For Land TrustsFor Land Trusts

Crafting an organizational audience profile

Climate change has become a mainstream idea that is quickly rising above partisan politics. Older, white conservative landowners may not use the term “climate change” but they cannot deny the impacts of changes to their land and communities. Young people and people of color demonstrate a greater readiness to communicate about and support organizations tackling the climate crisis.  

Many land trusts have set goals to engage with a higher number of young people or people of color in the next five years. If your land trust has discussed or begun to explore the goal of “diversifying your audience,” climate change communication is a smart approach to building relevance and authenticity with non-traditional conservation enthusiasts who may not have otherwise engaged with your land trust.  

 Before you seek to build a messaging slate to communicate your work on climate, it’s important to determine who you’re communicating to. Each audience may connect with or be motivated by a different aspect of climate change and resilience. Evaluate and build audience profiles for your current and future audiences. Work with your team to clearly define who currently supports your organization and who you would like to recruit as supporters in the next 2-4 years.  

This activity only works if you’re honest with yourself and your team. If your core supporters are 65+ white, wealthy, urban, birders — that is an important item to note. Being honest about where you are currently will help set and track realistic goals to achieve into the future.  

Check out this example of an audience profile that was developed for an urban land trust in a wealthy, educated region of the Southeast United States. The staff concluded that the current land trust supporter represents a small and homogenous population of the coverage area and is not representative of the entire population in counties they serve. They will seek to broaden the appeal of community-based land conservation to audiences outside of their normal reach through segmented climate communications messaging.  

Resources and Tools

Conference

Rally 2022: National Land Conservation Conference

September 15 - 17, 2022
New Orleans

The motto of New Orleans is “laissez les bon temps rouler,” meaning “let the good times roll.” And that’s exactly what we intend to do at Rally 2022 in New Orleans, Sept. 15–17! For the first time in two years, the land trust community will come together in person at Rally, and there’s no better place than New Orleans to celebrate our community’s reunion and the Land Trust Alliance’s 40th anniversary!

Webinar

2022 Webinar All-Access Pass

An All-Access Pass gives you the key to more than 30 webinars on critical topics in land conservation.

January 01 - December 31, 2022

Articles

A Call to Action for Land Conservation in America

Source: 
Saving Land magazine, Winter 2020
Author: 
Andrew J. Bowman

I argue tonight that the land trust community must move beyond making a generalized case for wildlife habitat conservation and natural climate solutions. We need to be fluent in just how much can be achieved in the United States and aware of how much land conservation is required in the country to squeeze the full potential out of the land sector. We then need to commit to those goals and strategize how we will reach them. And because time is of the essence, we need to make monumental progress over the coming decade.

Articles

A Growing Force

Source: 
Saving Land magazine, Spring 2019
Author: 
Marina Schauffler

Land trusts can play a critical role in slowing climate change, especially when they engage their communities. Several new reports reaffirm the urgency of this work.

Articles

On Delicate Ground: Communicating about Climate Change

Source: 
Saving Land magazine, Summer 2018
Author: 
Marina Schauffler

When communicating about climate change, it helps to follow some common sense guidance from those who have successfully reached their targeted audiences.