Exploring the Effectiveness of Outreach Strategies in Conservation Projects: The Case of the Audubon Toyota TogetherGreen Program

ABSTRACT

Successfully engaging target audiences represents a key challenge for environmental conservation projects. In this study, we examined 354 conservation projects implemented across the United States with the intention of systematically exploring the relationships between different forms of outreach (in particular, message content and delivery) and self-reported project outcomes. Using end-of-program retrospective surveys, we found that experiential engagement and directly demonstrating and/or communicating the ease of potential conservation actions were most consistently related to achieving desired project outcomes. Although it was thought to be largely effective by project managers, we found that focusing on equipping audiences with new knowledge was negatively related to conservation outcomes. Measured outreach variables explained between 15% and 17% of the variance in project outcomes, suggesting a wide variety of unmeasured factors at play. We discuss insights relevant to engaging target audiences in future U.S. conservation projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication
• community engagement
• environmental behavior
• environmental education
• evaluation
• outreach
• threat reduction

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the TogetherGreen team at the National Audubon Society and the first five rounds of grantees and fellows of the Toyota TogetherGreen program. Without their collaboration, this research would not have been possible. We also thank Wade Vagias, Chris Wynveen, and Rebekkah Beeco for their support on the evaluation, as well as Michael Sorice and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of the article.

Notes

Although Stern and Powell (2013) recently conducted a large-sample comparative study of interpretive programs, dependent variables were limited to visitor-related outcomes, rather than impacts to conservation targets.

A search on Web of Science (November 7, 2014) using each term as a topic word reveals 63,126 and 7,632 articles for “biodiversity” and “ecosystem services,” respectively, since 2000.

Biodiversity, however, could also potentially reflect utilitarian arguments to some extent (e.g., preserving genetic variability for medical exploration or pest resistance).

There were no statistically significant differences (α = .05) in any measured outcomes between fellows and grantees, although fellows received additional training within the TogetherGreen program; moreover, the amount of funding provided was also not correlated with outcomes (Powell et al. 2013).

Although “urgency” is often used in TRA, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) (2012) recommends irreversibility for target-specific, as opposed to site-specific, analysis. WWF defines irreversibility as “the degree to which the effects of a threat cannot be reversed or the target restored if the threat no longer existed.”

Although this simplification weakens the precision of exact percentages, our interactions with awardees revealed much higher confidence in selecting a range rather than a specific percentage. As such, while precision was sacrificed, greater confidence was associated with the accuracy of reported threat reduction.

To further test the robustness of the linear models, we also ran PROBIT models for each outcome and found no meaningful deviations from the ordinary least squares (OLS) results presented in this article.

Adjusted R² values are more conservative than R² values, as they account for the number of parameters in the regression equation.

Respondents’ perceptions of the effectiveness of these strategies alone provide little insight into the strategies’ utility, as effectiveness may have been based on the quality of implementation, the audience response, or the respondents’ predispositions.