As A Climate Messenger, You Need To Build Trust
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You’re at a family reunion, and your cousin-once-removed announces to the gathered group that electric vehicles are overtaxing the grid — and their drivers don’t pay their fair share of road taxes. You want to be a calm voice of reason in response, but how can you approach the topic of EVs — and the elephant in the room, climate change — without alienating the party-goers? You want to become a climate messenger who communicates effectively about climate change. You want to keep the family peace but also feel an obligation to illuminate the relatives about resilience and adaptation. You want to meet people where they are in their net zero knowledge bases but also move them to new understandings about our warming world and solutions available today.
Educating and mobilizing audiences to take action to confront the climate crisis is no easy task. We live in an Orwellian world in which false information is widespread — to the point where many everyday citizens don’t understand the climate-inspired dangers around them.
We’ve come to a moment where climate denial is no longer the default discourse among right wingers. Instead, we now see climate dismissal: diminishing, ridiculing, or rejecting the idea that climate change is worth any effort to study or try to slow. This faux realism minimizes the costs of climate change and, instead, celebrates high carbon policies.
As a climate messenger, you must such counter deceptive or misleading content that is manipulative and creates climate confusion. Be strong, though. You can help others to raise their voices, share problem solving approaches, and advocate for change. And you’re not alone. This gestalt will be achieved by a wealth of different people’s experiences, cultural contexts, and underlying values — which you can tap and grow into meaningful climate conversations.
Growing a Network of as a Climate Messenger
Climate communications are often positioned strategically within the trusted messenger principle: people believe people whom they trust, and they’re more likely to act based on the recommendation of that influential person. Friends, family, co-workers, doctors, and attorneys have typically been trusted messengers.
Now, in our social media-saturated lives, celebrities, rock stars, movie stars, top athletes, and authors have become influencers. When those influencers share their climate advocacy viewpoints, they provide an important platform. Generation180 and Climate Advocacy Lab recognize the power of influencers and offered a one-hour virtual event this week – “Trusted Messengers: Growing your network of climate advocates.” The goal was to “shift the narrative” and to help climate activists learn how organizations are mainstreaming clean energy and changing the energy norm by tapping the power of local leaders and creatives. The panel was composed of Gen180 executive director Stuart Gardner, Climate Power’s Kayley Hyde, visual journalist Sarah Lazarovic, humorist Esteban Gast, and AWS digital innovation specialist Apollo Gonzales.
The panelists posted the question, How are we supposed to build broad support for climate action – and bring new audiences into the climate fight – if we can’t reach them and gain their trust? The team acknowledged that AI content, fake news, and false narratives make people question what is accurate. People don’t know what or who to believe anymore.
The answer? We need more trusted messengers. From Tiktok influencers to school teachers, climate organizations are finding success by engaging fresh voices as trusted ambassadors in the climate movement. The webinar offered several strategic moves for climate activists to get their message out through influencers.
Even though we are in the moment in which climate action is absolutely necessary, not everybody agrees. We can do our best to make economic, cultural, and local arguments for climate action. But sometimes it feels as if the climate movement is getting gamed. The majority of people around the world care about climate, but they don’t hear about it everyday — unlike the amount of pro-fossil fuel news they hear all the time.
Clean energy has become increasingly polarized, yet more people in the US support climate action. Peer climate action inspires entire networks– it draws upon “high power knowledge” that’s translated on the micro, 1-to-1 level. Influencers can be football players or comics, HVAC installers or car sales people. What matters is the overlap — interpersonal affiliations in shared experiences emerge from shared affective experiences.
You cannot talk about climate enough, and the climate advocacy movement cannot spend enough influencers, according to Lazarovic. Influencers translate climate action into the personal realm. They tell condensed stories with emotion, so “get good storytellers to tell good stories.” They meet people where they are, say, in mistrust of fossil fuel corporates or billionaires.
Rather than having a strictly transactional approach with influencers, it’s important for climate messengers to be authentic with their audiences. They need to explain the importance of climate crisis in their own words so they can build awareness with their particular group of followers. They may be a little loose, notes Hyde, a little off the traditional brand marketing script, but they will make important inroads.
Final Thoughts
Has the climate movement embraced jargon that is frozen — as if scientists are talking to scientists? Think about it. How would you explain the climate movement to a friend at next week’s barbecue? In my doctoral program, each of us had to turn to someone in our cohort and explain our dissertation topic in a few sentences. Can you encapsulate why we should migrate away from fossil fuels due to our warming world? Can you help others to define greenhouse gas emissions, 1.5 C, how a heat pump works, etc.?
Key advice for working with influencers is to co-create. Bring in voices who are native to the social media marketing space. Work with artists and creatives. And remember to carve out in-person spaces where individuals can interact, ask questions, and be vulnerable. That is where the real climate progress begins.
If you want to be a climate content creator, keep in mind the following tips to make it a valuable, effective, and reliable piece of content, says the United Nations Department of Global Communications. Commonly accepted strategies to educate about climate action include using authoritative scientific information, conveying the problem and solutions, and mobilizing action. A communications product – such as a video, a podcast, a written article, or a graphic on climate change — has several important elements that you, as a climate messenger, must impart. Be informed. Keep it simple. Don’t be preachy.
Most of all, begin.
Want more ideas? Head over to Gen180, which uses Slack internally to develop knowledge communities. They have a resource library of about 10,000 texts. Their cohort trainings often last several months. Rather than a story of impending catastrophe, Gen180 works from the premise that we all need to hear a new climate story — one of hope, opportunity, and a better future. Gen180 offers a fresh approach that challenges climate mis/disinformation by sharing success stories of real people enjoying the benefits of clean energy today.
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