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.