify who they needed to reach (i.e. their target audiences), and what they needed those audiences to know, feel, and do in order to accomplish the goals outlined in their strategic plan. We also brainstormed possible activities to reach these audiences and identified available resources. Following the planning meeting the Biodiversity Project conducted informal interviews with potential partners for coordinated outreach efforts, and collected and reviewed existing public opinion data and relevant academic research to inform our recommendations.

The outreach plan that we produced included discrete communications objectives, defined target audiences, desired outcomes for each audience, and proposed strategies and activities to reach those audiences. Additionally, we provided specific message, messenger, and pathway recommendations.