Participatory Planning for Communications Campaigns

Dear all,

On March 21, Conservation International's Global Awareness department and the IUCN Commission on Education and Communication jointly launched a new publication titled Designing a Communication Campaign: The 4-P Workshop. Please see the full press release below, and feel free to pass this information on to your local networks. The full publication can be downloaded from the CI website at: . CI and IUCN launch publication on participatory communication planning Conservation International and IUCN's Commission on Education and Communication release guide to the 4-P workshop Curitiba, Brazil - March 21, 2006 - Conservation International (CI) and The World Conservation Union (IUCN) through its Commission on Education and Communication (CEC) jointly launched today a publication entitled Designing a Communication Strategy: The 4-P Workshop at the 8th Conference of the Parties (COP-8) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), during a side event on Communication, Education and Public Awareness (CEPA) hosted by the Secretariat for the CBD and IUCN-CEC. This volume is the first in a series called Lessons from the Field: Conservation Awareness, which documents CI's experience in the area of communication and education and provides a practical guide for conservation practitioners. The 112-page book focuses on the 4-P participatory workshop, a creative process for strategic planning - the first and perhaps most critical component to design effective conservation awareness initiatives. The 4-P Workshop is based upon a methodology created by CI in which stakeholders come together over a two-day gathering to analyze conservation Problems, identify which Publics to target, and select the appropriate communications Products, which are then compiled into a Plan for action. The workshop ideally gathers between thirty to forty participants.

"The 4-P Workshop is a very simple and successful methodology to engage stakeholders in the conservation process. It can be applied in many scales - protected areas, biodiversity corridors, biomes, countries and even within an institution," explained Haroldo Castro, Vice President of Global Communications at CI and a co-chair for CEPA at CEC. Over the past decade, CI has organized 42 workshops in 18 countries, in six languages, to create conservation awareness strategies. In this first volume of the Lessons from the Field series, communications practitioners can follow step-by-step instructions for planning and conducting a 4-P Workshop and learn from on-the-ground case studies of how the methodology was used to build effective campaigns. The case studies invite readers to think critically about the application of strategic planning at different scales in Madagascar, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Brazil. In Indonesia, for instance, a national-level 4-P Workshop was held to tackle the issue of illegal logging. The communication campaign, implemented by a coalition of six organizations, attracted a lot of attention from the general public and decision makers because it linked the campaign to major presidential election in 2004. According to Denise Ham, CEC Chair, IUCN supports the dissemination of this publication because the 4-P methodology can help a number of communicators and educators to integrate communication into their conservation programs in the field. "CEC is currently producing a toolkit for conservation practitioners and this book will serve as a guide for those who facilitate participatory workshops on strategic communication planning," said Ham.

To request a copy of the publication, please contact [email protected] . A downloadable version is also available at CI and IUCN websites: and www.iucn.org/cec .