Communicating effectively

Greetings Everyone:

Here are two publications looking at effective communication. The first is about the effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations in delivering your message and the second is a more intellectually challenging look at consumer behavior and understanding your audience.

1. How many of you use Powerpoint? I certainly do and in many meetings I attend Powerpoint presentations are the standard tool for delivering a speaker’s message. I’ve seen good presentations – and very, very bad ones.

Did you know that PowerPoint was born on August 14th 1984? Originally called Presentation, it was renamed as PowerPoint in 1987. Today there are 500 million users worldwide. Presentation expert Max Atkinson has written a short piece on the BBC web site looking at what makes PowerPoint presentations effective and ineffective in his article The problem with PowerPoint, availableonline herehttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8207849.stm.

2. And now for something a little more cerebral on communicating effectively. Cracking the Green Code: Using a Values-Based Model to Improve Customer Communications and Marketing is certainly not an eye-catching title but I think it’s content is worth a little of our time. It’sis all about understanding what makes people change their behavior, ultimately what we are all trying to do in environmental communication. This 21-page publication by John Marshall Roberts definitely takes us out of our comfort zone into the scary area of human psychology. He notes studies in the USA showing that while a high percentage of people claim to be very concerned about the environment the broadscale adoption of environmentally responsible behaviors by the public at large is not in evidence. He then goes on to explain why such a large gap exist between people’s stated beliefs and their daily activities with regard to the environment and how our understanding of this can help us to adopt messaging tactics that will result in the desired behaviour change.

Even if this paper does not seem to give you the quick answer you are looking for, it certainly makes you think more clearly about why our messages so often fail. Definitely worth a read. You can download the PDF here http://www.ecoalign.com/node/312 ...

With best regards, Sandra Hails, Ramsar Secretariat
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