STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION PORTFOLIO
Save Western Monarchs
Mobilizing conservation efforts to save a monarch migration on the brink of disaster.
STRATEGY
Conveying the scope of a crisis without succumbing to despair; mobilizing immediate action without creating false hope.
When I first heard the news about western monarch declines in late 2018, I was floored. Devastated. Overwhelmed. When we shared the news publicly in early 2019, I saw firsthand that our audiences were reacting similarly to how I did. And who could blame us? At that time, the western monarch population had reached an all-time low of 28,429—down 99.4% from the 1980s, when they numbered in the millions.
But of course, we did not have the luxury of despair. In order to stabilize what remained of the western monarch population, we had to take definitive, well-planned action—and quickly.
This included building a comprehensive communications plan that was part alarm bell, part crisis communication, part public service announcement, and, above all, a compelling call to action. This was an unwieldy task within an overwhelming situation. So, we broke it down into manageable parts, and delegated tasks to various experts across multiple teams at Xerces—particularly Endangered Species Team biologists and communications staff. We handled our individual assignments while maintaining open lines of communication with one another. From start to finish, it was a frenetic and highly effective process!
We decided on three distinct communications stages, all of which involved a coordinated, multiplatform strategy spanning our website, blog, social media (including custom Facebook frames; see logo at top of page), press releases, print media, enewsletters, and more. Although we cast a wide net—even garnering headlines around the world!—we primarily focused on reaching California residents. This was done in a variety of ways, ranging from direct outreach to local partners, to targeting California and Nevada residents on social media platforms (an effort that spanned multiple teams within the organization). We also tailored messaging to that region, including references to the size of different cities in California (see Design section).
Stage 1: Conveying the scope and severity of the situation without plunging our audience into despair. In our announcements about the latest population count, we kept our pronouncements crisp, clear, and factual. We did not sugarcoat the severity of the declines or what this meant, because we needed our audience to understand the scope of the problem. However, we primarily used emotive adjectives for the solution, e.g. “crucial conservation effort,” rather than the troubling situation. Imagery (discussed further in the next section) was similarly somber and factual. And, as with any crisis situation, we kept a close watch on how our audience responded. As the Web and Communications Coordinator, I was checking our social media multiple times a day to respond to concerned audience members (referencing our carefully-crafted internal FAQ document for this purpose), and to keep a finger on the pulse of the wider Xerces community. Our awesome audience was understandably upset, but determined. It was time to stoke that fire.
Stage 2: Exhorting our audience to fight monarch declines. We pivoted quickly to this emotive, generically action-oriened stage in order to prevent our audience from plunging into despair (sensing a pattern?). Those who were feeling discouraged were nudged into a more mobile, motivated frame of mind. The majority of our audience was in a fiercely motivated mindset; we wanted them to stay there. We kept communications short and factual, but added in strategic bits of emotive language, including a powerful quote from our executive director: “We are not going to be the generation that witnessed the loss of monarchs in California and stood by and did nothing.” This was the stage before we had a fully fledged Western Monarch Call to Action (a very extensively researched and well-planned document crafted by conservation biologists + communications staff in a short timeframe). So, a fiery-yet-nonspecific quote about taking action was perfect for this short stage in the campaign.
Stage 3: Pivoting to tangible steps partners and the public can take to support western monarch conservation. Our audience was perfectly primed for the Western Monarch Call to Action by the time it was ready for distribution (an impressive turnaround time, given the depth and breadth of the document!). At this point, our main objective was to communicate the five distinct steps we wanted our audience to enact:
Protect and manage overwintering sites in California,
Plant early season nectar sources and milkweed in California,
Protect monarchs and their habitat from pesticides,
Protect and restore monarch habitat throughout the West, and
Contribute to western monarch research.
Although we maintained a crisp and factual air in this final stage, we lightened the mood just a little. This was the hopeful portion of the campaign. This is where our audiences could put boots—and shovels!—to the ground and make a difference. This shift affected our word choice, visual design, and the tone of blog and social media posts. It was certainly felt by our audience members, who expressed less despair and more determination as time went on. It was a quickly enacted AND enduring mobilization of resources on an impressive scale.
REVAMPING FOR ROUND TWO
The original campaign spanned the first three months of 2019, and was reprised occasionally until the next count of overwintering monarchs was performed in November 2019. At that point, the population size was not significantly changed; it was slightly higher but still less than 1% of historic levels. The situation was still dire, but we also seemed to have avoided any further losses, which was good!
As I had seen throughout my time working at this science-based conservation organization, it was too easy to get bogged down by details and lose the narrative. We had to maintain clarity about the situation. Even though the numbers were slightly different, it was a negligible shift. That is how we framed the situation.
Western monarchs were still in grave peril. And yet, we also had to massage our messaging to ensure that we didn’t discourage the folks who were already working so hard to protect and restore monarchs and their habitat throughout the West—and we knew their work had made an impact!
We complimented their efforts while emphasizing the need to keep going. The foundations for this level of nuance were already present in the bracing, tough-but-hopeful-yet-not-too-optimistic messaging we’d developed the previous winter. We were able to make the pivot, refresh the campaign, and keep pushing for more western monarch conservation as we moved into 2020. We were also able to reuse many of my designs from the previous year!
DESIGN
Getting straight to the point with crisp, clear imagery.
Typical Xerces Society imagery during my tenure as the Web and Communications Coordinator was vibrant in color and concept. In contrast, this topic necessitated a somber mood and palette. I utilized Xerces’ brand colors (including their nature-derived logo colors and the gray tone that is featured in each graphic in this series). The hue of the orange text was borrowed from a monarch photo that I used in the campaign, specifically the outside of a monarch’s wings (which have duller coloration). These natural hues blended seamlessly with the photos I used in each graphic, and created unity among all campaign images.
As previously discussed, messaging for the Save Western Monarchs campaign came in three stages: conveying the magnitude of the problem, exhorting our audience to fight for the monarchs, and explaining concrete steps to support the struggling population. I designed images for each of these stages of the campaign—including my personal favorite: the chart showing the scale of the monarch declines (“for every 160 monarchs there were then, there is only one left today”). That piece was painstakingly crafted from a monarch photo that I isolated from the background, creating a cutout image that I formed into a grid. This simple and precise image shows the staggering scale of the population decline. Less effective (but an intriguing idea nonetheless) is the graphic comparing the populations of Los Angeles and Monterey, CA. A social media square felt rather limiting for the purposes of expressing this concept, but it was at least an accessible reference point for our primary audience of California residents.
Blog content drove the middle stage—exhorting our audience to fight for the monarchs. I settled on a powerful call from Xerces’ executive director that was in our blog post on the subject: “We are not going to be the generation that witnessed the loss of monarchs in California and stood by and did nothing.” Selecting a different color and different capitalization for the words “loss of monarchs in California” gave me another opportunity to highlight the dire nature of the situation while simultaneously balancing the image vertically (with some white sentence-case text above and below the all-caps words in orange).
Finally, I created a series of graphics outlining the five steps of the Western Monarch Call to Action. While these images also have large swaths of gray, I incorporated a bit more color—and hope!—into these designs. Photos of healthy, happy monarchs and healthy, happy habitat were selected to help our audience envision the desired outcomes. Although each graphic has a wide band of a bright Xerces logo color running through the middle, the hues don’t feel “loud” or out of place. That is because each logo color was carefully paired with a photo that has a similar color within it—for instance, step one has a splash of deep blue sky in the backdrop, which closely matches the deep blue of the accompanying text box.
Unifying this CTA series is an extensive use of Xerces branding. In addition to creating visual unity, leaning heavily on Xerces branding ensured that, no matter how far these images spread, the audience would be drawn back to the organization leading this important conservation effort. That’s not simple self-promotion. In a sea of conflicting advice about the best way to support monarchs (including a lot of misinformation about raising monarchs at home), we wanted to position ourselves as the clear experts and make it easy for our audience to find us. Ultimately, the simplest designs can sometimes be the most extensively planned. That was certainly the case for this campaign!
OUTCOMES
Extensive engagement on social media—and on the ground in California!—has likely contributed to the population’s rebound.
The most immediate outcome of this campaign was the waves it made on social media. There was extensive engagement with each post, including a significant amount of sharing/reposting/retweeting (oh, the days when it was still Twitter!). It was not just a matter of quantity, however; the quality of engagement was also significant. As the social media manager, I was inundated with many great questions and offers pertaining to monarch conservation efforts—most of which were coming from our target audiences in California and Nevada. Social media became a nexus by which Xerces and partner organizations could connect with members of the public interested in supporting conservation efforts across the western monarch’s range.
I will say that the Western Monarch Call to Action in particular was a communications success. It was clear and accessible to lay people and experts alike, creating a shared understanding of what needed to be accomplished throughout the western US in order to save this iconic migration from collapse. It may be hard to quantify the impact that our communications had on this conservation effort, but I think it is safe to say that formed a foundation of shared purpose, mutual understanding, and clear objectives.
Most importantly, the western monarch population has recovered somewhat in the past few years. It is too early to tell whether this will be a sustained trend, but Xerces and partners are cautiously optimistic—emphasis on cautious. It’s critical to keep supporting western monarch conservation!