What are the best practices for designing and evaluating environmental communication campaigns?

In environmental advocacy, a pivotal lesson is understanding the need to target and comprehend audience expectations. Non-profits often fall into the trap of assuming universal concern for their cause, leading to broad, low-impact messaging. However, by identifying and understanding the specific audience or 'persona', we can craft messages that resonate more profoundly. The struggle against ocean pollution exemplifies this. It isn’t a singular narrative but encompasses a range of stories affecting diverse communities distinctly. Recognizing these different perspectives allows us to create campaigns that truly connect.

It's crucial to set clear, realistic goals for your campaign. Align these goals with your mission, ensuring they are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, in our ocean pollution fight, instead of a broad goal like "raise awareness about ocean pollution," a more SMART objective could be: "Increase our social media engagement by 20% over the next three months by sharing weekly stories of impacted communities and marine life." This approach makes our objectives tangible and trackable, enhancing the effectiveness of our campaigns.

A general way to link common goals is through methods of equal gain to all parties involved. For example, the enterprise needs to upgrade its social image and the local community must know how to take care about environment, so The Enterprise can create a Park and offer jobs for teaching local community with environmental education.

D’après mon expérience il est important de combiner plusieurs outils de communication engageante en parallèle, et de faire appel aux parties prenantes déjà présentes sur le terrain, pour profiter de leur ancrage et collaborer avec des personnes déjà investies sur le sujet.

The strategies represent our overarching methods of conveying the message, such as education, persuasion, or mobilization, while tactics are the specific tools we use, like posters, videos, events, or petitions. For example, if our goal is to increase social media engagement by 20% over three months, our strategy might involve education and persuasion. We could educate the audience about the impact of ocean pollution and persuade them to take action. The tactics to support this strategy could include creating engaging and informative videos about affected marine life, sharing stories of communities impacted by ocean pollution, and hosting live Q&A sessions on social media to engage with our audience directly.

It is very important to be realistic when you design and execute environmentally-related strategies. Consumers and legislation are more aware of society's climate impact and other related issues, such as Greenwashing. For environmentally committed brands is an obligation to share their data to reinforce their messages, fighting against bad practices that use this huge humanity problem that our society must face urgently.

Current marketing and communication campaigns are not complete without a correct data evaluation. Technology has given us several tools to collect and measure how are we performing, and all of the data collected must be used to improve the next campaign's performance. It is important to define which tools and KPIs would be required to collect and study before a campaign is launched, becoming one of the first tasks when a campaign is being prepared.

Practices related to environmental communication will be the focus of several brands in the future. As they share their environment-related values, all the new consumers attracted by this method will be more loyal to it. Another important point to be aware of when talking about green or environmental marketing is related to greenwashing. Avoiding and fighting against it is very important. These practices are very damaging to our society and planet, so we as consumers must be prepared to detect the brands that are fighting against climate change.

We can also promote and actively participate in recreational and fun events with an environmental theme in preserved areas and involve local communities.