Storytelling as a tool for outreach and engagement of landowners

[Leslie Horner]

Over the last year, NNFP has been partnering with the Swan Ecosystem Center (SEC) in Condon, Montana to develop a strategy to connect with, inform, and engage new landowners in the Swan Valley region. Land in the Swan Valley has undergone ownership changes in recent years that include—like many other places around the country—some second-homeowners and retirees moving to the area to enjoy a quieter rural lifestyle. Although SEC has an active base of landowners who already are engaged in forest stewardship practices, connecting with landowners in rural areas can still be challenging--especially landowners who are seasonal residents.

Ultimately, the goal of forest landowner outreach is to inform people of the needs and opportunities for forest stewardship, and to encourage landowners to adopt new stewardship practices (e.g. thinning to improve forest health, providing wildlife habitat, avoiding the spread of invasive species). When landowners can see others who have already gone through some of the learning process and who have experience with certain practices, it becomes easier to picture themselves also undertaking the same forest management activities. In the Swan Valley and in many other rural communities, “landowner profiles” can be an excellent tool for outreach.

NNFP visited the Swan Valley with a graduate of Ohio University’s acclaimed Visual Communications program to develop multimedia landowner profiles that can help meet SEC’s outreach objectives. Landowners were interviewed about their experiences with actively managing their lands, including how they came to understand the need for various management practices. The interview questions were carefully planned so that a “story” of owning and managing land would naturally emerge in the interviews. The telling of a story has a much greater impact in 1) attracting attention, 2) achieving retention, and 3) affecting behavior than simply telling an audience what they should be doing.

The footage from these interviews, in addition to still photos and sounds recorded while visiting forest stewardship project sites, will be combined into a series of short multi-media presentations to be shared on SEC’s web-based Forest Stewardship Handbook. Because some landowners don’t have or use high-speed internet, the landowners’ stories will also be compiled on DVDs that can be easily distributed. We can already tell that there is excitement among landowners (not to mention NNFP and SEC staff) to see how the stories come together, and what we heard as landowners shared their experiences with us illustrates how much potential there is to learn from one another.

Keep a lookout in the next few months--we’ll share some of these landowner storytelling products as they’re ready. Also, please feel free to contact me at [e-mail] or [e-mail] if you’d like help crafting interview questions, would like to chat about ideas on how to get started on a similar project, or would like to learn more about the Swan Valley project.