Environmental Communications

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The landscape and environment sector attracts extremely committed, passionate, intelligent people but it is not usually blessed with an abundance of resources to invest in developing and delivering a coherent, coordinated communications strategy. The focus – quite rightly – is on delivering for the environment and the community. Communications often take a back seat.

Your organisation may have some extremely effective communicators working at the sharp end of conservation, but it’s highly likely they will also have a ‘day job’ that involves delivering the important stuff.

Having someone in-house to plan, prepare, coordinate and monitor communications is invaluable, because it frees up frontline staff to concentrate on delivery.

The state of the UK’s environment has rocketed up the mainstream media agenda in the last few years. This – in part – is down to the sustained communications and campaigning efforts of organisations like the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts and a rapidly growing ecosystem of start-ups in the nature recovery movement.

As the Government rows back on its environmental and conservation commitments, public outrage over the broken promises escalates. The key objective for a proactive communications strategy is to harness this energy and channel it into engagement, action and – ideally – increasing membership, subscriptions and donations.

So what skills do you need to possess or be prepared to develop to become a confident environment and conservation communicator?

Knowledge

If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’re already involved or interested in landscape management, conservation or the environment. That’s great – knowing what you’re talking about is essential for credible communication. But is your knowledge wide enough to explain how a specialist environmental project fits into the bigger picture? Can you articulate this to a non-scientific audience in a way that will resonate with them? Can you simplify the messaging so that it chimes with a ‘lay’ audience without missing the key point? These are skills that can be honed on the job, where the ability to identify a story that will grab the attention of a hard-pressed editor under pressure to find an engaging story will secure valuable media coverage.

Imagination

So you’ve got a multi-million Pound peat restoration project that’s going to transform the biodiversity of the uplands on your patch, sequester tonnes of carbon and potentially earn the landowners thousands of Pounds in carbon credits. But how do you ‘sell’ this story to the local media? How do you photograph it in a way that will engage people? How do you counter the perception that ‘it’s just a bog…?’

Here’s where some creative thinking comes in. Around 70% of good communication stems from understanding your audience. The other 30% boils down to translating the message you want to communicate in terms the audience can relate to. This isn’t dumbing down – it’s meeting your audience half-way and making it easier for them to engage with your objectives.

Focus

Effective communication requires focus and working out where to direct that focus is at least half the job. If you’re targeting semi-retired professionals who have time on their hands to do some volunteering, a TikTok reel is unlikely to be the best channel to reach them. Similarly, if you’re trying to engage environmental science students to help out with some surveying over the summer months, Facebook probably isn’t the way to go.

Curating active accounts on ALL the social media platforms is almost impossible for one person, so you may need to stick with the most effective platforms for reaching your priority audience.

From a strategic communications perspective, focusing too much time on social media can be counter-productive. The substantive work needs to happen upstream of social media – making your website as good as it can be and ensuring engagement, outreach, sponsorship and membership pages are regularly updated and SEO-friendly.

Adding real value as a communications professional means prioritising the more substantive, strategic content to create a consistent, compelling and coherent narrative that runs through all your organisation’s communications and engagement. It takes time and commitment to deliver on this and devoting too much time to social media will seriously impact your ability to do this.

Project management

With so many moving parts involved, as well as focus, a coordinated communications strategy also needs project management skills. For many organisations, a project management approach to communications provides focus and the ability to monitor engagement and outcomes more effectively. Again, this requires detailed forward planning and preparation to create a ‘communications grid’ which should ensure that the assets needed to deliver an effective campaign are all in place BEFORE the press release is issued and the social media is launched. In a large and proactive organisation, merely keeping on top of all this is pretty much a full-time job.

Writing and editing

Outstanding writing and editing skills are central to a coherent communications strategy – for both external and internal stakeholders. Confident external communications starts with clear internal communications and the ability to communicate effectively within your organisation is fundamental. Much of the internal communication will be in a face-to-face context, but the rise of virtual teams and remote working means internal written communication needs to be as agile and effective as your external comms. Even if you opt for an ambitious ‘video-first strategy’ you’ll still need to write and edit scripts, press releases, web content and social media.

The foundational skill here is the ability to edit and repurpose information for use across different channels quickly and accurately. This facilitates a disciplined ‘create once – publish many times’ approach to the content to incorporate clear messaging, inspiring calls to action, vivid photography, short bursts of video and short and long form writing that is suitable for use across websites, newsletters, the internet, social media and YouTube.

The overriding aim is to create an agile, efficient publishing model designed to generate a constant stream of focused, useful, engaging content across multiple platforms and ensure that all this content is managed efficiently to enable rapid distribution and re-purposing.

Video

Video is becoming ubiquitous as an efficient means of communication, engagement, education and knowledge sharing. Consequently, having both video shooting, editing and presentation skills is a huge plus. You don’t need Oscar-winning film production skills, but a basic understanding of shooting short-form video together with the confidence to present to camera will increasingly be seen as pre-requisites for communications specialists in future. You might even consider a ‘video-first’ approach to your communications strategy – an ambitious goal, but certainly worth considering.

Qualifications

No formal qualifications are required for a career in communications, but Universities like York in the UK and Jönköping in Sweden offer post-graduate courses in environment and sustainability communications. For those who would like to pursue a career in environmental journalism, the National Council for the Training of Journalists provides a range of vocational qualifications designed to develop all-round writing, editing and journalistic ability.

Obtaining qualifications like these will sharpen your skills, reinforce your credibility with prospective employers and significantly expand your professional network, providing an ideal opportunity for sharing best practice and a route to future career progression.

Conclusion

Millions of people across the UK now understand that we are in the midst of a climate crisis, but a much smaller proportion understand what is being done, right now, to mitigate the multiple impacts of climate change.

Still fewer understand what action they can take themselves – or support through volunteering or donations – to accelerate the journey to net zero and the restoration of a more resilient, diverse, nature-rich environment.

Now – more than ever – is the time to for skilled environment and conservation communicators to inform, educate and engage our communities on how they can take or enable urgent action on climate change.

Mark Sutcliffe
Mark is editorial director of Salar Media Services, a content creation and strategic communications consultancy which specialises in working with charities and not-for-profits in the environment, conservation and sustainability sectors.

First published in CJS Focus on Conservation Support Services on 16 October 2023. Read the full issue here

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