Marketing consultancy

 

Natural England - Public education scheme
Providing an effective community engagement template

Situation

• Growing public access is increasingly presenting conservation problems.
• The consultant was engaged to examine the issue of growing human and dog disturbance at a range of sites within the European Marine Site’s (EMS) coast (stretching from Gibraltar Point, Lincolnshire to Winterton-on-sea, Norfolk) with particular respect to threatened coastal populations of ground-nesting birds.

Response

• A coherent programme of community engagement under the banner 'Share-with care'® was created. During the pilot this consisted of:
• a brand suggesting people be more aware of their impact on wildlife.

Click the image to see the PowerPoint storyboard

• a programme of local community presentations (12-minute a/v) - conservation volunteers being trained to deliver a cascade of messages.

• a comprehensive website fully detailing disturbance access problems and indicating various simple remedial actions.
• an innovative credit-card sized reminder card, specifying simple behaviour guidelines.



• an online incident recording system

Results

• On the pilot's completion there was strong anecdotal evidence of the scheme successfully conveying the message that, as access rises, so people need to behave more responsibly towards animals and plants.
• In practice the North Norfolk website underpinning the communications campaign performed extremely well:
• although only 1200 reminder cards were distributed during the pilot, the only way the public could be alerted to the site's web address was via this card.
• 500+ unique site users found and used the web in the space of five months and together they clocked up over 34,000 hits.
• representing a massive 40% response rate.

• From the healthy website return, it was concluded that if applied consistently along this coastline the snowball effect the scheme ultimately sought to create (of peer pressure to police others' behaviours) could be secured inside 10 years.

Value Added

It was acknowledged that a radically improved method of community engagement had been created that would help to solve a local difficulty. This was to be considered at the national level - however budget cuts intervened.

Since 2010 additional pilot work has been undertaken with the Forestry Commission and Suffolk Wildlife Trust. As a result this template, usually delivered via a workshop, has undergone significant refinement.