Brad Smith, Flickr

Every successful communications campaign is rooted in sound planning. Based on our 15 years of experience, public opinion data and in-depth evaluations, we know that simply producing a pamphlet or a website for the "general public" is not the best way to reach communications goals. Like any fundraising, policy or research initiative, communications campaigns require thoughtful planning, specific qualitative and quantitative goals and evaluation measures.

Biodiversity Project encourages organizations to develop comprehensive communications strategies that are tailored to specific goals. We provide planning services for individual organizations and coalitions to create sound and successful strategies. Our communications strategy services include:

• Facilitating logic model-based planning sessions where we help clients 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 refine target audiences, develop values-based messages and identify the best messengers and pathways (e.g. newspapers, public radio) to reach those audiences.
• 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.
• Evaluating strategies during and after implementation to stay current, adapt to audience responses and stay on target to reach pre-determined goals.

Bill Bumgarner, Flickr

An Example of Our Work:
Evaluating and Devising Great Lakes Communications Strategy

The Great Lakes region encompasses 8 states, two Canadian providences, millions of people and hundreds of organizations working to protect them. These organizations use a variety of successful and unsuccessful communications strategies, as individual groups and as members of coalitions. The Wege Foundation hired Biodiversity Project to help them understand current Great Lakes public communications strategies and devise a universal strategy that could be applied region-wide. Together, we sought to answer the following questions:

Who is doing what?
What topics are being communicated?
What types of communications are being used?
What tool and pathways are being used?
Who are the messengers?

To answer these questions, we created a survey that was sent to Great Lakes organizations throughout the region. From the survey responses, we collected key information that allowed us to create short- and long-term communications strategies that could be applied from Ontario to Ohio. These new strategies build on current work, fill in the gaps and create alliances that can strengthen current and future project. This strategy will be presented to potential funders as a means to unify preservation and restoration messages and tactics for the benefit of the entire Great Lakes basin.

Our work with the Wege Foundation to create a unified Great Lakes communications strategy was influenced by Biodiversity Project’s previous Great Lakes public opinion research and our own public communications campaign, Great Lakes Forever. As in most projects that we take on, our previous experiences gave us a solid foundation from which we could devise future strategies.