Marine conservation in nonprofits: An analysis of advocacy and outreach campaigns

Despite vast amounts of policy action and awareness-building around marine conservation issues, evidence suggests society has pushed itself past planetary boundaries. Environmental campaigning is one of the methods used to relay a message and to persuade stakeholders into policy and management actions that protect marine resources. However, very little work has been completed to assess the state of environmental campaigning and to determine best practices moving forward. This research applies three methods to analyze marine conservation campaigning: a cluster analysis of campaign outputs; semi-directed interviews with campaign managers; and the Q methodology to quantitatively assess opinions on the current discussion surrounding environmental campaigns. We propose three recommendations: 1) target audiences should be defined and messaging should be tailored to those groups; 2) values-based messaging should become more prevalent within campaigns; and 3) funders should understand the importance of messaging and cater granting schematics to include campaign development.