Wild Ideas for Communicating Conservation through Events

Events. Registration lists. Caterers. Marketing. Venues. Rain plans.

Every time I drag myself home after a major event and crack into the caterer’s leftovers I ask myself is it all worth it? At the accredited Triangle Land Conservancy in Durham, North Carolina, it’s not just our aptitude for southern hospitality that led us to host 60 events last fiscal year. Our strategic plan and commitment to saving land for tomorrow are built on goals that make face-to-face interactions essential opportunities for communicating conservation. Along the way we’ve learned a few methods and lessons (like don’t host 60 events in one year) that we hope could help your land trust to better communicate conservation through events.

In the 35 years since TLC was founded, the Triangle population more than tripled and the majority of people moving to the area are young professionals. Less than 60% of the population now identifies as white and our home city of Durham is actually a city with no ethnic majority. But TLC’s demographics had not changed over the years: Our donors and enthusiasts aged right along with us and representation of new groups and faces in our organization was limited.

In 2014, TLC completed a strategic plan and realized that if we are going to conserve land for tomorrow we need our audience to look less like our past and more like the Triangle’s present and future. We think about our work and land projects through the lens of four public benefits: supporting local farms and food, connecting people with nature, protecting wildlife habitats and safeguarding clean water. These benefits are the basis for all of our conservation decisions and our communications, especially our events. That is why our signature event is no longer a fundraiser or a gala but an awareness event series, Wild Ideas, which started in 2014 to communicate the benefits of land conservation to new audiences in an engaging and interactive format. Less than four years later, we’ve now hosted 10 Wild Ideas events totaling 1,675 attendees, with 205 community partners, featuring 66 speakers.

Wild Ideas is a low-cost event that young professionals can attend after work to learn about how land conservation benefits them and how they can get involved. It’s always on a weeknight from 5:30–8 p.m. and is usually held at a co-working space to help appeal to our target audience: young professionals new to TLC. For each event we choose a fresh take on one of our four public benefits to keep things interesting and relevant.

Last year we hosted Wild Ideas for Getting Outside (“connecting people with nature”), Wild Ideas for Clean Water (celebrating Raleigh’s user fee program that “safeguards clean drinking water”) and Wild Ideas for Walnut Hill (“farms and food” featuring our new farm preserve). Once a theme is chosen and a date is set, we brainstorm sub-topics and partners who can help make the theme more digestible and appealing to various groups; then we present them with a challenge.

Five speakers are invited to create 15 picture-heavy PowerPoint slides that automatically advance after 20 seconds, giving them each just 5 minutes to make an impassioned public presentation on their topic. An emcee introduces each speaker and tells the audience of around 200 what they are up against. This twist on “Pecha Kucha” presentations (Google it) works to keep the audience engaged and the atmosphere high energy. For speakers, the time limit is challenging but helps them strip down to the essential message they want to convey. Many of them adopt this style for other contexts afterward.

Some of the presentation topics have included beer brewing, oyster farming, beekeeping, wild foraging, hog farming under conservation easement, heirs property and mountain biking. One five-minute presentation is always reserved for a member of TLC staff, board or other representative to share how our land conservation work provides community benefits and connects to the other presenters’ topics. Partners are the cornerstone of the Wild Ideas model — not only would our team revolt if we were solely responsible for all of the presentations at every Wild Ideas program, but inviting community partners to participate makes for more interesting content and always draws in new people.

Choosing who helps deliver our conservation message is one of the most important and impactful decisions we make. For a while we were doing well representing age and gender diversity in our Wild Ideas speakers, but lacked racial diversity. Now, we are always expanding our networks as we seek presenters and programs that increasingly reflect the diversity of our community in our events.

After the presentations, the audience visits “the Expo” of display tables of 20–30 organizations working in the chosen theme for more in-depth conversations about what’s happening in their community and ways they can be involved with us or one of our partners. This exposure to nonprofits, businesses and government departments builds community capacity.

The secret ingredient to prolonged interest and attention throughout this event is-big surprise-free food and beer. Heavy appetizers are our biggest cost, but it makes the event viable and is a chance to support vendors in line with our mission and theme. Our food is always local, served on compostable materials, and has even featured ingredients from farms we conserve. Beer is another opportunity to seek out kindred spirits since many local breweries make naturally inspired beers like our previous pours Beekeeper Honey Wheat, Till Farmhouse Ale or the Streamside Citra. We feature one local brewery at each event and now have a strong network of brewery contacts and a great reputation among attendees.

Wild Ideas is not a fundraiser. After starting out with pretty much just in-kind donations, opportunities grew with the event and now a mix of corporate and grant support covers all the event costs, including staff time to plan and pull off the event. However, after realizing in 2016 that only about 10% of Wild Ideas registrants were TLC members (meaning we really are reaching new people!) we couldn’t resist running membership challenges at six of our last Wild Ideas events, which inspired 172 gifts. Over 800 new names were added to our database through Wild Ideas, we regularly draw over 150 attendees, and approximately 50% of them are under the age of 45. Wild Ideas has brought us new board members, supporters, partnerships, publicity and, of course, a plethora of wild ideas. For Triangle Land Conservancy’s mission, events aren’t just worth it, they are it. The leftovers aren’t bad either.