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Frequently Asked Questions about Ocean Communication
Frequently asked questions
We hear this on almost every discovery call: "I know I need help with my comms, but I don't know where to start."Start with one decision: what you want to change, and for whom. Then answer four questions. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who are you doing it for? What do you want the world to look like after? Pick one audience and one ask. Channels, content and design all come after that.
Because the ocean sector works differently from the consumer markets those firms are built for.
Ocean decision makers are rarely on Instagram. They sit in working groups, conference rooms and WhatsApp chats you'll never find unless you know the sector. A PR firm can get you coverage. It can't get you in front of the regulator, funder or partner who decides whether your work moves forward. That takes people who already speak ocean.
This one comes up a lot, and it's fixable.People tend to be great at science or great at comms. Rarely both. Your comms lead already has the craft. What they need is the ocean: a briefing on the science, a map of who matters in your sector, and a strategy to work from.Give them that, and watch what they do with it.
Social media is one channel. Communications is how your work reaches the people who can fund it, adopt it, regulate it or champion it.For most ocean projects, those people sit in boardrooms, working groups and closed networks. If your comms plan starts and ends with Instagram, you're talking to the wrong room.Start with who you need to reach. Then go where they already are.
The person who can act.Your audience is everyone who might see your work. Your actor is the one person whose decision moves it forward. A regulator. A program officer. A procurement lead. A fisheries association.
Find out who they are, where they gather and what they care about. Then make sure your work shows up there.
Rarely. And trying to is one of the biggest reasons ocean comms falls apart.Most ocean work has two (or more!) audiences: the people who buy, fund or approve it, and the people whose behaviour needs to change for it to have impact. They need different facts, in a different order.Keep one shared evidence base underneath. Then tell each group the part of the story that matters to them.
Treat it as a connection problem.Our CEO Natalie's first big job was on a wind turbine project in southern Ontario, where community opposition was driven by misinformation about bird deaths and health effects. That's where she learned that misinformation fills the gap where trust and relationships should be.Map each audience first. What do they think and feel? What are they hearing around them? What are they afraid of? Then speak to those fears directly, through people they already trust.
Make something people remember.A sponsored slot buys you a logo and a timeslot. A memorable experience buys you a conversation. Interactive sessions, a bit of visual satire, a small invite-only gathering: these draw the influential people a booth never reaches.Know who you want in the room. Then build the experience for them.
Intent.Misinformation is false information shared by people who believe it. Someone shares it because they care, or because it confirms what they already suspected. Disinformation is spread on purpose, usually by someone who gains from the confusion.Watch how quickly one turns into the other. The claims that offshore wind was killing whales started with worried people linking a rise in whale deaths to offshore wind survey work, a link NOAA's data never supported. They grew into a funded campaign, and then into politicians calling for a halt. The science never changed. The story around it did.
Yes, but how you correct matters more than whether you do.Lead with what's true. Repeating the myth in your headline gives it another round of airtime. Tell a short story that shows the truth instead of a list of rebuttals. And let it come from someone the doubters already trust: a fisher, a local leader, a researcher who lives in the community.Move fast. The longer a false story sits unanswered, the more it starts to feel true.
Talk early, and talk to the people most likely to worry.Data doesn't protect itself. A piece of verified science is only as safe as the story around it. When a project stays quiet until it's ready, it leaves a gap, and someone else's story fills it.Before you launch, map your audiences. What do they already believe? What are they hearing? What are they afraid of losing? Then build relationships while there's nothing to argue about. People who know you are far less likely to believe the worst about you.
Get it out of your head first.Founders tell us all the time that they're the one person in the company who really believes in this stuff. That's exactly why it's hard to hand off. Write down who you're talking to, what you want them to do, the messages that work and the decisions you want a say in.Then hand it over in stages. Start with the channels you care about least.
It depends on what's missing.If you don't have a strategy, a new hire will start making content with no direction, and six months later you'll wonder why it isn't working. It's one of the most common stories we hear.Build the strategy first. Then hire or train someone to deliver it. And if you bring in a consultant, they should leave you with more capacity than you started with: a plan, tools, and a team that knows how to use them.
Make it easy for them.Most researchers want their work communicated. They're just at capacity. Ask for the one thing only they can give: the finding, the why, and twenty minutes for an interview. Handle the rest.Then show them something their work achieved because of comms, which makes the next ask you have for them a lot easier.
Count what changed.An output is something you produced. An outcome is something that changed because of it. Forty posts is an output. A policy document citing your finding, a fishing association changing a practice, a community that can explain what your project found: those are outcomes.Outcomes take more effort to count than posts. They are still countable, and they're what gets you funded again.
It's a box to check. It tells you nothing about whether the videos did anything.Most comms KPIs get copied from the last proposal and pasted into the next one. Keep the commitment. Then add an outcome to each video: who it's for, what you want them to do after watching, and how you'll find out.Your funder still gets their numbers. You get to learn what actually worked.
At the start. Before the proposal is written.Communications is almost always an afterthought. The communicator gets brought in after funding and inherits targets they didn't set, a budget that doesn't cover the work and deliverables nobody costed.Bring them in at proposal stage. The projects that think about comms from the beginning go so much further.
Usually it stops. Right when the results show up and impact finally becomes possible.Plan for the end from day one. Which audiences need to hear your findings after the project closes? Who will carry that work? What will it cost?Build in a legacy plan and a handover, so your team or partners can keep going when the budget doesn't.
Everyone wants comms. Very few projects put their money where their mouth is. Budget from the outcomes you want, then cost the work it takes to get there. The usual gaps: no time for strategy at the start, no money to understand your audience, and nothing left once the project ends. The risks in not closing those gaps are no adoption, no knowledge mobilization, no project legacy, and possibly no refunding. Comms is an essential part of a project, not an afterthought. To avoid the risks of not having it, list every deliverable and every audience in your plan, then ask who will do the work and how long it will take. If the total looks scary, cut deliverables before you cut strategy.
Give it an owner.When nobody owns comms in a consortium, it rolls downhill to the partner with the least capacity, and it doesn't get done.Name one lead with the authority and budget to coordinate. Agree on shared messages and one evidence base up front. Give every partner a clear role and keep one calendar.When in doubt, give us a call.
Keep the meaning. Lose the method.Your audience needs three things: what you found, why it matters to them, and what should happen next. Try And, But, Therefore. And sets the context. But names the problem. Therefore says what needs to happen.If you can write a scientific paper, you can do this. It's just a new structure to practice.
No. Story is how people remember.Science is the truth behind everything you say. Every claim in your story still needs evidence, and that discipline protects your credibility. What damages it is overclaiming, vagueness and doom.A clear story built on solid evidence beats a dense report gathering dust on the shelf.
Start with a moment, then the fact.I could tell you the ocean covers 70% of the planet. Or I could tell you about the harbour seal that popped up beside my canoe when I was two years old. Which one will you remember tomorrow?Make your audience part of the solution, and give them a clear next step. And skip the doom. Fear without a path forward makes people tune out.
Because information on its own rarely moves anyone.We don't need more data to tell us oceans are warming. We have the science. What's lagging behind is connection: the stories that make the science matter and make the hard decisions easier to make.People act when a message connects to what they already value, comes from someone they trust and asks for something specific. Design for that.
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