Climate Communication Strategy
The project was done as a part of the Capstone in Creative Sustainability 2021.
Client: Environment Department of the City of Espoo
Teammates: Arunima Jain, Ásta Ágústsdóttir, Beda Rasinen, Oona-Elina Oikarinen
Mentors: Leena Lankoski, Mikko Jalas
Reseacher methods: Survey, Literature review and benchmarking
My Role: Literature Review, Survey Development, Visual Design and Strategy
Duration: 2.5 months, 6 cr
Project background 🏙️ 🌍
In February 2018 the City Board of Espoo joined the new Covenant of Mayors for climate and energy. Espoo has ambitious plan to reduce their carbon emission by 80% by 2030 as compared to the year 1930. To achieve these goals, Espoo has developed 60 measures to achieve the carbon neutrality target. Some of these important measures are electricity consumption, district heating and transport in particular. The brief given to us was to develop the climate communications strategy and plan for the city of Espoo to inspire citizens, businesses, research organisations and NGO’s to climate action.
Solution Summary 👍 💬
Based on all the work done so far which will be presented in the next slides, Our solution to the client’s problem of not knowing how and what to communicate to the youth of Espoo, is to form a climate communication guidelines.
The guidelines will have two main sections. First, it will present insights into our target groups’ interests that we have identified with a survey. Second, it will present guidelines for visual language and content that we will formulate based on literature review and benchmarking that we have done.
Approach
In the preliminary meetings with the client, the communication gap between the City's climate action and youth group of 18-30 year old surfaced. Since the youth is dispropotionately disadvantaged by the impact of global warming, it was of great significance to the city to engage the youth who are the future leaders of tomorrow to take active part in shaping ans supporting city's goals.
Hence, in combination of literature review and benchmarking, we shared a survey with the youth of Espoo to gain understanding of the central interest for our stakeholder group and which channels to engage with them.
Literature Finding
Through the literature review, we aimed to find out how could the city’s climate work be best communicated to the youth, and what kind of tone of voice would be most effective and appropriate. List of refences could be viewed here.
Benchmarking
We benchmarked other city's around the world, private sector to understand what what makes for an impactful communication.
Survey Findings
The aims of the survey were to find out whether the youth was familiar with the climate work of Espoo, where they had heard about it, what channels they used for finding information on climate change in general, which channels they preferred and their interests and motivations to hear about the climate work of the city in the future.
The survey received 152 responses, we distributed it through university networks, telegram groups and facebook neighborhood groups
Communication Strategy
Using the learnings from literature review, we created a basic anatomy of the communication structure.
Communication touchpoints
Using findings from the survey, we have proposed the following to be the touchpoints of communications.
1. Public places such as student cafeterias, supermarket, parking lots, metro stops etc.
2. Online presence on the most preferred option to be the Instagram handle of the city and the official website of Espoo.
1. Public places such as student cafeterias, supermarket, parking lots, metro stops etc.
2. Online presence on the most preferred option to be the Instagram handle of the city and the official website of Espoo.
Communicating at the action checpoint to encourage the green effort
Communication regarding waste segregation near housing
Communication regarding vegan food at cafeteria
Communication regarding local consumption in supermarket
Regular updates on Official social media channels
Better navigation to climate work on website
Reflections
Working with the public sector is the most exciting for me. This project not only gave me the opportunity to work with the regional city government but also presented our team with a lot of room for creative thinking to present something tangible in form of visual communication. Working with the city was a very rewarding experience as we got to present our propositions to the Mayor by the end of the project and they were quite willing to take forward some of the proposals and insights gained from the research. The project also made us empathise with the public sector organisation as the entire city is their stakeholder ranging from all sorts of organizations, residents of all age groups, it is the most important thing for them to be inclusive and maintain harmony among all the stakeholder groups. Even though our project had the initial aims of targeting the youth, we soon were wronged in our assumption that youth only wants to learn about the city's climate work through social media channels. This leads us to create city-wide communications that could be accessible by all stakeholder groups. However, we further suggested the city to conduct participatory workshops with the youth to create a dialogue and work more closely to bridge the communication gap.
