“Failure to Communicate?” Don’t Let It Happen to Your Group

Imagine Strother Martin, the crusty “Captain” in charge of the Georgia prison in the great Paul Newman movie “Cool Hand Luke,” walking into a meeting of your community group, tapping his baton on the palm of his hand and saying “What we’ve got here is . . . failure to communicate.”

If so, he’d probably follow up by saying “And a failure to promote your cause.” That’s because the make or break activity for many committees devoted to the environment isn’t fundraising, recruiting volunteers or even basic planning. It’s communicating. Too often the communications effort consists of “Tell all your friends” and “Who has the poster board?”

But to really raise awareness about your mission and your activities, you need to plan in advance. The best advocacy organizations in the country understand that to bring attention to their cause, grow their membership and raise more funds they can’t have a low profile. The good news is that you don’t need the resources of the Sierra Club to pull it off.

If you’re part of a local or regional committee, creating a communications plan can help you have a big impact in your community. The first step is to have a clear understanding of your mission. What are you trying to accomplish? The point of the communications plan is to engage a target audience about the mission of the organization.

What’s in a plan? In theory it can consist of a wide range of elements including audience identification, social media, print and local broadcast media, events, speaking engagements, alliances with like-minded groups and more. But in reality all that can be more than a local volunteer environmental committee is able to put together. Time availability is an issue and so is expertise. Best to look at the manpower (or womanpower) of your group, consider what you’re able to commit to and then follow Walt Whitman’s advice – simplify.

Here are some basics for your community communications playbook.

Build your team. Look around your community. Who else is doing something related to your mission? Increasingly more and more people are concerned about the environment, conservation and sustainability and they’re doing something about it in their own way. Take an inventory of who is doing what in town-appointed committees, ad-hoc groups, in the schools, businesses, churches, etc. You may find that there’s a diffused effort taking place that can become more effective if you communicate with others, organize and work as a team. Suddenly your committee has more depth.

Engage the local newspaper editor. If you live in a small rural community, a larger suburb or even a small urban area, get a meeting with the editor of the local newspaper and establish a connection. What’s the paper’s policy on op-ed submissions? Would he or she run a series of articles that you could provide or must everything be staff written? (If you make regular submissions, figure out your topics in advance. Don’t write one and then ask ‘Now what?’) Mention that your group is planning some community activities that could be worth covering.

To raise awareness you need consistency. Perhaps the most valuable part of a plan is that it forces you to think things through for the months ahead. What will you do to draw attention to your effort and when will you do it? Many local environmental groups have an annual expo or science fair. In that case, your early target audience includes sponsors and participants. Does your group host speaking events? Add some sizzle to your promotion to attract people who are only casually interested. Climate change, global warming, sustainability are broad, flat terms. Book authors, activists, inventors, business leaders all have a point of view. Find out what it is and then use that to create some buzz.

Think globally, write locally. Probably millions of trees have been killed creating books about global warming, sustainability, melting glaciers, Al Gore and other Big Picture news related to the environment. If you want local people to care about your work, come up with local angles. Trying to encourage people to reduce their carbon footprint? Perhaps someone in town has dramatically altered how they manage their house. Write his story. Any “old-timers” in your group who’ve been pushing alternative energy forever? Propose a feature article on them to the paper. Why have they stuck with their passion for so long and has anything changed? If you localize the global stories your community editor will be far more interested.

Create a “go-to” web site. You can really boost the standing of your committee in town if you make your web site a resource. List upcoming events, efforts of the “green committee” at your local high school, meetings by official town committees on matters of interest, links to other local groups, your board members and ways that people can get involved or make donations. There are numerous free and easy-to-use sites that can get you started. I like Weebly.com. It offers an unlimited number of pages at no cost and hundreds of templates to choose from for your design. The drawback is that you can’t post video and audio without moving up to a pay package.

Apply social media? Of course.  A Facebook page for your group will help to establish your identity as a committee.  The town newspaper or cable television channel might work fine for older citizens who aren’t interested or comfortable communicating electronically beyond email. But younger members often use social media as their primary way to communicate and you need to think about ways to communicate with different audiences. Social media is also ideal for volunteer committees because it is free. Caution: think of your team. Do you have someone who can spend time keeping the page fresh? If your Facebook or Twitter pages go weeks or months without being updated the only message you’ll be sending about your group is that you’re inactive.

Volunteer committees are limited in time and energy. You can’t afford to waste either as you struggle to draw attention to what you’re doing, increase membership or raise funds for operations. Commit to a good communications plan and you’ll accomplish all three.