Week 10: Grace R Morrissey – Great expectations

For the outreach part of our project (public education about the invasive rodent nutria), I think we were all concerned about raising unrealistic expectations with the outside parties that we will be engaging with as key participants in our outreach activities.  We are primarily doing this as an academic exercise and none of us are really prepared to be involved beyond the duration of the term.

But as it turned out, there really is quite a big gap out there in raising public awareness about this issue. Our little effort might just be a drop in the bucket but at this point, that is a drop that can go some way in slaking the big thirst for information.

Personally, it made me realize that there is a whole genre of environmental issues out there that isn’t getting the kind of focused communication thinking that they probably deserve.  There are a lot of cute public campaigns out there about invasive species awareness but I am not quite sure if they are connecting with people beyond exciting some interest with the novelty of their approach (e.g. eradication by mastication).     

None of the people who attended our event did so out of idle curiosity. There’s already a certain buy-in there. They’ve already had some experience with the rodents, either as part of their job or as private citizens who probably owns a nutria-infested property or knows of one nearby.

Maybe this is one of those issues where, as far as public participation is concerned,  you really had to go with a micro approach, digging deep into pockets of constituencies who are ready to listen to you or at least have some prior investment into the issue that they will pay attention.

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4 comments to Week 10: Grace R Morrissey – Great expectations

  • kpokrass@uoregon.edu

    Hi Grace – You raise some interesting points about the lack of focused communication on environmental issues. It reminds me of the discussion we had in our strat comm class on monday about the role of communication professionals in the non-profit world. I’m interested to hear more about how your group’s event went and what the feedback was from the attendees.

  • Grace

    Thanks Katherine. I actually brought up this same point with Sam Ford in yesterday’s call because they talked about “slacktivism” in their book, saying it has its place in the bigger scheme of things.

    I agree that changing one’s Facebook avatar to reflect your support for a cause like marriage equality or saving the whales is laudable. In the first place, there are not very many avenues for people who are not directly affected by these issues to be involved anyway. Second, these are issues of national/transnational scale and they certainly need as wide an awareness-building as they can manage.

    With issues like invasive species management, you might just end up polarizing people needlessly with that kind of shallow messaging. Not only do people have mixed feelings about whether a rodent like nutria should be considered a pet or a pest, but the real change happens based on how people behave in so many little ways and not just on what they believe.

  • epriebe@uoregon.edu

    I completely agree. With our nutria project, the micro approach seems to be the way to go. I only wish we had learned that sooner! Rather than trying to broadcast the site to a wide audience, it would have been better to focus our efforts on fostering the relationships between the representatives of the various environmental groups and neighborhood organizations that showed up to the event. By working hand in hand we might have been better able to target our content efforts.

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