Stakeholder Outreach: Effective Communication of Complex Environmental Threats

In this course you’ll learn how to improve your project management communication in your work environment and motivate and engage communities with clear communication to address complex environmental problems. As an environmental advocate or project manager, your active listening skills and effective communication skills are paramount to in person team members, remote teams, general employee engagement, and even more so for achieving success. The first step in solving complex societal and environmental problems is to rally support around the idea that there is a problem worth solving and that can be solved. This is achieved with good communication, teamwork, and clarifying data visualization.

This course will begin with storytelling as an effective communication skill providing powerful frameworks for establishing meaning and understanding about complex topics. However, better communication is not always verbal. A picture is worth 1,000 words (or more), and so the course continues with data visualization to help succinctly present meaningful data and engage stakeholders with powerful information. Additional communication strategies covered are the importance of presence, being confident and engaging as well as establishing trust and credibility. By improving poor communication skills and converting them into effective workplace communication across various communication channels on your project team with both verbal and non-verbal communication styles improves your environmental project management. The benefits of effective communication on workflow, teamwork, employee engagement, team collaboration, overall well-being of the project are seen in real-time as you improve your team communication. And finally, the course establishes the fundamentals of good presentations for project management, when presenting for stakeholders and project team members in-person onsite in your work environment, utilizing communication tools like zoom, or face-to-face giving a public presentation. We provide the effective communication techniques; using proven designs and techniques and the art of data and clear communication to increase engagement on your environmental projects. Whether it’s internal communication or customer outreach, the best communication process starts with a story.

Together, storytelling, data visualization, and presence can help to motivate stakeholders and give convincing clarifying presentations when managing large-scale complex environmental projects.

Module 1. Storytelling

Intro

Lesson 1. What is a story?

Lesson 2. How do stories work?

Lesson 3. Structuring your stories.

Lesson 4. What makes a good story?

Lesson 5. Who are you talking to?

Lesson 6. Narrative structure.

Summary

Module 2. Visualizations

Intro

Lesson 1. Data visualization Part 1

Lesson 2. Data visualization Part 2

Lesson 3. Conceptual diagram creation

Lesson 4. Photos in science communication

Lesson 5. Videos in science communication

Lesson 6. Storyboarding

Summary

Module 3. Managing stakeholders with stories

Intro

Lesson 1. Analyzing your stakeholders

Lesson 2. Finding stories that resonate

Lesson 3. The different types of stories for projects and programs

Lesson 4. Using stories to capture lessons learned for programs

Lesson 5.

Module 4. Persuasion and presence for environmental program and project managers

Intro

Lesson 1. Establishing trust through words

Lesson 2. How emotions work in communicating

Lesson 3. Crafting an emotionally compelling message

Lesson 4. Communicating bad news

Lesson 5. Identifying values and threats

Summary

Module 5. Presentations

Intro

Lesson 1. What is understanding – Know what

Lesson 2. What is understanding – Know how

Lesson 3. What is understanding – Know why

Lesson 4. Assembling a technical presentation

Lesson 5. Presentation preparation

Lesson 6. Delivering a presentation

Summary