ecomm-a-rama

I’m a day late for an official Earth Day post, but my brain’s still thinking green and it seems that I’m not the only one. Green is in. There’s a ton of buzz around “carbon footprints” - I think about it in my personal life constantly and it’s become an almost daily conversation within our organization.

We’re “greening” our offices, holding ourselves accountable for carbon expenditures by purchasing offsets, and exploring ways to cut back on daily commuting. We’re even poking around with ideas of how to relay the measures we’re taking to our supporters via the website and email messaging in the hopes to inspire more change.

A few weeks ago, The Wilderness Society released a new report on the huge carbon reserves held in forests. The report is great news. It’s exciting stuff! Yet, it’s also a scientific report and hence can be complicated in places, at least for this right-brained creature! So this got me thinking. What could we do to make the contents of this report a bit easier to digest for the average Jane like me? This is a question that I find myself asking on a very regular basis - one of the awesome challenges of working with a lot of brilliant people in a field that’s quite new to me!

I stumbled across an interesting website today that takes a bit of a different spin on this idea of an environmental footprint. It’s a subsite for Patagonia and it visualizes the footprint of several clothing products they sell. Now to be honest, this makes me - a bit of a shopaholic - a little depressed. Perhaps not what we’d like to go for…but the idea is solid - graphically showing the “footprint” makes an impact while keeping things pretty darn simple to understand.

There was also a little buzz about a map of the US carbon footprint that circulated last week, which, aside from the debates about its scientific merit, is pretty sweet to look at and evokes some interesting thoughts/questions/discussions.

This has gotten me thinking, are there things we could do within The Wilderness Society to make our good work stretch further, appeal to a larger audience, engage folks better and longer? Using some of these models to visually tell our story is definitely a potential solution.

Keep it simple…

If it were only that simple. So many videos and advocacy messages try to be all things to all people, mix in a million details or address the concerns of a committee of experts. Or all that.

But, really, explaining difficult concepts in a way that is easy to understand is tough. Even with the web’s ability to pile on video, photos, links, comments and more. As smart people (well, not me, just you) we tend to have all the details and want to use them.
PresentationZen has a nice little post about using simple tools - pen and paper in a digital video in this case - to help bring clarity to complicated topics.

In this case, the subject is video produced by the folks at CommonCraft. There is even one embedded lower down on ecommarama about RSS. The CommonCraft videos do a great job explaining complicated online tools in just a few minutes. The videos are mostly pen and paper drawings with a voice over. Sorta like back of the envelope sketches of an idea that have been taken to the next level. Well worth checking them out and thinking about how to hone a message to its simplest pieces. If you can’t explain it with stickfigures then its still too complicated?