Over the last weekend in February, the SFFI team traveled to Greenwich, CT to facilitate a Tools for Engaging Landowners Effectively Workshop for the Hudson to Housatonic (H2H) Conservation Initiative. After learning about targeted marketing, audience segmentation, and reviewing New York and Connecticut data from the National Woodland Owner Survey, H2H members split up into 4 groups to work on a communication plan. While the groups chose to work with unique target audiences and chose different engagement activities, all were working towards an end goal of either land conservation or increasing stewardship behaviors.
When one of our senior facilitators became ill after day 1 of the workshop, our fearless research assistant, Rachel Plawecki, stepped up to the challenge and facilitated a group for the remainder of the workshop. We are thrilled that the newest member of our team is learning to apply her work with SFFI in the field.
While some workshop participants had previous exposure to targeted marketing techniques, many were new to the field. One participant noted “This workshop has changed the way I think about environmental outreach in general, making me much more aware of the need to make the message relevant to the needs of the target audience, and to keep the goals manageable, especially in this age of information overload.”