Communication analysis in advance can save money

The commissioners of the WCPA study on Protected Areas (PA) and Climate Change (CC) aimed to udate the PA community on CC and convince the CC community to give more attention to PAs. Unfortunately these two audiences are quite different in their attitude towards the subject: the PA community is not very familiar with CC, but quite favourable for a larger role and more resources for PAs. The CC community is hihly familiar with the subject, but not very favourable towards PAs: for them PAs have a rather negative image. The same messages that would update the PA community, would run a high risk of putting the CC community off. For them the communication residue would confirm their perception of the PA community as CC opportunists. Analysing in advance the beliefs, attitudes and knowledge of the audiences should have led to the conclusion that it would be better not to use the same media for different purposes to different audiences. In the end such analysis saves time and money and helps to realize the objectives.