Corporate Season's Greetings

How to send seasons greetings on behalf of the company and still be simple and personal? The closer people are to us, the more personal and direct (face to face, phone, sms) we convey our best wishes. Privately most people still send greetings cards by normal mail. Companies are learning to avoid the footprint of the traditional greeting card and increasingly send electronic greetings. What can they do to increase the satisfaction of the receiver and add to their reputation? A few tips:
Design a card yourself and insert it in the text window of the mail. Don't use free or commercial online greetings cards. Use a photo, a drawing or painting. Be careful with music or video (time and audience). Make sure the message is short, simple and personal. Don't forget your company's tagline and website. Have staffs send the card to their own relations. Individual mailings cost more time but offer staffs the possibility for an extra personal message.

Illustrating climate change tipping points

A picture says more than a thousand words when we talk about the climate change tipping points. "A few decades ago we thought that melting glaciers in the Himalayas would be an issue for our grand children, a decade ago for our children, but today we realize we will have to cope with it ourselves", said A.K.Singh, Air Marshal, India Air Force (retired), during a conference in Paris, early November. John Navis took the photo of Rongbuk Glacier in the Mount Everest range at the top in 1968. The photo at the bottom he took in 2007. See the short video of the Greenpeace expedition and Novis' story.

Climate change: the opposite of chess

Metaphors can help to communicate difficult concepts. During a conference in Brussels earlier this week, Ambassador Olof Ehrenkrona compared the complexity of climate change with chess. In chess when you reach the end game there are less and less pieces on the board. With climate change it is the opposite: the closer you get to the end game (implementation measures) the more pieces are on the board. He quoted Clemenceau: "la guerre est une chose trop sérieuse pour être confiée à des militaires". Similarly we cannot leave the combat against climate change to the environmentalists, we need to bring in all sectors and listen to them to find the right solutions.

Effective project presentation

How to engage in effective project presentation and how to steer projects on main policy lines? My client asks me to attend a meeting of the advisory board of the organization. Project managers present their projects. They sum up activities they have undertaken. They can go on for hours. The board - it is the first time they are briefed on the projects - starts asking questions about all kind of details. Soon the meeting reaches the point of micro-management. Later I am asked how to avoid this. I share a simple format that allows an advisory board to stay at the main policy level. It is advisable to keep the presentation short not more than 5 - 7 minutes and allow enough time for questions and feedback.

Project debriefing: biting your tongue

A debriefing session with the donor on the results of the project is an exercise of talking and especially listening. The client I am working for just had such a debriefing. I had proposed to do it this time differently from his normal routine of giving a long presentation and answer questions. So we started with shortly reformulating the objectives of the project. Then we showed a short video with the highlights of the process and products. Afterwards we asked questions: what was most meaningful for them, what questions the images triggered, to what extent the project met their expectations, how it added value to their policy and what next steps they would advise us. We had to bite our tongue, not to start giving more information, just listen and recapitulate. This way we collected useful feedback and building bricks for a follow-up, partly 'owned' now by the donor.

Form follows function

The communication objectives of the anniversary celebration of an organization are to improve its image and public relations. The seminar and party on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Netherlands Committee for IUCN were a statement about the relevance of the Committee and its core functions. The attendance by the key stakeholders, the venue of a redesigned old gaz factory, the vegetarian and biological food, the pleasant and time conscious facilitator, the party for the personnel of all member organizations - it all supported the messages of the seminar: we need nature and therefore we need transformational change. I don’t remember much details of all the messages of the speakers. They represented the various aspects of international biodiversity conservation in the Dutch context. There was not much looking back, and much more looking forward. The presence of the Queen, the Minister, the DG of IUCN and conservation celebrities upgraded the event and the Committee to a level, that it now can capitalize on for its core functions: convening and mobilizing. For short video click here.

The core brand value of climate change

Metaphors are often the best way to communicate complex issues. Take climate change. "Scientists and politicians still frame their observations in terms of 'if by 2050 the temperature rises by 3,5 centigrades…', says Richard Leaky at a seminar for the 30th anniversary of the Dutch Committee for IUCN. He uses the story of that train loaded with highly toxic and inflammable chemicals in the station of a mountain city to frame the core of the climate change issue. “The engine driver just returns on the platform from the cafeteria with a coffee in his hand and he realizes that he has forgotten to put the train on its breaks. He sees the last wagon disappearing from the station. What should he do? Warn the people down the mountain to get away as fast as possible? Ask colleagues along the track to jump on the train? Run himself after the train and to try to stop it? The issue of climate change is not if that train will pick up speed, derail and cause a disaster - it will! It is too late to talk about if the train picks up a speed of 30 or 60 kilometers! The engine driver hast to acts fast now, run and make others run after the train to try to slow it down and ultimately stop it. That is the core of the climate change issue."

Invest in preparation and facilitation

People support what they help to create: meaningful involvement is key in any process of change. To create positive change for biodiversity on a local or sub-national scale participatory action planning is often a good investment. To guide such a process successfully one needs three disciplines: project management, strategic communication and facilitation of group processes. Based on these disciplines Ramsar has published a participatory action planning guide for managers of a wetland site or river basin. The tool is designed to develop a wetland outreach plan, but managers of any landscape can easily use this guide to develop or update any management plan. The material provides the manager with insight and tools for the interactive processes of clarifying the context, charting change, validating ideas, and moving to action. For a manager the success is in enough time for the first phase and in finding a skilful neutral facilitator.

The footprint of websites

A usable website has a navigation which can be used intuitively by its customers. Design and lay out should help a user to stay on track and find the information he is looking for. As a regular user of environmental websites I often get very annoyed when looking for information. It is much easier and faster to use google or Wikipedia. High time for these organizations to invest in usability research? Usability is a new discipline that focuses on human-computer interaction, communication and engineering. It helps to improve websites, mobile phones and other new media by testing interfaces, observing and measuring user behavior and factors that influence that behavior. It leads to advice how to increase user satisfaction. It also helps to reduce the footprint of the organization, says Mercedes Sanchez. She is specialized in usability research and wrote about the relation between usability in the private sector and its effects on the environment.

Leadership messages for change

"Few challenges facing America -- and the world -- are more urgent than combating climate change. Many of you are working to confront this challenge....but too often, Washington has failed to show the same kind of leadership. That will change when I take office." Yesterday President-elect Barack Obama set out his vision on combatting Climate Change in a short video. Addressing the US Governors Climate Summit, Obama emphasized his enthusiasm for the Poznan Conference and promised that his administration would mark a "new chapter in American leadership on climate change." On YouTube I saw that his video in one day already had more than one million viewers. Change needs leadership. Leadership makes strategic choices in communication modalities to get the messages for change out, so we all can buy in.