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Module

Recommended Reading 7

? “How to write a press release” http://www.lunareclipse.net/pressrelease.htm

Abu Dhabi, UAE

4.3 Sustaining communication: Long-term approaches

While information quality is essential, active communication is another vital ingredient that needs
to be addressed in sustainability. People may or may not know about environmental conditions
to which they are exposed. In any case, it takes a long time to achieve changes in attitude (e.g.,
consumption patterns, prevention, minimizing health risks, participation). Practice shows that if you

want to achieve positive changes, a long-term approach is needed.

There are differences in the expected impact that various information and communication strategies
cause over time. Intense publicity over a short period of time may have only a short-term impact.
A short, intense mass media publicity campaign, for example is able to attract attention and even
cause action; but unless the campaign lasts, its effect will soon fade, as attention of the audience will

turn to another subject. On the other hand, research without or with little communication builds
very limited impact over time.

The recommended long-term communication strategy is based on continuous persuasion. It begins
with relatively active publicity in the beginning, and continues with a fast, consecutive improvement

of the information base.

Your work is almost done, but a last and important step in the work process remains: evaluation.

The evaluation step often is forgotten after the project is completed. However, information received
through systematic evaluation and feedback (i.e., through interviews with key people), will save
resources in the future. In addition, the possibility of providing feedback and influencing the process
will increase the sense of ownership within the community. Your evaluation experiences also could
be of use to other institutions planning to carry out a similar process.

Evaluation will be further discussed in Module 8, which deals with monitoring, evaluation and
learning in the IEA.

IEA Training Manual Workshop for the National Reporting Toolkit (NRT) 41