Telling them over and over and over again

One of the things that used to really amaze me when I was a journalist at the BBC was how difficult it was to communicate even the simplest messages. Myself, and the small team who worked with me, would spend hours carefully honing radio and TV scripts. We would find suitable locations and spend hours interviewing just the right person before editing a final piece for the main news bulletins. As the correspondent, I presented the piece – and would be completely perplexed when the following day a member of the public would stop me in the street and challenge the report, obviously completely misunderstanding the point. Even friends who had knowledge of the subject would “get it wrong.”

As we all know, communication is not what A says but what B hears. The truth I learned in 20 years of national and international broadcasting was that if you want a message to stick, you have to say it over, and over, and over, and over again. You know those irritating earworms – songs that you can’t get out of your head? Or TV jingles from childhood that you can still remember? Think how many times you must have heard those before they stuck. And those messages were often reinforced –TV, radio, billboards and magazines all ran the same adverts to drive the message home.

The same is true about any communications with the public. I was involved in the water industry in the U.K. in 2012 when we had an extreme drought and were welcoming visitors from all over the world in an Olympic year. Droughts come slowly (on the whole) in the U.K., floods come fast, so in this case we had time to work across the sector to ensure we had the same two or three messages about using water wisely. Government, regulators, industry and even some NGOs were all saying the same thing. The message stuck and water use moderated.

People these days are disconnected from agriculture. The sector’s understandable concern about yields and weather doesn’t impact the public directly, and the public has lots of other things to be worried about. So we in agriculture need to find ways of working with friends and allies to help people understand what we do and get our point across. For example, in the U.K., we at the Crop Protection Association (similar to CropLife Canada) have been working with Greenpeace to try and stop people selling professional crop protection products to consumers online through organizations like eBay. The agriculture sector does have some catching up to do in explaining what it does and why, particularly when you compare us to environmental NGOs, but our experience is that people are willing to listen. You’ve just got to be willing to tell them over and over again!