Strategic Messaging: A Guide for Leaders and Officials

Why is Strategic Communication Important?

Resource management issues often require the participation of the public or landowners. Public and private organizations will often use strategic communication to encourage responsible behaviors, as an alternative to incentives. For example, state agencies in Louisiana use strategic communication to encourage the public to take actions that help protect residents during extreme weather events (Jarreau et al., 2017). Strategic messages have also been used in Florida to promote irrigation water conservation (Warner et al., 2015). Before prescribed burning activities, strategic messaging is used to address the concerns of residents in the wildland urban interface (WUI) and empower residents by promoting the development of Firewise communities (Kyle et al., 2010). Private conservation organizations and environmental advocacy groups also use strategic communication to advance in their mission. For example, the Genesee River Watch Initiative seeks to advance the protection of the Genesee river by educating the public and advocating for policies and programs that help protect the river (Genesee River Watch, 2019).

What is Strategic Communication?

Strategic communication is when organizations have purposeful communication with individuals inside and outside their organization to help reach set goals, or prevent conflict (Holtzhausen, 2008). Many academic disciplines (e.g., economics, psychology) contribute to the field of strategic communication, which encompasses marketing communication, advertising, public relations and political communication. Strategic communication is also an applied practice, so communication efforts are frequently evaluated to determine if prescribed goals have been met.

There are competing views about how to apply strategic communication. From a managerial perspective, communication is done to help advance a larger strategic plan (Hatch, 1997). Messages will often be transparent about the speaker's agenda, and speakers assume that audiences will respond rationally to the messages. However, a top-down approach to management can also be perceived as excluding alternative perspectives or ignoring some stakeholders' interests. There are also cases where messages have been designed to compete with other infiltrating messages. When audiences receive conflicting messages, the speakers' intentions on both sides often becomes obscured.

The emergent communication strategy is an alternative to the managerial perspective (King, 2009). This strategy is formulated from the bottom up and messages are derived based on context and ongoing communication patterns. The advantage of this approach is that it recognizes and accounts for how audiences may interpret messages (e.g., emotional responses), which is useful when there are issues of trust with the speaker(s). The emergent communication strategy is dynamic and sensitive to changes in conversations and the context. An intentional evaluation of the conversation among stakeholders (e.g., focus group) is often required for speakers to effectively engage in emergent communication patterns.

The Goals of Strategic Communication

There are commonly two goals for strategic communication in natural resource management. One is to cultivate social trust and the other is to provide information that helps empower audiences to engage in proactive or altruistic behaviors.

Psychology research has found that people are more likely to trust others who appear to think and behave as they would (Cvetkovich and Winter, 2003). In this case, communication efforts can be used to enhance awareness of the values and attitudes shared by stakeholders and the management organization (Vaske et al., 2007). This approach has advantages over conventional strategies of enhancing trust through greater transparency, because audiences do not have to invest in learning about the organization's processes and procedures, which can draw unproductive criticism.

When stakeholders trust the management organization, they tend to have positive attitudes towards controversial issues as well. For example, a study conducted in Alberta, Canada found stakeholders who trusted the wildlife agency would responsibly manage newly introduced wolves, also had positive attitudes towards the wolves and wolf reintroduction (Sponarski et al., 2014).

Importantly, trust in an organization is not always enough to convince all audiences of an idea. Some resource issues have a disproportional impact on different stakeholder groups. Personal experience with a potential hazard often makes the issue more salient to a person, which can make them more critical of the managing organization. To help those who feel most vulnerable communication plans should work to empower this audience by providing strategies that help them protect their own interests (Siegrist and Cvetkovich, 2000).

The best way to empower stakeholders, and encourage responsible behaviors, is to address their basic information needs. Without key types of information stakeholders may become fearful, which may lead to conflict. Fundamentally, stakeholders need unbiased facts or details about the resource issue itself. More than this, stakeholders also want to know what the community (neighbors, friends) is doing about the issue, how they as individuals can help solve the issue, how they may be able to adapt to changes brought about by the issue and how the government is working to address the issue (Jarreau et al., 2017).

Another way to empower stakeholders is to motivate them or give them an incentive to take action. Messages that describe the potential for personal gains often have a positive effect on attitudes towards expected behaviors (Jarreau et al., 2017). Messages that trigger psychological responses, such as "place attachment" and a "sense of community" can also be effective in promoting responsible actions (Jarreau et al., 2017; Kyle et al., 2010). Language that is designed to prompt responses from specific personality types (e.g., obligors) or stakeholder groups can help make messages more targeted in their effect (Fiske, 1992, Rubin, 2017). 

Challenges in Strategic Communication

There can be challenges in strategic communication, such as knowing when your messages may be making issues worse. Audiences that receive mixed messages about which actions they should take may decide to not take any actions, which can slow down progress towards planned goals. For example, landowners often receive distorted messages about the positive and negative consequences of controlling invasive species, such as honeysuckle, to enhance bird habitat (Rodewald, 2012). Knowing what other messaging or outreach is occurring around the same issue can help speakers find ways to streamline messages.

Some organizations may use compelling stories and emotional appeals as a way of working in opposition to the actions taken by another organization. Because this type of messaging prompts an emotional response, a rational counter argument (e.g., science facts, statements about long-term policy goals) may not always be effective. How people choose to respond will depend on how much they trust the organization, and if they have had personal experience with the hazard or issue (Siegrist and Cvetkovich, 2000). In these cases, communication practices that proactively seek to cultivate trust and empower stakeholders remains a suitable strategy.

Using Research to Enhance Communication Efforts

Because natural resource issues are often place-based, communication strategies need to be designed to match the context of the issue and the audience. Effective designs often involve primary data collection to help inform the design of messages, and these messages are then evaluated for their effectiveness with the target audience. For example, in New York the effects of information about deer contraception on attitudes toward suburban deer management was evaluated using a pretreatment measure of attitudes and a post-treatment measure (Lauber and Knuth, 2004). Researchers were able to make predictions about stakeholders' behavioral intentions by measuring changes in attitudes. However, data describing actual changes in behavior (e.g., fewer human wildlife conflict cases) should also be collected to verify if communication strategies were effective.

How information is delivered to key audiences can also have an important impact on the effectiveness of strategic messages. When issues are controversial, interactive formats can be more effective compared to methods where communication flows one-way (Toman, 2005). For example, a study in Norway found public preferences for deer management was more often determined by factors such as communication and relationships with the agency than by the personal interests of the audience (Gerner et al., 2011). Interactive formats may not be as suitable for stakeholders who are less aware about key issues. For example, a study found landowners who were uninterested and unaware of where or how to obtain basic resource information preferred information pamphlets compared to visits by resource experts (Butler et al., 2018). Testing which communication formats works best for which audience can help reduce costs and can lead to better outcomes.

Strategic Communication and Policy

Research-based message design and interactive communication formats are all part of the emergent communication strategy. In the past, management organizations tend to employ a top-down approach to resource management, with an emphasis on control and enforcement. The emergent communication strategy, however, is in agreement with new models of policy-making, like the policy cycle model, which emphasizes culture as an outside force on decision-making (Rosenbaum, 2013). More broadly, the emergent perspective also supports concepts of sustainability because it emphasizes the connection between the ethical treatment of the individual and the good of society and ecosystems (Forbes and Lindquist, 2000).

Citations

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