The conservation needs of an ecoregion are immense and require strong collaborative partnerships, sufficient resources, and a sympathetic public audience. At the core of these needs is a strong communication strategy that delivers the results of ecoregional assessments to targeted public and private audiences.

Documenting and sharing the methods, outcomes and data from an ecoregional assessment is critical. Well-documented science will garner credibility and leverage further science and conservation. However, communicating is more than just presenting the ecoregional report. It also involves understanding what issues and benefits the audiences are interested in and the agendas they will support.

To get conservation done “on the ground”, a number of different audiences will need to hear key messages and be moved to act. For any assessment there will be numerous audiences to reach out to, each with a different role in the conservation of the region’s biodiversity. A communications plan should be developed along with the assessment to distribute and leverage the results of the assessment and guide and catalyze outreach after the assessment is completed.

Effective communication and sharing of ecoregional assessments and associated products involves:

• Developing a communications strategy,
• Producing communications products and summaries that are accessible to key audiences
• Sharing these products and summaries through a variety of channels, and
• Ensuring products adhere to legal standards for sharing data and information.

Developing a Communications Strategy

A communications strategy is a documented plan that defines strategic and effective communications activities that will advance specific program goals and objectives. To begin to develop a communications strategy, it helps to ask a key internal question: What do we want to accomplish by communicating the results of the ecoregional assessment? For example, do you want potential users and partners to adopt the recommendations in the plan for use in their own planning?

It is important that you state – as clearly and as simply as possible – your overarching goal in developing a communications strategy. That will help keep you focused throughout communications planning. It is also important that all parties to the communication planning of the ERA explicitly agree on the priority audience.

In short, a communications strategy serves to detail specific communications objectives, tactics, resources and timing. It guides the communications planning, selection and development of communications tools, identification of key audiences, development of key messages, and is, essentially, the guiding framework for how the results of the assessment will be shared with various audiences. A communications strategy should be developed early in the ecoregional assessment process and involve a communications expert when possible.

The strategy should identify key audiences and determine the desired messages each audience will receive. From this, the team can determine the types of products and venues that will be most effective for delivering these messages. Finally, responsibility for production and dissemination of products should be assigned and cost should be determined.

It is important to note that there is a difference between a communications strategy and communications tactics. It is important that you decide upon your strategy and your audiences, before selecting your tactics. Tactics may include brochures, newsletters, PowerPoint presentations, videos, proposals and reports. Your strategy should guide your tactics, but because it is much easier to talk about tactics (e.g. a brochure) than it is to hash through strategies and audiences, people will tend to concentrate on tactics. It is important to guard against this.

Engaging marketing and communications experts
It can be very helpful (and is highly recommended) to involve a communications and/or marketing professional at the very beginning of the ERA process. Too often, communications staff are consulted after the process is complete when there is little time and money left for the project. Trying to piece together materials for various audiences after the completion of the plan takes much longer and generally lacks the quality of well-thought-out products/outcomes. Anticipating the need for marketing support during the annual planning process helps ensure support and staff time are available and dedicated to the project. Ideally, ERA communications are integrated into the program’s overall marketing/communications plan with staff time allocated accordingly. Early engagement also enables the planning team to ensure there is budget available for effective marketing/communications products and activities.

Communications and marketing professionals can help the team work through establishing a communications strategy, defining and segmenting audiences, creating messages, highlighting benefits and recommending appropriate deliverables, such as booklets, fact sheets, press releases, etc. They do not necessarily need to attend every technical meeting, but should attend enough meetings to be familiar with the ecoregional assessment process, outcomes, challenges, benefits, goals and the different audiences for the particular geography.

A Strategic Brief (see Resources section for examples) can be a helpful tool for working through communications challenges. Briefly, it is a document that identifies key audiences, content outlines, budgets and delivery dates for individual projects. It differs from a communications plan in that each tactic (for example, a brochure or PPT) would have its own brief. A communications plan is more comprehensive and strategic. A brief is more limited and more tactical.

Determining audience
Together with your communications support staff, key audiences should be identified. Understanding and identifying the audience(s) is critical to communicating ecoregional assessments. Reaching different audiences effectively requires targeted messages and targeted outreach efforts through a variety of channels. Scientists typically are a very technical audience that demand highly specialized, technical language. Audiences for government relations, marketing and philanthropy generally do not respond as well to technical terminology and jargon, and look for information through different sources. Partners and stakeholders represent another group of audiences requiring a unique presentation of information for effective communication.

Key audiences may include:

• Scientists
• Partner organizations
• Local communities
• Elected officials and other decision makers
• Government agencies
• Private funders (foundations, individual major donors)
• News media
• Philanthropy

It is important to learn about each of your key audiences. What are their needs? What are their values? How can the assessment help them solve their problems? Many audiences will be familiar to the planning team. However, there may be great variation in how well the team understands the audience, what the team wants from the audience, and what the audience wants from the assessment team. There are many ways to quickly gain additional information about audiences. One resource is community-based staff; another might be a volunteer who serves on a chapter or advisory board and who is active in community affairs. Newspaper archives are an excellent resource, because they chronicle most of the day-to-day discussion of issues at local, regional, state and national levels.

Audiences with such different needs typically mean that one single communications product or channel will not work for all audiences. If you try to use one piece with many different audiences, it may not be effective with any of your audiences. If you only have budget for one piece, the program has to decide which audience is the most important to achieving the ultimate goal of the Ecoregional Assessment.

Key messages
Once the key audiences have been identified, it is critical to determine what response you hope to get from each audience. To get conservation done “on the ground,” a number of different audiences will need to hear and be moved by the message to act. A “message workshop” facilitated by an experienced communications professional can help develop these messages.

When developing messages for specific audiences, it can be helpful to work through a series of specific questions. Remember, you are not your own audience. Try to think like a member of the audience you are trying to reach, then ask yourself these questions:

• What is the issue?
  This is usually the threats identified in an ecoregional plan -- for example, the decline of habitat for grassland nesting birds in the northern tallgrass prairie ecoregion.
• Why should your audience care about the issue?
  This is where you hook depending on your audiences' priorities. You answer this question in different ways for different audiences. You may talk about the loss of natural beauty, diversity, etc. to people who are already conservation committed or concerned. You may talk about the potential loss of revenue from lack of hunting or a slowdown in bird watching to governments and local communities concerned about their economies.
• What is your organization doing about the issue?
  This is usually drawn from the strategies identified in an ecoregional plan – for example, we are working with partners to conserve grassland landscapes. You also hook here depending on the interests of your audience. You may talk about grassbanking to preserve the health of the surviving tallgrass prairie, or land management techniques such as prescribed fire.
• What happens if we fail?
  Here is where you relay the urgency of the issue and what is at stake--loss of freshwater supplies, loss of a way of life, etc. Again, the sense of urgency depends on what your audience cares about.
• What do you want the audience to do?
  Here you may also draw from strategies. Do you want your audience to support legislation to protect grassland habitat? Or, give money to your organization to help protect the last remaining examples of tallgrass prairie surviving in North America?

It is important to note that in practice, the more detailed you can be in your answers, the stronger your messaging will be.

As you are thinking through the answers to these questions, remember that people buy benefits, they don’t buy features. For example, an advertisement might note that a car is white (the color is a feature), but mention that white cars get fewer speeding tickets and there is suddenly a clear benefit to having a white car.

Thinking about the value of the ERA in terms of features versus benefits can be very helpful. A feature is the preservation of a certain forest, the benefit of that is the protection of clean, abundant water supplies and preservation of habitat for a rare migratory songbird. Try to think of the benefits your audience values and work them into the context of your messaging.

• a report summarizing the intent, partners, approaches and outcomes;
• data sets-- both spatial and tabular, and;
• communications materials and activities such as brochures, email and published updates, e-newsletters, public presentations, media materials and events that will help galvanize conservation actions, the use of the information generated in the assessment.

Ecoregional Assessment Reports
Ecoregional Assessment reports, and the associated data, are critical to inform the next steps of future iterations of the assessment, designing appropriate strategies, taking actions and measuring progress. These products galvanize and provide information to guide action within the organization and with close partners. The ecoregional assessment report is not a tool that is likely to be effective with more general, non-technical audiences. However, the executive summary can likely be made very accessible to most audiences and, if you are working with a limited budget, can serve as a good general information piece about the report. To be effective in that way, the summary should be written in clear language (no jargon please) and should clearly define the urgency of this information and what its benefits are.

While the content of assessment reports will vary widely, we recommend that all reports contain (Groves 2003, WWF 2004):

• Executive summary
• Introduction to the ecoregion or planning region: Ecological and environmental descriptions, boundary justification, biodiversity status, land ownership and land-use patterns, threats to biodiversity, existing conservation areas, human population status and trends.
• Overall purpose, goals, and objectives: A brief overview of conservation problem(s) the plan is attempting to address, and the overall vision and goals for what the plan hopes to achieve.
• Overview of methods: A summary of the overall methods, with details in an appendix.
• Sources of Information, data collection and data management: A summary of the types of data used in the project ( e.g., remote sensing, expert opinion, governmental databases), their origins, and how the information is being managed and accessed (GIS, database software, metadata).
• Partners and stakeholders: A summary of the organizations and agencies involved in the planning process and the nature of that involvement.
• Identification of conservation targets: The elements of biodiversity or surrogates for them upon which the plan is based, the rationale for their selection, and assumptions surrounding their use.
• Setting conservation goals: A summary of the target-based goals for each of the conservation targets or groups of targets, and the reasoning and assumptions behind them.
• Gap analysis of existing conservation areas: A description of the management status of existing conservation areas in the planning region and what conservation targets are found within them.
• Assessment of population viability and ecological integrity: A brief summary of the methods used to assess viability and integrity, and the outcome of applying these methods to population and occurrences of target species, communities, and ecological systems and/or ecosystems in the planning region.
• Selection and design of a network of conservation areas: Criteria used to select conservation areas, a consideration of linkages and network design and minimum area requirements for species and processes and a map and list of selected areas.
• Assessment of threats to conservation areas: Results of threats assessments, including an indication of the scale at which the threat occurs (e.g., single conservation area, multiple conservation area, entire planning region).
• Setting priorities for action among conservation areas: Criteria used to set priorities for action among areas in the conservation network, methods for applying criteria, the rationale and assumptions used in the methods, a map and table reporting the results of priority setting.
• Selection and computation of measures: Identify indicators to measure viability, threat status and conservation management status of targets and measure progress toward goals. Determine and report current status and outline a plan for evaluating indicators and measuring progress toward goals into the future.
• Development of conservation strategies: A brief introduction to how this planning process will lead into the next phase of identifying conservation strategies at different scales, to help achieve the goals of the plan (i.e., implementation).
• Data gaps and future research/planning needs: Identification of critical data gaps in the planning process (e.g., aquatic ecosystem data, human threat information), planning needs in future versions of plan (e.g., incorporation of socioeconomic data), and assumptions to be tested.
• Conclusions, literature cited and appendices.

Consider publishing innovative methodologies or exportable results in peer reviewed journals. Full reports should be made available online. Conserveonline is a public, online library of conservation related materials. Over 50 ERAs are already available via ConserveOnline. We recommend uploading completed assessment reports to this library. Further, all Nature Conservancy produced assessments should be reported in the Ecoregional Assessment Status Tool (EAST) at http://conservationtools.tnc.org/.

Spatial and non-spatial data
Data products can be very valuable to others working in the region and beyond. Metadata is information about the data. Metadata reports should be developed in accordance with established standards relevant to your organization and/or major partners involved in the project (e.g. organizations that will maintain or share the data, government agencies that financially supported the project) . The Ecoregional Assessment Data Standard version 1.0 was released in August, 2004 and is available on ConserveOnline at: /docs/2004/09/ERA_Data_Standard_Version_1.0.zip. For details on managing data see Standard 5: Data Management.

Once appropriate metadata has been developed for a data set, there are several ways to make this information available to the public. Data clearinghouses compile data and make it available via the internet. One such clearinghouse is the Conservation Geoportal. Conservation Geoportal, a collaborative effort to build a comprehensive GIS data and map service catalog for the conservation community. This data catalog includes metadata records describing conservation GIS datasets and online map services.

Finally, prior to sharing data, make sure you are not sharing sensitive or proprietary information. See Legal aspects of information and data sharing below.

Communications and marketing materials
Products that reach out to external or non-science internal audiences vary widely. Products may include brochures, fact sheets, websites, cd-roms, posters or presentations. Read the Case Studies section below to see examples a range of quality products that have come out of past ecoregional assessments.

There are many considerations when putting out communications and marketing materials.

It is always important to date your materials somewhere on the publication and to ensure that you are using the correct logo, tagline and that the mission statement appears somewhere on the document.

If you worked with partners to develop the assessment, it can be helpful to list them somewhere on the publication. [see the Great Lakes: Conservation Blueprint for an example.] This can add another layer of credibility to people interested in the information when you show how many other organizations and groups were involved. If you are using another organization’s logo, please be sure that you have all necessary permissions and are approved to put their logo on the publication. A logo implies endorsement of the printed product and so the use of other organization’s logos must be handled with care. If, however, you are just running a list of organizations, businesses, governments that provided assistance on the assessment, it may not be necessary to get formal approval. Please rely on the assessment team members for guidance in those instances.

There are many ways to distribute the products and distribution strategies should be considered when you are developing tactics. For instance, the entire ecoregional assessment itself will likely require a very specific distribution strategy and probably has legal considerations that must be met.

For marketing/communications pieces, the standard is not so stringent since most of those materials are unlikely to contain sensitive information. There are a few common distribution channels worth considering. The distribution method will ultimately depend upon the type of publication and the needs of your audience.

• Direct mail – this method can be effective if you have a relatively lengthy list of people who should see the publication (brochure, executive summary, etc). This can be expensive so be sure that direct mail is an effective way of reaching your audience.
• Web site – maintaining a Web site with in-depth information can be a very good way to reach many different audiences. Because it is so easy to compartmentalize information on the Web, it is one of the few marketing vehicles where highly technical information/messages can co-exist effectively with information/messages intended for general audiences. Good design, clear copy and consistent updating are keys to having an effective Web site. One of the benefits of a site is that you can bolster your information with links to partners, technical reports and other Conservancy Web sites. [Please refer back to legal requirements of date sharing if you are going to post parts of the technical assessment on the Web).
• Presentations – it can be useful to carry publications to presentation opportunities for use as leave behinds. In this case, it is important to be sure that the content of the leave behind meets the needs of your audiences.
• Sharing with partners – sometimes partners are the best distribution method for publications. Partners occasionally ask for publications that they can use with their own internal audiences.

Legal Aspects of Information and Data Sharing

There are legal issues associated with the sharing of information and data to which to adhere. Additionally, there are some non-binding best practices that we recommend to ensure information is shared in the most appropriate manner.

In many cases, not all ecoregional assessment data can be made public. Formal data sharing agreements with data providers define the parameters by which information can be shared, if at all. An example of sensitive data are rare and endangered species Element Occurrences (EOs). Generally, agreements are made to represent these data at only a very coarse-level in order to preclude providing accurate location information to potential poachers, and agreements are made to ensure that databases with detailed information are not made publicly available. See Resources section for examples.

There are specific publication elements that are standard for most products. These include: 1) formal citation; 2) list of contributing participants; 3) contact information; 4) confidential information statements, intellectual property rights (copyright, trademark issues for TNC and materials used from other sources; and 5) Corporate Identifiers (Organization and partner logos). Contact your legal department to go over these issues before completing the documents for public distribution.