Julia Debes, the Director of Agricultural Communications for Working Lands for Wildlife joined our July session to talk about engaging your team or organization in communications. Julia shared some tips and trips about Working Lands for Wildlife’s communications strategy, which results in a collaborative approach to sharing messages about exotic annual grass invasion, land use conversion, woodland expansion, and riparian/wet-meadow degradation.
Julia pointed to her practice of regularly sharing product metrics and results as a way she keeps her team engaged in communications. She also talked about embracing the concept of “Spheres of Influence,” or the idea that each member of a team has different audiences they reach through different mediums. Julia uses this concept to demonstrate how each team member is connected to communications through their own particular work efforts. Working Lands for Wildlife’s communications team also regularly uses “content waterfalls” to maximize the reach of communications products—and to increase buy-in and support for content development. In Julia’s experience, clear advocation for your work leads to both organizational support in addition to further communications opportunities (like the Cattlemen to Cattlemen Episode Working Lands for Wildlife was able to produce!).
The amount of information Julia shared meant the first half of this session went a little over the 45-minute mark, but the robust presentation led to good discussions in breakout rooms. Topics ranged from getting better support for communications efforts to building communications programs from the ground up.
You can watch the recorded session here!
Resources from Julia’s presentation:
- Presentation slides
- Working Lands for Wildlife: https://www.wlfw.org/
- Content Waterfalls: https://newsletter.imagine-content.com/posts/wash-rinse-repeat-content-waterfalls
- Cattlemen to Cattlemen Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpsJnM-IrPY&t=5s
Want to join the Circle? Register here for the final two sessions of 2023! The Storyteller’s Circle is open to any and all people who support conservation communications in any capacity! We hope you’ll join us as we hone our communication skills together.
The Center for Collaborative Conservation and Intermountain West Joint Venture are proud to produce the Storyteller’s Circle in support of the Western Collaborative Conservation Network.
