Green Tracking Library

THE EGA TAPES

Session 23:
Media Strategies for Environmental Protection

Moderator: [Tape begins in progress] ...Pew Charitable Trusts.  We're waiting on Denis Hayes, he may be out building the majority now as we speak.  The approach of this workshop is that we're going to present two or three just examples of media campaigns that foundations have been involved in, just very brief presentations.  Then we're going to engage in a discussion.  I've passed around some questions there as you sit down, that I've asked the participants, the presenters to consider when they're both answering questions and making their presentations.  And they're questions that especially I would like to see answered, and I as a funder who is facing these funding proposals, I'd like to see answered.  However, if other good questions come up, we'll easily divert from these.  It's just a way to jump start the discussion when we get started.

So let's just start with--Josh Reichert, who is the director of the Environment Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts was to be here but he couldn't make the whole conference, and so I asked Donald to present what I was going to ask Josh to present, which was a campaign that several funders worked together on on the ancient forest.

Donald Ross:  It must feel good to be a three billion dollar endowment [Pew's assets], [audience laughs] I'm sitting in for Josh.  I want to really just give a very quick description of the media campaign that's been under way for about the last 9 months on the forest issues.

It's complicated because there are three organizations that are really involved in it that at various times have worked very closely together and at other times had a high degree of tension between them and not a great deal of communication.  And partly we funders are responsible for it because at the very same time two separate groups of funders picked two separate horses on which to lavish large sums of money to run media campaigns.  And despite great efforts to get them to work very closely together, it sometimes worked not as well as one would want. 

So as a result, there really were, it was a campaign.  And rather than use their names, because they're all called Ancient Forests, with different other names, the Americans for the Ancient Forests, Western Ancient Forests [Campaign], Ancient Forest Alliance, or something. 

There's one campaign was run by David Fenton of Fenton Communications, he's a full process public relations firm in Washington D.C. that has done a fair amount of activist political work over the years for mainly progressive and left wing types of organizations, foreign governments, etc.

The other major national campaign was the [Robert A.] Chlopak effort.  Bob is the former head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, the staff head and had a lot of background on political campaigns.  He was working for the past several years for Sawyer-Miller, which is a public relations, advertising, media strategy firm. 

And the third effort was the grass roots, was a more grass roots effort run by the Western Ancient Forests Campaign.  And their contribution to the media portion was to take a large log on a truck through the country, which was a guaranteed, in small towns certainly, guaranteed picture in the local newspaper, story on the evening news.  And that's what they did.  They spent months crisscrossing the country and have clips that all look remarkably the same from papers all over the country talking about forests.  And it's a relatively low-budget way of getting TV, radio, newspapers, etc. and the like.

The other two campaigns--when you talk about media, and we use that word interchangeably.  There's really two very distinct branches of the media.  There is the paid media efforts and there are free media efforts.  The forests, the log is the quintessential free media effort.  You just roll into town, put out a canned press release and it's a guaranteed, you know, story.  The paid media, the other two, and the Western Ancient Forests used no paid media, the grass roots campaign.  They only used free media.

The other two campaigns used a mixture of free and paid media.  The paid was mainly drive time radio in selected Congressional districts of members of the House Interior Committee and to some extent the Senate Agriculture Committee on occasion to try to drive home the forest issue and generate some community response.

But the larger effort of both the national effort--campaign--was the free media, the public relations.  And the Fenton effort I think generated a good deal more media than the Chlopak effort, partly because Chlopak's campaign was a political legislative effort as well and it wasn't simply a media strategy.  And I just want to, I'll just mention a few of the things, if we can pass this around, that they did. 

And Fenton uses this technique in a lot of his campaigns and it's pretty effective.  He gathered together four or five activists, Jeff DeBonis of the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, Andy Kerr, Michael Stewartt of LightHawk and the like, and scheduled intensive visits to major media centers, New York City, Los Angeles, where they would spend two or three days with back-to-back meetings briefing editorial boards, news directors, feature writers.  And there is no question that that effort produced a torrent of media, which involved everything from evening news, television stories on the forest to editorials to features in some of the newsmagazines and the like. 

It was an effort that was loosely coordinated with the political work that was going on, but very loosely coordinated.  And in some respects that revealed one of the I think problems of the effort.  While it was successful in getting media, often times the media blitz was three months before any real political action was taking place and so by the time the political action was there and you wished it was on the evening news or you wished it was the editorial in the papers that people were picking up that day, it was stale news.  It was Ancient News.

And it wasn't that well coordinated.  Nonetheless, it produced a fantastic array--and I don't know how many of you may have seen some of the reports that were sent out on it, but it was two inches thick. 

And similarly, the Chlopak campaign, in a more targeted way, placed a lot of free media, frequently in the newspapers that were in the districts, or that covered the districts, of members of the House Interior Committee that was the principal body that was wrestling with the legislation for much of the last congressional session.

That was in essence the campaign.  There's a lot of lessons to be learned, I think, from aspects of it, but I don't want to go into them now.  I think the format is that we'll talk about those.  I merely want to give a descriptive opening of the three components of the campaign, the distinction between the free and the paid media and then leave it at that until we have time for dialog.

Moderator: Let's play some of the radio ads.

Radio ad:

Adult: There used to be a lot more fish out here.  Now I get my limit by lunch time.  Now [indistinct] get a bite.

Child: What happened? 

Adult: I don't know, they're not healthy any more.  They need clean water.  And with all the logging in the forest, there's not more good water left.

Child: Hey, wait a minute.  Salmon don't live in the forest.

Adult: Sure they do.  They begin and end their lives in streams that run through the Ancient Forests.  and when the forests are logged, and the water gets choked up with dirt, the salmon can't spawn and they die.

Child: I guess that means no one has any fish any more.

Adult: Sure.  You've got a choice.  But what if I fished for a living?  I'd be out of a job.  And you'd be out of a vacation.  And your bike.  And a lot...

Child: Okay!  I think I'm beginning to get it.

Announcer: Logging in the Ancient Forests is destroying our fisheries.  Cutting down more old trees will cut back the number of fish.  And that could mean we lose a billion dollar industry and thousands of jobs.  It's time to preserve American jobs by preserving America's Ancient Forests.  A message from Americans for the Ancient Forests.

Moderator: Okay you want to play the other one?

Donald Ross: That ad, by the way, was obviously specifically to counter what was the major campaign of Wise Use.  The jobs were linked to the logging. 

Radio Ad:

Announcer: Have you heard the latest from the nation's capital?  A Congressman says he's got the real solution to the Ancient Forest crisis.  There's just one problem.  Congressman Peter DeFazio's plan would allow the federal government to violate today's environmental laws.  Says the Oregonian, "DeFazio wants us to trust the federal government, even though they've broken these laws over and over again.  And what if they keep breaking the law?  Too bad, because DeFazio's plan also takes away our right to stop them.  That could hurt a lot of people, like Northwest fishermen who depend on the billion dollar salmon industry, an industry being destroyed by overlogging.  It's time to tell our Congressman we want a real solution for the Ancient Forests.  Let's tell them we'll fight any plan that lets the government break the law and takes away our right to stop them.  Call your Congressman today at 202-225-3121.  That's 202-225-3121.  Paid for by Americans for the Ancient Forests.

Voice: Then we also have LightHawk's video, which is about to be--well, Denis, you've been working with this just a little bit.  Do you want to explain why the, uh, where it's playing and...

Denis Hayes: David's version of the LightHawk issue is this: they have entered into a collaborative relationship with a producer known as Big Blue.  That's a small film production company headed by a fellow who used to do all of the PR and advertising for Body Book.  Body Book went [indistinct] wind surfing...

Female voice: That last?

Denis Hayes: Body Book?  For people who are into surfing and wind surfing and that sort of stuff.  It may resonate more than with others.  But it became an enormously stylish, very successful company.  They did a lot of environmental advertising, and he decided he wanted to do it full time, so he's now set it up as an independent film production company, advertising agency to advertise on behalf of the environment.

And following a national trend, he moved last week to Seattle.  You're concentrating them all in Seattle. [laughter.]

They wanted to get the ancient forests on the agenda of the presidential campaign--so this is an ad that is specifically targeted at the two presidential candidates.  It's designed to elicit a telegram, a very inexpensive telegram to the two presidential candidates focusing upon the ancient forests.  And this gives some graphic visual images, which we'll see in just a second.  What's important about it is that they recognized that there is huge competition for PSAs on television, that the cost of paid advertising is spectacularly expensive, and so what they have done is to approach movie theaters--Big Blue did this on the Earth Summit.  They got a series of very dramatic ads on the Earth Summit urging President Bush to participate in it.  He's now gone out to theaters asking them to do this as well.  Thus far they have signed up fourteen-hundred theaters.  There is almost a blackout in the Northwest because it's a sufficiently controversial issue up here that even Norman Lear's Act III Theaters don't want to do it here.

The [indistinct] it elsewhere in the country, they have just this huge number of theaters that are going to run this several times a night, a preparatory feature to each of the films that comes on.  The difficulty is that having paid for the production and having paid for the initial duplications of it, they are now out of money.  To be able to duplicate the film to send it to the theaters that have already agreed to run it for free if they would only send it to them, costs about forty dollars a film.  So we've bellied up to bar and given them ten-thousand dollars for 250 films.  To the extent that any of you are interested in this kind of vehicle, it's necessary to do it relatively swiftly.  Our ten thousand is because we can do some discretionary things with ten thousand, because it's targeted on the campaign, the whole thrust is send a telegram to the candidates, it loses a lot of its timeliness in about a month.

They are all prepared to go.  From the time they get forty dollars to the time it's in the theater is like two days.  If any of you are prepared to sponsor it, it would be wonderful if you did it.

Female voice: Could we move the screen?

Denis Hayes:  Yeah, maybe move me.

Donald Ross: Turn the TV on. 

LightHawk/Big Blue film:

Noises.

Paul Newman voice-over: Some day very soon, when most of the trees in America's national forests are gone, it will be too late to tell you that this is public land.  Our land.  And every day over six-hundred acres of America's national forests are destroyed.  Some day, someone will tell you the staggering number of jobs that were lost, jobs from the vital industries that keep more Americans working that those industries that destroy them.  You wonder why someone didn't tell you.  You have the power to make a difference now.  Take it into your own hands.  Call One-800-Be-A-Hero.  This is Paul Newman asking you to send an urgent message to both presidential candidates demanding the permanent protection of America's national forests. 

Announcer: Produced as a public service in association with Big Blue. 

Voice: I'm going to ask Denis, uh.  If I could call--

Female voice: Denis, could you tell us where is Big Blue?

Denis Hayes: Yes, I'll get it because we have it on a card right there.  Well, why don't we just read them the address to the people who might be interested.  Send this to the attention of Michael Stewartt, who is the president of LightHawk.  And it's 311 First Avenue South, Suite 301, Seattle Washington 98104.  LightHawk.  L-i-g-h-t-H-a-w-k.  311 First Avenue South, Suite 301, Seattle Washington 98104. 

[Paul ?] Voice: Now the ancient forests campaign is a very targeted media campaign and--on a national level, since it is trying to get one thing done, which is as said, the ancient forest in effect legislation before Congress, I also wanted to have Denis here to talk about what is really the two largest media campaigns ever done for the environment, that is Earth Day 1970 and Earth Day 1990, both of which he organized.  So in terms of those as media events, if you could just--

Voice: Uh, Paul, before Denis starts, could Donald just give a quick quote on the total cost of each of the two campaigns, or the three, when you take in the grass roots one, the scale of effort, and so forth?

Donald Ross: Well the grass roots media campaign was paid for largely by, I think, the Chlopak effort.  Chlopak I think spent about something on the order of about $600,000 beginning in January [1992] through October [1992] and the LightHawk effort, I believe, raised a total of about $700,000 and I don't know how much of that was spent.  The Chlopak effort actually raised about $1.1 million but has not spent all of the money.  The amount spent was about $600,000.  And I think the media spending, to the extent there was any, by the grass roots was really relatively small.  They got money from the Chlopak campaign for media.

Denis Hayes: I talked, probably, more than my fair share this morning.  Let me do this one relatively briefly.  I think there are a couple of structural things that I'd like to say over and beyond the really important distinction that Don pointed out between free and paid advertising.  The concept of all of this is that we are, as most of you, all of you, know, subjected to a continual barrage of information.  And if you look around the room at all of these publications in front of me which I sort of glanced at, at the T-shirt, at the mugs, at the what-have-you, at the little Starbucks coffee thing on the paper cup, there's just this flow of things, some of which have an impact and some of which you don't expect to have an impact but apparently do. 

If you look at financial unpinning of movies today, it has become an important structural component of the movie what candy bar the guy holds up, what kinds of car the hero drives.  They pay for that.  A company comes in and says, we'll give you $150,000 toward this vehicle if, on two occasions, the guy will eat a Milky Way candy bar, and we'll provide another 25,000 if he smiles after one of the bites.  [laughter]  Something that sends back a positive subliminal message to people that says maybe we ought to do this, especially if it's something they can actually do right there in the theater, so they can get their feedback. 

In all of this stuff from billboards and T-shirts and mugs and--somebody this morning was talking about the impact of soap operas on the television to news stories, it seems to me that the communications fall into sort of three broad categories of human response.  The first and by far the most common and essential for our sanity is the category of "Sinks Without a Ripple."  To pass through this maze and you filter out 98 or 99 percent of this and you are unaware that it has even passed you by and it's probably not even lodged in your subconscious--under hypnosis, it's just--you're swimming through it.  You manage to avoid most of the folks who are targeting on you one way or another.

The next broad category is that that kind of enters into the realm of noise.  And this is stuff that you consciously register and it maybe even penetrates your short term memory and it doesn't have any lasting impact upon your consciousness, your values, your behavior or anything that--we all, in this kind of a group, read newspapers with great regularity, or multiple newspapers.  And by and large I would essentially guess that--it's certainly true for me--by the time that I get to lunch time, if you asked me to spontaneously come up with the stories that I read that morning, I'd have real difficulty triggering up what 95 percent of the stories were and coming up with them spontaneously.  But if you asked me a question about one of the stories, triggered, and it was an associative memory as opposed to total recall, I could probably still associate it at lunch.  Two or three days later it probably core dumped the entire thing unless it was some story that fit in already in some important way with a frame of reference that you carry around.

The third category, and the one that we're all concerned with here is the real communication, the one that leaves some kind of a lasting residue that somehow integrates its way biochemically into our consciousness and will be carried around with us for some period of time, that influences our behavior.  It's a complicated field that I don't pretend to know enough about.  But I know that in my experience there are two ways that you can move something from being noise to being communication. 

One is like the LightHawk business.  The noise that elicits action tends to take it to a different level.  If you see this and immediately afterwards you do something as a consequence of it, especially this, something which costs you a little bit of money or a little bit of inconvenience, then that combination of the information and the action associated with it gives you a stronger kind of bond that tends to leave it in there for a while. 

And so I'm very much personally more in favor of campaigns that are specifically targeted that--"See this?  Spend 30 seconds on it or 60 seconds on it, and do something"--than things that don't.  And in fact in some, I, every pretense to intellectuality in me rebels against saying this, but I think it's probably true.  That something like that may be a far better communication vehicle than a very thoughtful reflective piece written about the intricacies of the subject in the New York Times because that tends to promote people.  Be something where you read the first few paragraphs at best, and most people only read the headline.  Even if you read the whole story, if nothing else bonds it to something else, it tends to disappear from your consciousness in the deep.

It's a source of consistent astonishment to me.  To take an example that Ren will note, a whole lot of that in Congress: people will go into hearings and hear these profoundly moving messages all morning long on global warming and come to--you think--have some comprehension of, say, the most obvious relationships between CO2 and global warming even if they don't go into the other more sophisticated aspects of it, they'll go that afternoon and vote for a clean coal bill, because somehow the afternoon was talking about sulfur dioxide.  The morning was talking about carbon dioxide.  So you vote for the clean coal bill, forgetting that you can't get the clean coal combusted without producing probably more carbon dioxide than you would with dirty coal.  So you [indistinct] the [indistinct] that comes out of it.

Okay, so that's the one broad category.  Stuff that elicits action.  The other category is really the Earth Day question.  This is the tough thing to do.  But the other way to cause it to really dent people is saturation.  You can have something that suddenly is in your face for a protracted period of time until ultimately you can't sort of read and toss it off and read it and toss it off and read it and toss it off until suddenly you've been reading it so many times, encountering it in so many things that suddenly you realize "I've got to confront this.  To figure out what does this mean for me?"

Examples like that war in the Gulf States.  And people who are in that one out of seven Americans who can't find the United States on a map of the world know who Saddam Hussein is, know where Kuwait is, know a whole bunch of stuff.  Say they know who Norman Schwartzkopf is.  Not necessarily the most important information they could acquire.  But among other things learn something about the vulnerability of our oil supplies because that globe is just in their face, day after day after day. 

For some period of time after Bhopal, we knew a little bit about the problems that are associated with petrochemicals in general and certainly that pesticide in particular and Union Carbide certainly took an incredible flap out of it.

Chernobyl, that conveys powerful images to people.  God, the most powerful images perhaps that have been conveyed in a negative sense.  You can say everything you want to about the relative safety of American reactors and American containment vessels, about what we can do with inherently safe reactors, the Can Do reactors, but people confronted that visual image. 

It's the sort of thing that the Reagan administration did so beautifully by manipulating visual images that undercut the impact of the words.  So that you had the President out in front of an old folks home communicating through this smiling interaction with old people that he really understands and appreciates and cares about old people, when he makes the announcement that he's cutting 80 percent out of the budget for senior citizens health care or something.  The image that gets communicated completely belies the words.

If you've got this constant thing day after day of the devastation wreaked by environmental disaster.  An Exxon Valdez.  Powerful images.

What we did with Earth Day was the most difficult part of that, which was to try to communicate positive images of opportunities to people over a sufficiently protracted period of time that they had to confront what does this mean for me? 

Another example that I have used on this is perhaps the most difficult to anticipate.  Sometimes this is completely random and you don't know this is going to happen.  Where it happened was the Clarence Thomas hearings.  Day after day, and there were suddenly a whole lot of men who had never thought much about sexual harassment before started thinking about it.  I mean I know I tend to be a huggy person.  Some people probably even noticed on the stage today, I hug people a lot.  And I hug all the people in my office.  And I come across this news story in the course of this Clarence Thomas thing that says seven out of ten women resent being hugged in their office.  And I looked at this thing and I said, Jesus!

Female voice: You can hug me any time.

Denis Hayes: And I called everybody together and said, hey, is this offensive?  And be straight.  I don't want to do something bad.  And everybody was very gracious and said if you don't hug us, Denis, we'll come and hug you.  And I was okay.  [laughter]

There was a heightened sensitivity from coast to coast among men.  And there was some electrifying impact from coast to coast since we all knew about women.  It was just transformed, the nation.  We wouldn't have done it if there was just one quick shot.  One story in the newspaper.  Two stories in the newspaper.  It was there in our faces for long enough that we had to--

Well, with Earth Day, what we did was try to select every vehicle of communication that we could find in the United States and encourage them to cooperate in this effort.  We went after newspapers and met with editorial boards from coast to coast and with reporters from coast to coast.  We went after the TV networks.  We went after the cable.  We went after every newsletter, every magazine.  We went to every organized religion because Earth Day was going to be on a Sunday, and we tried to get them to preach from the pulpit.  Anything that you can think of that delivers a message to people, somebody on that staff at some point approached and said will you participate.  And a whole lot of folks said no.  But so many said yes that for about a month people just got sort of sick of the environment.  It was on the cover story for magazine after magazine.  Even completely unrelated magazines.  In a way that we think caused people to say, Jeez, this has really, I mean it has got to be important, that all the time.  What should I do about it?  And then in the final week we had a sort of countdown where there was a day that talks about recycling.  We got a huge number of newspapers to have their cover stories on recycling.  One on energy conservation.  And one on water conservation.  On down the patch.  So that by the time that that hit, there was hopefully some receptivity to it.

That was targeted to deal with creating a context within which we were going to be promoting this agenda for the future.  We had a series of legislative things, and a series of lifestyle changes, and what have you was to come out.  The failure of Earth Day, this most recent one, was that all that kind of got lost in the hoopla.  We got news stories, but they disappeared in the noise.  Somehow, that didn't tie into the other things well enough that it really got embraced.

And then what really killed us with both Earth Days was that if you're counting on saturation, what kills you is being trumped.  And in 1970, a couple of weeks after we had the saturation of Earth Day, with 20 million people participating, President Nixon invaded Cambodia.  And we had these eruptions, these violent eruptions across the society.  And, you know, all the people who were out at Earth Day, or some large fraction, suddenly were plunged entirely into a different issue and we had to apply artificial respiration throughout the entire Fall to get stuff going back, the Dirty Dozen campaign and the Clean Air Act and what have you.

This time obviously what happened was Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and completely shoved all of this stuff out of consciousness within a matter of weeks of Earth Day once again.  And much of what was to be the follow-up agenda went down the chutes as a consequence.  Okay.

Moderator: Uh, Kathy?

Kathy: I want to talk a little bit today about New Jersey's state growth plan, and the media strategies that foundations supported.  And I've written them down because if I try to talk without notes, I get lost. 

Within the field of growth management, New Jersey has distinguished itself in three ways.  It is the first urbanized state to struggle with the growth management strategy that will tie it into the next century.  It is also among the first to propose altering the traditional relationships between development policies, land use decisions and more equitable policies to guide the distribution of wealth and opportunity.  Finally, the process in New Jersey we used was to arrive with a consensus about coordinated growth.  The plan has been fully negotiated with all 21 counties and 567 municipalities. 

New Jersey's cross-acceptance process has brought citizens, local environmental commissions, planning boards, local, county and state governments together to compare their plans and programs and then negotiate changes among them to achieve a statewide consensus about where and how to accommodate population and employment growth.

The cross-acceptance dialog was also extended to include private sector and interest group participation, so that all points of view could be factored into the state plan.  Concern about the negative consequences of unplanned development led the New Jersey legislature in 1985 to adopt the state planning act with the aim of conserving natural resources, revitalizing urban centers and protecting the environmental quality through a statewide plan.

It was originally to take 18 months.  It took 84 months.  There were many reasons for this exhaustive process.  From the onset the state planning process has been controversial.  A concept paper introduced in April of 87 set off a furor of opposition.  Many local officials feared that the state would mandate new zoning densities that were either too low or too high, depending on local circumstances and needs.  And while many environmental organizations hailed the concept, development interests claimed it would destroy the state's economy.  Clearly, the notion that the draft was merely a point of departure for discussion was lost amid the debate.

The opposition organized quickly, leading frontal assaults and end runs.  The campaign to derail, discredit and delay the state planning commission and the plan was under way.  However, the public involvement, education, and media approach that local foundations has supported from the beginning of the process made a critical difference in the outcome.

We created a precondition for change.  We helped people vision what they wanted in their community.  The media strategy was different at each stage of the process.  We targeted at each step, designed to change attitudes.  Public awareness, training the public officials, environmental commissions, public forums, monitoring the process, professional support for commission members, evaluation of the interim plan, and analysis of the economic impact statement which provided the commission with alternative solutions.  Most importantly again, foundations helped the people of New Jersey decide what they wanted for their community.

Today's discussion is about the mass media.  And as I tried to look at our approach, we could not really in New Jersey do mass media.  New Jersey is a state that lacks mass media coverage.  We sit between New York and Philadelphia, and our television stations are about New York news and about Philadelphia news, expect for New Jersey public television, which, I'm afraid to say, not very many people watch.  We really can't get good coverage on the TV. 

Nor do we have a good statewide newspaper.  We have regional newspapers.  And we have the New York Times, which gives a summary of coverage for New Jersey. 

So clearly a mass media campaign was not in order as we talked about this.  So, early in the process, New Jersey foundations participated and supported the creation of New Jersey Future, an organization whose primary mission was to promote public action in support of a sensible and balanced growth strategy for New Jersey.  New Jersey Future produced discussion papers, studies, public dialog that ultimately enabled New Jersey people to be heard.

I brought with me a number of these study papers and discussion papers that we really blanketed throughout the state at public discussions and hearings.  In the final years of the process, four New Jersey non profit organizations submitted a joint proposal to several foundations: Victoria, Dodge, the Fund for New Jersey, and Schumann Fund for New Jersey. 

New Jersey Conservation Foundation, New Jersey Future, Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions, all organized to coordinate this campaign to shore up the public's involvement in producing a final plan.  Again, I want to stress public involvement.  The process came up.  They initiated a seamless program of statewide activities to deliver an acceptable plan by early 1992.

But the final media strategy came with the release of the impact assessment of the interim state development and redevelopment plan.  This assessment was produced by the faculty and staff of the most prestigious academic institutions and consulting firms in the country.  The analysis concluded that the plan's development scenario would save 1.3 billion in infrastructure costs.  An additional $400 million in annual fiscal savings to municipalities and school districts.

In sum, the analysis predicted benefits for the state's economy, fiscal resources, environment, quality of life, housing cost, intergovernment coordination and farmlands preservation efforts.  It proved that the plan did in fact set a national standard for growth management programming. 

Incredibly, firmly entrenched opposition was in the home building industry continued.  Disregarding the findings of the independent assessment, opponents were able to find legislative support.  And you have to remember that in New Jersey. I guess as elsewhere, most of our legislators are either real estate developers or lawyers.  And they tried to resurrect the battle, the oversight battle of the planning commission.

Two different bills seeking legislative oversight made their way through the assembly and senate committees.  But, the foundation support and groundwork preparation really paid off.  Victoria had funded the Center for Analysis of Public Issues to conduct a statewide public opinion survey.  And I have a copy of this magazine which the whole magazine was devoted to land use in New Jersey  And on page 20, you can pass those around, the public survey of what New Jersey people felt.  And what they found out was the New Jersey people really were for the plan.  They really believed that we should limit growth.  And you can see for yourself.  It made the difference because the New Jersey legislature wanted to listen to the people that were going to elect the the next time around. 

The New Jersey magazine poll and survey and all of the other work that was done by the New Jersey Conservation Foundation and New Jersey Future really did create a mass media campaign, but it was not one that we are talking about today as far as public television or ads.  It was really working with people and helping people determine what they wanted.

In summary, foundations played a critical role by providing operating support to organizations educating the public, involving the public in the decision-making process where decisions were made locally.  Foundations helped the public recognize that land use, the way we used our land, was causing the environmental quality of life problems in New Jersey: air, traffic congestion, you name it.

The goals of the conservationists and the social justice community were integrated.  The plan made out tiers of development to redirect growth.  It put forward the concept of affordable housing in the city.  It put forward the concept of rebuilding our urban infrastructure, of improving the quality of life in the state, of lessening the impact of development and increasing the feasibility of mass transit.

We haven't stopped.  We've gone on.  We've just released this study Beyond the State Plan.  And I've brought some videos with me that if you want to stay and see later you can.  But that's how we approached getting what we thought was right on the public agenda and really having the public buy into a planning process for the state of New Jersey.

Moderator: For the first campaign that we talked about, the Earth Day, the Ancient Forests and the New Jersey Growth Management Plan kind of illustrates a range of media projects that I've certainly seen at the Pew Charitable Trusts and also when I was working as a consultant at the Rockefeller Family Fund.  We get all those kinds of proposals, big, small, and in between.  And I guess the first question that I want to throw out in the first part of the discussion really is, Is this something, these big time media, giving that Donald rattled off some fairly large figures.  $600,000 seems rather large to me in terms of where to invest the money.  Is this something that's really a viable option for us or a cost effective option for us.  And I'm going to first ask the panel members that and then get what other people have opinions.

Donald Ross:  I think, Clark? Curt?, that public relations, clearly, free media is cost effective.  I mean that you don't need to hire an outside consultant every time you want to do it obviously.  Most of the groups we fund do their own to a greater or lesser extent.  And when you do hire an outside consultant that's a relative cost effective way. 

The problem with free media is that you don't really control the message.  You try to control it.  You try to get the story written the way you want it.  But there's no guarantee.  The reporter, if he or she is a decent reporter is talking to both sides, and who knows how the story finally comes out.  You can't guarantee, and you can't even usually have any input into where it's placed in the newspaper or what time it appears on the television or the like.

Which is why companies rely heavily on paid media to advertise their products.  They can control the message exactly.  They can control its placement to a significant extent, the timing and all that.  But the problem from our point of view is that paid media is expensive.  A full page ad in the New York Times with guaranteed placement in a certain section on a certain day in $53,000.  Now you can get it for as little as $7,000 but you can't control the day, you can't control the exact placement.  You can get it for somewhere in between for about 17, $18,000 with some control.  But it's tricky.  And even $17,000 is not cheap for one placement on one day.  And so it's a tradeoff.  And I think for many funders and for many non profits that they'd like to do the paid media, it's just the reach very often times, of particularly advocacy groups. 

I will mention just one campaign.  It's not environmental, that I'm following now, and that's Ms. Foundation is running a campaign that's called Take Your Daughter to Lunch...

[END SIDE ONE, BEGIN SIDE TWO]

Donald Ross [continues in middle of another sentence]: ...large female market, and they're trying to get a paid media campaign and have someone else do the paying.  And it remains to be seen how well it will work.  But on non-controversial, or non-adversarial issues, that's a strategy that some, that may prove useful for some environmental issues.

I suspect that probably Nature Conservancy and Trust for Public Lands may have done some of that in the past as well.

Female voice: I've had this happen, in your foundation that put this on, and embark on it in a six month program that took seven years or so.  [laughter]  We have been involved in a similar campaign that's taken seven years and if anybody had been told that's what we were going to end with in the beginning, we'd frankly still be talking about it.  We'd never have done it.  How do you judge your continuing commitment to this thing?  Do you just keep putting dollars into it?

Kathy: Yeah.  I have to back it up to say that Victoria's trustees really have over the years supported, given operating support to almost all of the conservation groups in New Jersey.  It something that we believe in.  So they were ready to put this together.  But when they came to us at first about the plan.  And I think the first one was just the growth management handbook that they came in--and in fact, Dodge funded this.  Yeah, we didn't have any anticipation that we would be doing this over an 8 year period.  So each year we assessed where we were, we saw what was happening, we redirected, we started doing training, for instance, for the environmental commissions in each community. 

Female voice: Would you have been more successful if you could have finished sooner?

Kathy: No.  The 7 years were really critical to getting public cross-acceptance of the plan, to have every community.  The interim plan came out.  It showed what could happen in your community and what couldn't happen, where development could occur, where it couldn't.  You know, if it had been a quick process people would not have had the time to buy in to vision, to really start thinking about the way they wanted to live.  And no, in retrospect I think it was good that it was a long process.

Moderator: The hand up in the back, there.

Female voice: Yeah, I assume the prices you were quoting, Don, the main broadcasting networks that, does cable television show any promise?  Uh, in terms of having people...

Donald Ross: Well, the problem with, when you go on to television is the production cost zooms.  I mean, the production of a normal newspaper ad is, even one that's done really professionally, is considerably less.  The communications consortium did a 30 second spot this year for uh, on automobile pollution, and got it placed on about a hundred and some-odd television stations, by sending it out.  Some of them were cable, some of them went over the air.  But the production cost on that--and it reached a big audience--the production cost was $45,000 with huge amounts of donated labor for a 30 second spot.  And that was very cheap, really for that type.  When you see these 30 second television commercials, they're a couple of hundred thousand dollars.  And that's the dilemma of--and if you don't spend that and you just do it with your home video, it looks like that.  You know, it has that...

Moderator: Grace?

Grace: I was going to say, just answering your question about cable.  I mean, when the cable system was set up, and there were federal laws that regulated the cable operations that they had to set aside a certain amount of their budget and make their production facilities available to community groups to put out the community message.  So if you can't get in the loop, there are ways, and I will give this advertisement later.  We have a book specifically on cable access and I'll talk about this when we get down to question number six.

Moderator: Kathy or Denis, a question: I'm going to rephrase it.  Should we be putting a greater percentage of our environmental funding into media than we do now?  In terms of getting the kind of change that we want?

Kathy: I'm not really qualified to answer that.  I think from a personal point of view that there are some times when, yes, we should, when there's a critical case.  I mean, I have been absolutely stunned, after going on LightHawk and going over those mountains.  I mean, I've been coming to EGA conferences for how many years?  And you've all been talking about ancient forests.  And it never hit me like it hit me the other day when I got in that plane and looked at what was happening.  And so people get that out, yeah, it's worth investing in. 

Moderator: Denis?

Denis Hayes:  Well, I think Don really put us on the horns of the dilemma.  The people who have been most effective at getting free advertising, free media are sort of depressed at the impact that it's been having.  They put a huge amount of effort into it, spectacularly successful, I mean Fenton is almost is a league by himself in terms of being able to get an issue and put it on the evening news, get it on the news story magazine programs, put it in the newspapers, get it off the wire services, he does a marvellous job of doing it.  And there's this fear that it all perhaps adds up in some incremental way, but the connections are very tenuous and difficult to see.  I sometimes think that the principal impact of it is funding proposals.  People send us all their press clipping to show how effective they've been.  Some reporter says--

Male voice: Cutting down those trees.

Denis Hayes: Cutting down those trees.  That's right.  The alternative to that that a lot of them are very enthusiastic about is, you create your own messages, you do it with stories that you package yourself and send to local news stations.  They sometimes will pick up such stories and run them as if their reporters had covered it themselves.  The sophisticated versions even give them room in it for voice-overs by their local reporters to cover the story.  To produce advertisements and place them as campaigns very much like Chrysler does when they're introducing a new product.  And that works very well for the introduction of new products.  It works very much less well in the corporate sector when you're dealing with ideas.  In some sense one is a very very very very minor contributor to the undermining of the nuclear industry is the enormous amount of money that they've wasted on the Committee for Energy Awareness with all of these full page ads saying "grow your children nine ways better with nuclear power."  Nobody pays them the slightest bit of attention.  My personal favorite was, of course, "Make every day Earth Day with nuclear power."  [laugher]  It had enormous success.  [laughter]  then the question becomes, They can't do that because there this contradiction and it seems like it's self promotional, and people tend to distrust it.  I don't know how effective a paid campaign where the environmental movement--if we could put a $10 million campaign into something would be or if it would undercut us.

Moderator: Chuck.

Chuck: Yeah, I guess I think that's the real question about whether more dollars should be donated for the media.  I think the question is, Is there a role for media in our overall strategy, and I think absolutely yes.  But it's got to be overall strategy.  And I mean one of the things we do, in my other hat when I'm giving training sessions to people, non-profits, big ones, very sophisticated, $50 million a year budgets.  And it's mind-boggling when you get the vice presidents for communications together and you start asking how these campaigns are not integrated into the rest of their program activities.  Over and over and over and over again so I think a media program by itself doesn't make any sense.  Whereas, the overall goal that you're trying to accomplish and to get it integrated, and I think when that's well articulated it's a valuable part of the program, otherwise...

Moderator: Ted:

Ted: I want to take of on the major theme of what Chuck was talking about.  If we get kind of realistic, at least from our standpoint, our sense is that most of the major environmental non-profits have a poor understanding of media campaigns, of how to do an outreach to the public beyond their constituency and membership, and that on regular occasions we've received partial proposals or ideas that really aren't cutting it.  I want to ask a couple of things about this observation, and the observation is that most of the Big Ten, or what they were called, really don't understand media at all and tend to throw their money down the toilet when they try to use it.  So if there is a role in strategy, and I'd like to talk quite specifically and hard right now, what role do funders have if this observation is correct, and the view is correct on you, in trying to elevate their own abilities and consciousness on how to integrate a media strategy into what they're trying to do.

Male voice:  That's a good question and I don't know what I'd say that might take off of that, but in terms of the Fenton-Chlopak ads, there was also another target besides the public, intended or not: Congress itself.  I can guarantee you that after what the integrated campaign between the grass roots and the Chlopak ad on DeFazio quite frankly scared the living hell out of him.  And that's the kind of ad that he would have expected from a political opponent.  It was the kind of tactics that wakes them up the most.  I think that it was quite effective, quite helpful.  And whether you can do it all the time, or whether it's a specific time, you know, I don't know.

Moderator: [indistinct]

Voice: I hope to speak to a couple of these other points.  two things, one is that what the panelists describe very convincingly and excellently were specific campaigns.  And I think that what we face as donors is more frequently is the media component of the larger strategy or ongoing work.  And to evaluate that, I think there are different levels of media, uh, presence in media and sophistication.  There's myriad basic skills and strategizing which Chuck just mentioned, I think is very important skills in being able to reach the media and talk to them and integrate it with the rest of the work.

Then there's another level of establishing oneself as a player.  Some of these shape the debate.  And then the third level is the more permanent campaign of creating one's own media and making our television, radio and print media out ourself and getting into the mainstream.  I think all three levels of that can be very effective.  And we all ought to pay attention to them.  Because most organizations, certainly grass roots organizations, are only going to be able to do the lowest level, the basic approach to the media, and the media to get a message to them.  More sophisticated organizations, NRDC or these others who have expert scientists on staff can help shape the debate, which is extremely crucial over the long haul.  I think I disagree with you, Denis, a little bit on this way people sort of weed out information in getting from the Times and the Post and so on.  I think there can be very effective campaigns if we think about it over the long haul if you are able through scientific expertise and a smart media strategy, you can shape the terms of the debate.  The Union of Concerned Scientists we did that on Star Wars.  We were able to stigmatize the entire program as scientifically and strategically bankrupt, and Reagan administration had to respond to that, those scientists ever since then, for ten years.  The program is still wanted, but it's a lot less.  But that was mainly through scientific critique and some discrete but important interventions in the news media, including some work by Fenton.  And the top layer--I think I just want to put in one more point that not just campaigns, the specific campaigns, some of which were quite expensive, and some were counter effective, but I think we should also pay attention to our allies in the news media, particularly the print media.  Newspapers and magazines that cover these issues, non-profits like Mother Jones, and The Nation and High Country News and all kinds of good print media that are going to cover these issues, and can do it as investigative funds can access and want to access money through foundations, and can do a pretty good job in exposes and informing opinion leaders as well as activists and ordinary citizens about these issues.  So as we evaluate the total, I think we need three different levels of media approach, of media strategy.  But I think it's helpful that each one is different and has its own needs and its own cause.

Moderator: Any reaction by any player up here?

Denis Hayes: At the tactical level, as long as we're doing some of this by funding Mother Jones, the thing that we have done a little bit of, but you might want to consider as a funding strategy is, you're familiar with the new wave of environmental magazines, most of whom are having a fair bit of difficulty right now financially, in this last grant cycle we bought subscriptions for E Magazine for every public library in the Pacific Northwest as a means of getting it in there where people will see it.  Hopefully the libraries will resubscribe.  You get a high multiplier, and so they put a lot of these circulation blanks into each of those magazines,  send the out and hopefully pick up a lot of new consumers.  It's a way of getting information out wholesale and retail simultaneously.  It's worth considering.  Cheap.  They sell them to you as cheaply as they can. 

Moderator: Donna?

Donna: I want to ask the panel about something that happened to come up.  At Columbia Foundation we fund media but not mass media, it's much more a balance of--I think some of them have been very effective when they're used kind of within the Republican community [indistinct].  I finally got thinking about, What are the instances where we have massive change in the paper probably in this country.  The one thing I can think about is the drunk driving campaign and the anti smoking campaign, maybe recycling.  I don't know that'll happen.  But clearly the anti smoking campaign and the drunk driving campaign we've had massive change in public opinion.  In a very short time frame.  It hard to get people to stop smoking.  Just think what's happened in this country.  What can we learn from that?  We're talking about the news media, not just for the legislators and not just for a targeted district.  But really to build an environmental majority we're talking now.  I'm, what have we learned from that?  I can't think of any campaign that I know of, maybe I'm missing a lot, but that's really resulted in a massive change. 

Moderator: This is directed to the panel?

Donna: The panel, well, anybody, but I was asking the panel to respond.

Denis Hayes: Well, I think another example would be nuclear power.  Certainly the combination of the China Syndrome and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, all of the media certainly changed that industry, eliminated it for all practical purposes.  Don was personally responsible for Chernobyl. [laughter]

Donna: I don't believe that it eliminated it.

Denis Hayes:  Well, at the present time there are no nuclear plants being built in this country. 

Moderator: Curt?

Curt: Well I want to address your point. I, my professional work is in recycling and I was out in public education.  And I find that media is a sort of supportive mechanism to get people aware of the issue, but really what makes the changes is personal contact and outreach.  One of the programs I've started in Seattle called Master Composters, we did work a lot with free media and a lot of tv and newspaper and all that other stuff to raise awareness, but it isn't until we've trained two or three hundred volunteers to go out there and get a message out...

Female voice: Like the [indistinct].

Curt: Exactly.  And that's where the combination of an outreach campaign with the proper tools and the media to support that, you can create community action.  And in our city now compost is a household word.  There's probably a quarter to a third of the households that compost, are composting at home.  But it is a process that takes time.  I think that where we lose our impact is we expect to go in for a month or a week or a short period of time, do a media blitz, as Denis was saying, you just go in and out and that's why people forget about it.  And you gotta be [indistinct].

Male voice:  I think that this--[indistinct] who edited that report--just one observation that I wanted to add, was that the environmental, big environmental groups, in [indistinct] seem to have a real narrow focus and all they really do is direct mail.  And it seems like that's, you know, you keep hitting the came group of people over and over again.  And maybe that's obvious, but the thing is that that seems to be where their expertise is.  But beyond that they do really seem to have, you know, there may be exceptions here and there, but they really don't seem to have any expertise in what the big media--cable systems, you know, on the air TV, radio and all that.  There are, of course the possibilities are there, so it seems to me to be a real opportunity for funders to look at what the possibilities for overall strategies are.  Because there doesn't seem to be really all that much going on from these groups themselves.  I've heard instances where they've tried TV advertising and this just got written off as something they just can't do.

Moderator: Lisa?

Lisa: I just wanted to say briefly.  We've been in preparing for [indistinct].  I did look at all the literature of some of the campaigns we're mentioning and some others.  And at least in terms of campaigns that have been studied, most of the ones that have been studied closely, the government ones--the government put money into it--the three that are considered successful are [indistinct] cigarettes and food and nutrition.  And drunk driving, interestingly, has not been successful.  There is absolutely no truth, they say, in the levels of drunk driving or designated driving.  And Jay Winston [?] is now undertaking a study to try to do that.  What is interesting about some of this--I mean there are lots and lots of theories about it and lots of people say they're convinced in the social science literature--the more accepting the public is of the message, the easier, obviously, it is to change the behavior.  Smoking is a very interesting one because of course the surgeon general report came out in 1964, had an immediate impact, but within 3 months smoking levels were back up.  What they attribute the change to was not so much the message directly, but the second-hand smoking report that caused citizen groups to enact legislation and in fact started really to really act.  The other thing they also attributed it to is children.  When children started getting the message and saying to their parents You're going to die, that meant something to the parents.  Now whether that, the message is still there...

Female voice: Is there a lesson?

Lisa: Well, there is.  There is a lesson there.  But it was really definite.  I just had the, I mean I have lots of literature.

Female voice: What about peer pressure and children's parents?

Lisa: Well, shame is... [audience laughter] financial force is nothing, although they never deal with that.

Male voice: What about the ban on promotional advertising?

Lisa: That helped.  Helped a lot.  I mean, once you get to really, to see the law on [airplane noise obscures voice].

Male voice: That's a, that's a really interesting twist on television advertising, because it turns out in the smoking controversy what, what encourages people to begin smoking tends not to be advertising.  It's peer expectations, images that you have of people relaxing after sex with a cigarette on in bed, and all the other positive things that they've been putting through to us in movies and other subliminal ways.  But advertising itself is principally, as it's impacting you to smoke Philip Morris or to smoke Marlboros, what the sequence is with regard to advertising is a series of efforts under the fairness doctrine to get counter-cigarette advertising on television.  Whenever there was a cigarette ad on television, I think it was a ratio of one to three.  So what we had then was a whole series of cigarette companies that were putting ads on television in order to get them to smoke Philip Morris instead of Marlboro, whenever they had three of these ads, then there was an ad that came on that said Don't smoke at all, it's going to kill you.  It was having some effect in persuading people not to smoke.  So the total cigarette sales were continuing to go down, which made Marlboro and Philip Morris want to advertise more to get a larger fraction of this declining market.  As they advertised more, then suddenly under the fairness doctrine there's more opportunity for this public interest group to discourage smoking cigarettes [laughter] and there's not much notice.  But the effort in Congress to have cigarette advertising banned was by the American Tobacco Institute, it was in fact a response to this phenomenon where they were caught in a Catch 22.  But the point of moving to legislative solutions and institutionalize one's values, I think is a really important one.  If you're talking about these kinds of windows to change behavior, if you can convert that into a local law that bans smoking in restaurants and that bans smoking in buildings--at Stanford now they have a law that says you're banned from smoking.  You can't smoke in the football stadium, even though it's open air.  That brings in an institutionalized thing, that applies a sanction to these people that kind of look down their noses at people who are engaged in this kind of anti-social behavior.  That's unsanctioned.

Moderator: Did you have your hand up?

Male voice: Yeah.  The Angelina Fund has not funded to date campaigns, but we've been interested in funding capacities of different types.  We've sort of merged, we're supposed to this [indistinct].  So for example, we built on the needs of E Magazine example Denis gave.  And we've been trying to do all sorts of funding for these, this institution called Center for Alternative Journalism.  A coalition of eighty weekly newspapers, the Chicago Leader, the Los Angeles Weekly, each of which is itself self-sufficient per the needs of the [indistinct] to make the [indistinct] institutions.  To start having editorial content go to all 80 of those.  Our goal and this is strictly as funders of these (c)(3)s, is we'd like to see a monthly magazine developed with one editorial content which would be our press carrying our kind of messages to five million leaders every week--once a month to begin with, but ultimately every week.  And it would be the pro-environmental for profit, the for profit organizations with a new capacity would be there.  And it's that sense of capacity, so we're not each time reinventing the campaign mode.  We realize that, especially where we support media criticism, we have, our feeling is that FAIR, Fairness And Accuracy in Reporting, when it's gone after MacNeil-Lehrer, when it's gone after some of these other TV shows, it's had impact and it's brought new modes with it.  So at then no additional expense, they have to start bringing in our sort of voices instead of the middle of the road conservative voices that have dominated evening news.  The third thing that we've been interested in is looking at the future of communication, which I know you have too.  We've given a lot of support to Jeff Chester and Kathy Montgomery who were imported from the West Coast, who have just changed the possibilities in Washington because they're the only eco-based people that, who understand what's going on in Congress on new modes of communication.  And it going to change what we can do and the cost of what we can do and who we can reach.  And yet they don't have a whole lot of support and there's not a whole lot of their folks in [indistinct] who are doing that.  And they really need some help to get started in D.C.  It's those three things which are all capacity issues in one sense or another, institutional issues, so we don't always have these campaign-specific costs and crushes.

Moderator: Michael?  And Patricia?

Michael: I second that idea that there's gotta be a facilitator of an environmental majority and maybe we do that by not focusing exclusively on campaigns.  But a lot, of course at the time it was a good thing.  And there's a story that illustrates that that I think is part of the problem.  Apparently, most people who make environmental films are documentary people, and typically they make them in a way that is not commercially salable.  I have a good friend who bought film properties for National Geographic for years.  And she said that in an effort to encourage people to produce marketable film properties they sponsored an environmental film festival, and there were 300 films that eventually were shown at the festival out of several thousand that were submitted.  None of them made it to broadcast.  Which was interesting.  And partially it's because the formula that people use when they're making films is totally antithetical to commercial formula.  So getting film people who are in film now to bring that message into a commercially salable form is their strategy.  And getting people who are making documentaries to use a more formulaic method of making a commercial vehicle surround their message will also produce a couple of scenarios.

Moderator: Is there some, can you explain briefly what it was about those films that wasn't commercial?

Michael: She, she explained it to me, but it didn't resonate.

Female voice: Was it technical about the content?

Michael: There is apparently--I hate to make this, this is truly, because I've been deceived, but there's apparently a very formulaic method of making a drama.  And you have a man who is the main character, and you have a key moment, and that's repeating, and then there's, you know, a resolution very quickly and something else happens.  It sounds too simple to be true, but apparently writers in Hollywood spend their time sort of using this formula and filling in holes.  And that's how this successful--so why not appropriate that model and we put what we want to have in it.

Female voice: Michael, my name is [indistinct].  There's a lot of junk being made in Hollywood [indistinct].

Moderator: Patricia?

Patricia:  Well, I don't know how we foundations can help stimulate commercially viable films, but with The China Syndrome, the [indistinct] it's just not good entertainment when you no longer reach the usual suspects.  The values of [indistinct] I just wanted to sort of second the motion that we all fund [indistinct] communications.  How are these [indistinct] a lot of talking and a lot of attention is being focused on what the multi-media electronics, see the highway to the future and say [indistinct] to society.  The fact that at last somebody is looking at the Federal Communications Commission's public access to communications, may essentially be a dead letter.  I think we taken the approach that the reasons were we've been priced out of a practical avenue to new technology for a lot of us.  Standards that a scarcity regime has justified [indistinct] have been supplanted by a deregulatory adjustment.  So if you wanted the same place we as funders just [indistinct] how to reach the environmental movement.  And they didn't understand [indistinct] in the new information age. 

Moderator: I just want to shift gears now for the time remaining.  Anyone is welcome to continue with the question they were going to ask.  But to especially ask foundations here and members of the panel if you have worked with communications consultants or with any organizations that you have found that your grantees have worked with or you've worked with individually who you would recommend as a place for people to go.  And with that lead-in, let me just call on Craig to explain a little bit more than he did.

Male Voice: We also sponsored Jeff Chester and gang and that's one of our areas of concentration is that there's a diversity of media in Washington and that the FCC on what's going to happen in the future.  But two things that I think are very much of importance for all of us here.  The one thing is that our foundation has sponsored an advocacy media conference in May of this year.  And we're looking for people to attend, to participate.  There is, if we could pass that around so everybody can get a copy that would be great.  We're trying to get together funders, producers and some of the non profit groups together to look at how we can make more advocacy videos effective in getting the message out.  And there's a brief description in the letter here.  And we welcome the participation of the people who would like to have that. 

Female voice: I'd to put in a plug for the [indistinct] foundations.  I think that [indistinct] for grants for our grantees, because it runs the gamut of how to use media from talk radio to cable access, to [indistinct] to use paid media to how to get onto the op-ed page and a lot of things.  I think it's a wonderful [indistinct] of publications. 

Male voice: Can I ask you a question?  You have said that one end of the scale now is, you know, [indistinct].  I want to explain to folks about a series that we have.  The MacArthur, Johnson, Ford and Carney Foundations have purchased between 500 and 1,000 of these books, sets of these book for their grantees.  Now if we could pass over the next fact sheet here that's under the one here.  We have an order form here for the booklet Money Raising.  Very quickly what you've got.  This one is I think the general picture on how to design and a [indistinct] campaign.  This is how to do electronic networking so that you can be involved and get your people involved in your campaign, in touch.  We have media advocacy, another general thing about how to use the media.  Op-ed, newspaper kind of things, how to do that.  Voice programs, talk radio, using video and then last but not least cable access.  So we've got a series here to--the books are available, but also we're more than operative on issues.  We've got two very competent staff people that provide technical assistance to other foundations and get involved in the Council on Foundations and they have a media section of the Council on Foundations board.  We also provide technical assistance directly to non profit groups.  Our focus right now is on kids, but I know that after [indistinct], back in the environmental business, and that's why I was put on the board with all the gains in the environmental field and that is why I'm here to start networking with folks and let the people know that we're available to help.

Moderator: Do you have any Veg-A-Matics there?  [laughter]

Male voice: Your part of mission of funding the little labor and [indistinct] money back, say whatever it is.  And I imagine it would probably be a center of [indistinct] in San Francisco.  It was originally funded by West Coast groups.  And population groups.  Do any of you know what the statistics are on the appeal potential of please return environmental foundation loan funds in our--have you written any letters.

Female voice: I don't quite understand the question.

Donald Ross: Do you have any--have you put out full-page ads.  Almost all of those, unless they land on a [indistinct] day lose money. 

Male voice: Lose money and gain zero back.  You get half back or thirty back, you try to get fifty.

Female voice: [indistinct] to pay for your ad.  But they don't return [indistinct].

Donald Ross:  I doubt they could pay for their ads.  That's not my experience with them.  Maybe they would know better than I which is more [indistinct].

Moderator: Ed?

Ed: I'd like to move back to environmental issues specifically and ask for the opinion of the people here and the members of the panel, we have a couple of major campaigns coming up.  The Ancient Forests in one certainly, the Endangered Species Act is another.  And there are other national campaigns and potential campaigns that we're running or doing something about in the next several months.  I'm curious to know how Kenneth, Donald and other see the role of media in those two or others that you might want to talk about.  And then further the role, perhaps, of foundations.

Donald Ross: Well, it's actually in an area I've thought a lot about because of the experience of this Americans for the Ancient Forests effort.  And so let me give a slightly larger answer, and I'll try to be quick.  I, there is no organization today that can wage any one of these national campaigns by itself.  And given the experience on the forest issue and others, I'm somewhat pessimistic that a collection of national groups are going to be able to get together and divvy up the work in an effective way and manage a campaign.  What I keep thinking about now on these national efforts is that--and this would take a major role by large funders to help drive this--is that there's almost a kind of a modular kind of a campaign where you would take people from different groups and take different expertises together to assemble, so you'd end up with a task force of people from maybe five or six different groups that were under some central direction.  Part of the problem in the forest campaign is you had a lot of these elements including lots of these media folks, paid and free.  But there was no central direction and very little co-, uh, no one was able to really say, okay, like a quarterback, you go this way, you go this way, you do this, you do that.  There was never a control mechanism.  So it became too chaotic. 

Clearly, within house there's not the media expertise.  And equally clearly, except for a handful of campaigns, you can't afford the outside experts.  Chlopak's core budget for himself and his core staff was $15,000 a month and that is doing it at a pro bono rate.  The reason we used him is he quit Sawyer-Miller, that wanted something like $30,000 a month to do the same thing that he was giving us at half price.  And Fenton's campaign, I don't know what his core monthly operating budget was, but it had to be in that same ball park, $10,000 a month.  So these are very expensive efforts, really.  I mean they're not expensive relative to the stakes, but relative to foundations' normal response, these are costly...

Woman in audience: Did foundations ever pool their money out front ahead of the time on these campaigns?

Donald Ross: Well, that's how this was done. 

Male Voice: It was the first time out, this on the Ancient Forest thing.

Donald Ross: The Ancient Forest stuff was pooled within the Wilderness Society, actually acted as the fiscal agent.  But there was a three person board set up with the Wilderness Society having one of the seats, to manage that money as a separate venture from the Wilderness--they were writing checks.

But I think that's what you're going to need.  Might be interesting, what I think the answer to the question is, is that if we're going to have a chance, clearly media is going to have to be a major part.  Can you imagine the campaign against endangered species when we saw what they did with just a little owl on the woods?  And when you hit endangered species that every snail and every this and every that, they're going to just pound us.  So there's clearly going to have to be a major media component, but by itself, not integrated with the politics, it's not going to be enough.

Moderator: Denis?

Denis Hayes: I think that I would agree with everything that Don just said.  To sort of let our hair down here a little, I think that we probably disagree about how effective lobbying was in the early 70s in the environmental movement, but it was certainly more effective than it is now.

We put together the Clean Water Act and there was just no ambiguity: NRDC was the lead organization, and people took their assignments, we all reported in.  For the coalition against the SST, then Friends of the Earth was the leader, we all took our assignments, we reported in.  For the Clean Air Act, Environmental Action was the leader, we took our assignments and we reported in.  It all ran like fairly smooth clockwork.

Lots of glitches, but it was substantially better than today.  And there central repositories and there was a line of decision-making.  What has happened since then in the evolution of these national groups is that they are so driven by membership response that each wants to claim credit for anything that happens legislatively, than in a media strategy, whoever gets out front and is quoted in the lead paragraph gets to send that out with their mass mailing, and underlined in red that they did this.  And it requires people to have very sharp elbows and then the media becomes really driven by some of those concerns.

It's crucial that we have a media component to some of these campaigns.  I despair a little bit as to how we're going to put it together.  But we are certainly going to be under a vast assault in the Endangered Species Act.  I guess it's way out, by the context of this meeting, but I think that we may also have to rethink the Endangered Species Act, and rather than just on a pure preservationist thing say what fundamentally are we trying to achieve here.  And what is a position that we can in a strategic way say Yes, we will draw the line here no farther.  And it may not be where the lines are drawn right now.  It may have more of an ecosystem focus.  I'm not sure that thinking is going on inside the coalition.  What we have done in this regard to it in our modest way in this enormously preliminary way to really let hair down tonight, is not media at all, it's grass roots organizer, but it gives you some insight as to our thinking.  We got a proposal for a grass roots organizer to handle the Northwest and to some extent the West Coast of the United States for this campaign.  Somebody asked him the question of due diligence where the person would be located, and he was to be located in Washington, D.C.  And then we sort of raised some objections and we started talking about Seattle.  And we finally sort of agreed that the right place to have it was in Tom Foley's district.  It's not particularly media, but you ought to have somebody there with the local newspapers whose votes and relationships in addition to the grass roots stuff has part of the media campaign.  We've got an expert right there to be quoted in the local papers, in the pivotal office on that issue in the first six months of that issue.

Moderator: I'm going to use that to wrap this up and with an aside in the following comment, which is that, you know, it's nice to have workshops you hope that you will come away from one with answers.  And there's a number of really nice media projects along the environmental area that have been done not just with last year, but the last ten years.  And it shows us what's possible.  But despite the growing number of consultants in the field it's still very difficult as to who to go into it, how big an effort to make and how well coordinated it is to any targeted legislative efforts.  And I think that that means that the lesson that I draw from that, and nothing in this discussion disabused me of this notion, which is that we as funders have to be insightful as to where we're going to dump essentially a large chunk of money just on these small media projects that come across our desks.  And we don't have enough resources to go to people and say how do we evaluate this or who's good at it or whatever.  And I would hope that future EGA panels or groups of funders can tell me, and I would be willing to and hope to work with some in my position at Pew, if we could start working together at evaluating these sort of things, because it's, you know, you just get avalanched by it.

Male voice: I just want to say one thing.  I think the real challenge for us here in this community and in the non-profits is to develop the in-house capacity to develop our own media experts within the foundations and in the non-profit organizations.  Because consultants are expensive and they usually are kind of a one shot kind of deal, and we need to build the institutional capacity in our movement to work with media and get the message out and that means education and training.  That means what we should do, especially the foundations, we can provide education and training for media advocacy.

Moderator: I'd like to thank the panel members. 

[Applause].

END OF SESSION

END OF TAPE