Climate Communications Product Analysis: Maine Coast Heritage Trust
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About This Sample
The accredited Maine Coast Heritage Trust created this fundraising product, which highlights some best practices in climate communications. Here's how this product showcases these recommendations for communicating about climate change.
This product was created by Bridget Macdonald and the Mass ECAN Climate Communications Expert Work Group, with input from Meaghan Guckian and Environmental decision-making lab at UMass for The Land Trust Alliance.
© 2018 Land Trust Alliance, Inc. All rights reserved.
The accredited Maine Coast Heritage Trust created this fundraising product that presents sea-level rise as a clear and present danger to coastal marshes, makes the case for why people should care, and positions Maine Coast Heritage Trust as uniquely qualified to address these threats on multiple fronts.
The annotated example below highlights some best practices in climate communications. Here's how this product showcases these recommendations for communicating about climate change:
1. Leading with politically neutral messages about conserving resources people already care about.
In the first two sentences, this piece offers three compelling reasons why anyone should care about the fate of salt marshes: clean water, commercial fisheries, and coastal infrastructure. By opening with a message about things that are key to the economy and quality of life in Maine, the author primes the reader to care that sea-level rise is an increasing threat to these and other resources.
2. Finding trusted spokespeople to deliver your messages.
Although there are no individual testimonials included in this piece, MCHT establishes a sense of trust by emphasizing the importance of collaborating with willing landowners, municipalities, and partners like The Nature Conservancy and the Downeast Salmon Federation.
3. Focusing on local climate change impacts and responses, rather than on the causes.
This piece is explicit about the severity of sea-level rise from climate change in Maine; in the worst-case scenario (a six-foot rise over the next century) all marshes, dependent species, and associated benefits will be lost. It is also specific about what MCHT is doing locally to address these threats — tidal-barrier removal, marsh restoration, protecting uplands — and why it is uniquely positioned to do so as “the only statewide land trust focusing on the whole coast”.
4. Avoiding technical jargon, instead using language that can be understood by anyone.
This appeal presents a four-part plan for protecting marshes with clear headings — Strategic Marshland Conservation, Marsh Restoration, Stewardship, and Statewide Leadership — followed by straightforward descriptions of what MCHT is doing to respond to sea-level rise on these fronts. Each description connects the dots between threats and consequences, and between actions and benefits. For example, protecting upland buffers to allow for marsh migration is critical to sustaining Maine’s “marine economy”, and tidal barriers “hurt Maine’s marshes” and deplete nutrients.
Rather than getting in the weeds about restoration, the author focuses on establishing a theme of partnership. The audience doesn’t need to know about marsh-migration modeling. They need to know that MCHT is working with others to align the resources and technical expertise needed to address a problem that spans multiple jurisdictions.
5. Selecting photos that bring your messages to life.
Scale: The appeal opens with a map that effectively communicates the scale of this problem, and simultaneously, the scale of MCHT’s response. With red dots, the map indicates area where MCHT is focusing — more than can be counted at a glance — and highlights marshes that are considered priorities on a state, national, and global scale. The message is: Maine’s marshes play a significant ecological role in our state, and beyond, and MCHT is covering a lot of ground to protect them “for tomorrow”.
What could be improved?
Because this piece is intended for an audience that is interested in ecology, it might have been nice to have included a quotation from a staff scientist contextualizing the role Maine can play in addressing this threat.
Communications case study in context
Rich Knox, director of communications for the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, tells the story behind this product.
Context for the product
We created this four-pager as part of a comprehensive fundraising campaign in order to better explain an area of our land conservation work that was difficult to understand, yet highly important to those with concerns with climate change and the ecology. We used an existing communications design template which was created to resonate with different audiences and their conservation interest– such as public access, ecology, and climate change.
Understanding the audience
Our audience for this piece was primarily folks who have an interest in the coast of Maine, and either are current donors or prospects that we would like to involve in the organization. We are always trying to meet people where they are, and a subset of our audience has expressed an interest in ecology and climate change. Donors are an extremely important audience because they have demonstrated through the action of giving that they care about these issues. We work hard at converting people that seem ready to act.
Framing the issue
We’ve learned it doesn’t work unless it’s a story. We take our lead from our field staff, and they were telling us that some of the most important work we’re doing from an ecological perspective is protecting lands upland from existing salt marshes….the “Marshes of Tomorrow”. At first thought it would be a hard sell; it’s not the rocky coast, it’s not the islands. But when you dig into the concept: Sea level is going to rise, where are the marshes going to go? It’s a compelling story. In order to be strategic, we need to protect more than just lands along the coast. You might be preserving upland forest, but those are the marshes of tomorrow.
Climate-communication takeaways
Stay within what you can do, and what it is your mission to do. You shouldn’t try to solve a problem that is unsolvable, but you should look at your work and ask yourself: What are we doing to address climate change? Think about the most salient points and try to tell a story with them. For five years, we have used a basic communication template that we contracted a designer to develop: cover, inside cover, main points, inset map, call to action. We have beautiful imagery, we always include maps, and we always distill the story into four points. This one wasn’t our usual sexy Maine island story, and it may only appeal to a subset of our audience, but you need to target your messaging.
