Professor Saint Louis University Saint Louis, Missouri, United States
Abstract: Conservation efforts increasingly focus on engaging individual homeowners, particularly in urban areas. Residential lawns and gardens can make up to one-third to one-half of the total greenspace in a city. If urban homeowners can be encouraged to make ecologically meaningful habitat improvements in their yards, this could decrease environmental degradation, increase natural habitat, and provide more connectivity across urban spaces for important wildlife like native pollinators. One way to encourage such changes is through backyard conservation programs, which recruit, enroll, inform, and support homeowners in the process of making these changes, often via their websites.
The goal of this study was to determine how often various persuasive appeals were used in a sample of backyard conservation program websites (N = 141). Our approach was to describe the websites by conducting a quantitative content analysis. The communication literature was used to develop a coding scheme of persuasive elements, including framing of the issue; use of visuals, humor, and other heuristic cues; messages of hope, pride, or self-efficacy; and specific calls to action. Two undergraduate students were extensively trained on the codebook and underwent multiple inter-rater reliability checks before and during coding the websites.
Results indicate that a significant percentage (34.7%) of websites did not target a specific audience, and some that did appeared to target gardening enthusiasts and long-standing members of the program and related association. Fewer than 1 in 10 sites acknowledged challenges participants might encounter, and 7.8% of sites were visibly outdated. References to norms appeared in fewer than 1 in 20 sites, and only 22.9% made use of charts, infographics, or diagrams. In conclusion, the important task of involving the general public in conservation efforts is likely hindered by the lack of theory- and evidence-based communicative strategies on backyard conservation programs’ websites. As ecologists struggle to include people beyond scientists and nature enthusiasts in conservation efforts, it is recommended that they collaborate with scholars trained in communication to make the most of their recruitment and outreach efforts.
