The Fish Habitat Web - Online Presence and Communication Tools

In order to thrive, Fish Habitat Partnerships must communicate clear and compelling messages to their stakeholders and interact effectively with their partners to ensure that on-the-ground projects are prioritized, produced and evaluated in a collaborative environment. Online web presence and other communications tools can serve a number of purposes to achieve these goals such as: displaying a recognizable brand and coordinating consistent messages; increasing awareness and legitimacy from key partners; actively engaging local and regional stakeholder groups across a broad geographic area and from multiple social and scientific disciplines; enabling access to data; soliciting, reviewing and prioritizing project proposals; showing how and when to use habitat conservation techniques; and informing key audiences of project successes and partnership opportunities. Fisheries biologists and habitat conservationists face a fast moving world of information technology. Interactive websites, social media, mobile device applications, streaming video and many other new media formats are available in addition to more traditional communications tools. Determining how to communicate well and which tools will deliver the desired outcomes is not easy. It requires a strategic approach to analyzing the situation, defining desired responses from key stakeholders, creating key messages, and positioning them to elicit the response necessary for successful fish habitat protection and restoration. Designed to serve the needs of the partnership, communications can be an up-to-the-moment two-way street that broadens the opportunity for full participation by numerous stakeholders and improves accountability and transparency. Building an evaluation process into the strategy up front provides an opportunity to test the tools and modify them for more effective impact in the specific context that defines a particular partnership. Drawing on examples of web design and electronic tools built for existing fish habitat partnerships and related natural resource management organizations will demonstrate how these tools can meet a number of the challenges faced by fish habitat partnerships.