Communicating Social and Environmental Issues Effectively by Reed Betsy;

Author:Reed, Betsy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2020-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Once you have created your pen portraits, it’s important to also create a “negative pen portrait.” A negative pen portrait represents a group of people you don’t want to work with or who are not a good fit for your organization. Having this group identified helps with outward communications so you are not attracting this group.

A quick word on this: once you have sketched out a picture of your positive pen portraits and actual stakeholders for your communications or engagement exercise, you can then begin to make an educated guess as to what their attitude and receptiveness to the social and environmental issues you’ll be communicating (O’Neill, 2018).

If the issue is high-risk for your organization, it is definitely worth focus-grouping or testing messages and approaches. Once again, remember this: you are not your audience. So what you think might work might actually be off-putting or simply fail to land with audiences. And if that’s the case, what’s the point? Your brilliantly crafted communications approach might end up being at best a waste of time and resource and at worst could create backlash or a crisis. There are plenty of cautionary tales out there about brilliant creatives, communications teams and organizations who’ve put something they thought was truly great out there and have maybe even won awards for, if you hark back to the 1980s Chevron example in Chapter 1 – award-winning on one hand and held up as the gold standard of greenwash on the other.

Don’t get caught out by failure to remember that you are not your audience and all you need to do to find out what works for them is ask.

When it comes to ensuring messaging and communications tactics and channels are effective, especially when the stakes are high around complex or controversial social and environmental issues, don’t make assumptions. The good news is that you don’t have to guess; you can simply ask.

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