A Community for Conservation Comms Pros

Hi, friends and colleagues, and welcome to the first Conservation Makers newsletter. I'm so glad you're here.

This idea of virtually gathering and catering to the community of conservation communications and marketing pros—and anyone even partially involved in making content—gripped me as I was planning my transition into consulting work after eight wonderful years at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

One of my proudest accomplishments during my time at TRCP was planning and moderating an event for conservation communications peers. The in-person summit took place at Orvis headquarters in Manchester, Vt., and we welcomed attendees to share case studies of their most successful recent campaigns, with presentations on tips and tactics sprinkled in.

The feeling of partnership at this event and the enjoyment of geeking out on the nitty, gritty details of the job with like-minded folks has been hard to replicate. No one wants to join another standing call. Events are expensive to produce and travel budgets are tight.

Then a client recently asked if I could recommend webinars, newsletters, or social accounts that would be instructive for communicators just starting out in the conservation and enviro spaces. I have been a part of forums for women in the business and found great professional inspiration from for-profit marketers, but there isn't much that is dialed in specifically for comms folks in our industry.

So, this is my humble offering—a low-bar way to check in with peers, find inspiration, and share stories and successes. My goal is to "gather" this community here weekly, aggregate trending marketing topics, profile intriguing people, and let the creative sparks fly.

OK, let's get into it.

_{(Do you know someone who would like to be a part of this? Would you be so kind as to forward this email?)}

Here are five things I can't stop thinking about this week...

• What Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, shared about the platform's multiple algorithms and how they work.

• This podcast on neuroscience and marketing, which talks about fascinating research on customer purchasing decisions. Apparently, the reward center of our brains activates when we see a product we want and the pain center activates when we see the price—there has to be a high level of reward and low level of pain to convince the customer to buy!

• Should conservation orgs take advantage of the option to put up to five links in the IG bio or just plow ahead with Linktree? Which links should they use? Should I do a post on this @kb.comms?

• Are serif fonts cool again? Designers, fill me in!

• Will my 3yo ever grow tired of dressing up like Santa Claus? (Yes, really, it's a whole thing.)

Here's one thing I had to look up this week...

SaaS: An acronym that gets thrown around a lot in the marketing newsletters and podcasts I follow. It stands for "software as a service" or typically web- or cloud-based digital subscription products. Think: Shopify, Salesforce, Dropbox, Netflix, and anything with a free trial period to get you hooked on the platform before you have to pay for use or additional features.

That's the bit of SaaS marketing that we can all probably learn from—give your audience something valuable for free before you ask for anything in return.

Finally, a quick exercise...

We've just come through the Memorial Day and post-Memorial-Day sales, and if you're like me and don't take the trouble to unsubscribe from anything ever, you were bombarded by emails about products and services you didn't necessarily want.

Take a peek at your Promotions tab: What brands did you hear from that you'd forgotten about completely? They need to clean their lists. Now, how guilty is your team of emailing folks who have been ignoring you for years? 😬 

Which subject lines actually managed to capture your attention in a sea of promotional messaging? They should be inspiration for your next email.

Well, that's all for this edition.

Next week: I'll unpack one of the juiciest copyediting debates of my career with the help of an expert who shaped every single story in the leading hunting and fishing magazine for 18 years. 👀👀

If this email was forwarded to you, please subscribe!

Have a great week,
KB

P.S. How are you? How did you like the newsletter? Send an email to let me know. I'd love to hear how you're doing!