Tagged: audiences

Managing the Psychological Distance of Climate Change

Climate change is a notoriously ‘distant’ risk for most people – it feels ‘not here’ and it feels ‘not now’. Anyone who has had any experience trying to engage the public on climate change will likely recognise the challenge of overcoming the so-called ‘psychological distance’ of the issue, and bringing climate change ‘closer to home’. There is a lot of...

The Uncertainty Handbook: A Practical Guide for Climate Change Communicators

If you have ever struggled with the communication of uncertainty, then this handbook is for you. It distills the most important research findings and expert advice into a few pages of practical, easy- to-apply techniques providing scientists, policy-makers and campaigners with the tools they need to communicate more effectively around climate change…. This handbook offers some strategies for closing the...

The Buzz on Buzzwords: Do Americans get the sustainability jargon you’re using – and does it make them want what you’re selling?

It’s 2015, and green is exponentially more mainstream these days. It’s a selling point for many major global brands. It’s plastered all over product packaging. It’s the star of Super Bowl ads aimed at the American heartland. And we all know (and may be a little weary of) the lingo that goes with environmental marketing: Green. Eco-friendly. Sustainable. To say...

Communicating bigger-than-self problems to extrinsically-oriented audiences

This report presents an overview of the results of research conducted with a pool of volunteers from Cardiff, Wales, for whom extrinsic (or more materialistic) values were held to be particularly important by comparison to the UK population at large. This research focused on the effects of asking participants in the study to reflect for a few minutes on why...

Limitations of Environmental Campaigning Based on Values for Money, Image, and Status

Since 2009, we have been suggesting that there is a potential danger in those aspects of the Value Modes approach which argue that campaigners should attempt to motivate pro-environmental behaviour by connecting such behaviours to aims like money, image, and status. We have carefully grounded the case that we have advanced in the peer-reviewed scientific literature on values. Because some...