Building a strategy
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About This Document
It is important to be intentional with your climate messaging. A climate communications strategy can be built into your current plan or a newly developed organizational communications plan. Once your key messages are developed, whether for acquisition projects or a community initiative or any work your land trust does, you can consistently weave them into internal and external communications.
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Building a strategy
It is important to be intentional with your climate messaging. A climate communications strategy can be built into your current plan or a newly developed organizational communications plan. Once your key messages are developed, whether for acquisition projects or a community initiative or any work your land trust does, you can consistently weave them into internal and external communications.
Building a climate communications content calendar
Don’t treat climate communications as an add-on to your existing workload. Land trust communications staff and volunteers are spread thin as it is. Without proper commitment from board and executive leadership, as well as a well-defined content calendar, climate communication can often fall to the bottom of the list and not be treated like a programmatic goal.
Establish a content calendar with a team of communications and program staff and volunteers. Encourage the team to identify where climate change messaging can be folded into upcoming projects, campaigns or events on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis.
Check out this example of a climate communications plan, including a communications tactics chart, that Northern Virginia Conservation Trust created to provide a road map to identify opportunities to incorporate climate messaging into their everyday workplan and workflow. NVCT has a one-person communications team who supports the entire organization with content design, communications and outreach, and some philanthropy support.
Media relations and climate messaging
When preparing to pitch an earned media story on behalf of your organization, consider if and where a climate impact angle could be incorporated. Did the land acquisition project have a high climate resiliency score? Did a citizen science project contribute to protecting a climate-endangered species? Did a volunteer organize a successful community event to address impacts of a changing climate?
Earned media is an effective tool to test messages before explicitly communicating a climate commitment to your core supporters and to reach new audiences who may exhibit an interest in climate but are not existing land trust supporters.
As you craft an earned media pitch, be sure your team can answer the following questions:
Is it local?
Is it timely?
Is it relevant to the reporter’s focus area?
Is the story new or unique?
Can you provide the reporter with a diverse cadre of storytellers?
Once you’ve identified that you have a climate angle to incorporate in a media strategy, incorporate these actions into the planning and preparation of your media representatives and materials that will be shared.
Identify the overall topic for the story and determine how or where a climate angle will be incorporated. Will a reference to climate impacts or solutions be shared in the project description or a quote from an organization representative?
Prep your staff with climate-related talking points ahead of any media interviews. Be sure those talking points reinforce your organization’s climate messaging slate or mission focus.
Select messaging that is clear, concise, relevant and of interest to reporters and news readers/listeners. Your story should not be heavy on scientific data.
Diversify your interview list. Identify volunteers, board members, organization champions or local topic experts who are comfortable sharing their stories or experiences. Reporters enjoy representing voices directly from the community in addition to land trust staff or subject matter experts.
Oftentimes, the most successful story placements include providing a reporter with women, young people, people of color as interview subjects.
If a traditional media pitch is not the right approach or not successful, consider placing an op-ed from a board member or executive director expounding on your organization’s work and relationship with climate impacts and resilience.
If your organization is considering paid advertising, analyze the return on investment before investing in one or more mediums. Determine the budget, goal and intended audience. Then make sure those parameters align with the need to spend advertising dollars. If your ad budget is prohibitive, explore multimedia advertising, streaming radio and social media influencer partnerships before investing in print ads.
One example of a successful media pitch was when CTNC pitched an exclusive story of a collaborative land acquisition project to a local reporter in Asheville. The story was featured on the front page of the newspaper and resulted in new and increased donations. Check out the press release CTNC sent and the resulting story.
Check out these resources for further education
Check out videos from land trusts across the country highlighting their climate communications work.
Biodiversity & Climate Resilience
Saving Land for a Changing Climate
Conservation is Climate Action
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