Breakthrough Strategies for Engaging the Public: Emerging Trends in Communications and Social Science

This document explains the consensus of a meeting of international biodiversity specialists on ways that biodiversity can be communicated in the media and to the public, including not only framing biodiversity as a species loss issue, but also placing biodiversity in a broader sustainability context, which includes lifestyle and over-consumption issues. It examines communication campaigning models and the challenges inherent in implementing them.

The conceptual frameworks and models of communication campaigns are presented, along with theories of behaviour and social change, as a context for analysing the following strategies: values-based communication, used to raise awareness and motivate action, whether personal or policy-related; strategic framing, used to redefine an issue in order to redirect public attention to social systems and policy change; and social marketing, focusing specifically on individual behaviour change. In addition, two emerging fields, conservation psychology and conservation sociology, are described as fields that can enhance these strategies.

An example from values-based communication relates these values-based attitudes of college students to message writing basics:

• Egoistic concerns focusing on the self (health, quality of life, prosperity, convenience);
• Social-altruistic concerns focusing on other people (children, family, community, humanity); and
• Biospheric concerns focusing on the well-being of living things (plants, animals, trees).

The message writing in response needs to:

1. Give audiences a reason to care about the issue by appealing to their values;
2. Describe a threat and often suggests who is responsible for the problem;
3. Provide a solution; and
4. Describe what action will help solve the problem.

The discussion of strategic framing, a way to define an issue as a public problem or to get people to rethink a problem from a different perspective, includes using metaphors to move forward public perception. Examples are: shifting from conflict to consensus and the polarity between the environmental and economic considerations by calculating the benefits of biodiversity as “ecosystem services” and “green medicine". A second example might use the metaphor of biodiversity as our “common heritage” to encourage stewardship for future generations.

Social marketing is the application of commercial marketing techniques to the analysis, planning, execution, and evaluation of programmes designed to influence the voluntary behaviour of target audiences in order to improve their personal welfare and that of society. Strategies are framed within concepts of product, price, place, promotion, policy, and partnerships to produce marketing for "target" audiences.

The document concludes that "[r]esearchers in the communications field... have developed useful recommendations for how to design and evaluate campaigns. Current communications strategies take an audience-centered approach in order to be more effective, recognizing that people have different values and different ways of engaging with the natural world. New strategies are needed for a whole array of solutions - from individual behaviour change to public policy change... Biodiversity advocates need to steer cultural evolution by “marketing” a set of environmental ethics and behaviours... The field of conservation psychology ...can inform communications and social marketing campaigns, as well as reinforce the developing field of conservation sociology. These new fields will contribute to a better understanding of the affective realm and provide meaning to the concept of biodiversity."