This blog post was written by Paul Butler.  Mr. Butler led Rare’s first Pride campaign in the late 1970′s to save the endangered St. Lucian parrot and continues his conservation leadership today as Rare’s Senior Vice President, Global Programs.

This part one of a series of posts from Mr. Butler on his campaign visit to Andavadoaka in Madagascar. His second post was on how Madagascar is a biological marvel, but it faces grave threats.

Some may falsely think of Rare as solely an awareness-raising organization, but Rare is actually in the business of behavior change.

Rare create an enabling environment for behavior change to take place by marketing the changes needed, as well as providing the alternatives to make desired changes possible and sustainable.  In simplest terms, this means that Rare seeks ways to convince and enable individuals and communities to take action to protect endangered species and ecosystems. When Rare and its partners are successful, individuals and communities change their own behaviors so that conservation threats are reduced or eliminated.

Rare must evaluate its performance by measuring each Pride campaign’s ability to impact individual and community behaviors, so that conservation measures are supported, implemented, and ultimately lead to the elimination of threats to biodiversity.  These conservation measures include evaluating behavior change by determining, for example:

• The number of families to adopt a new fuel-efficient stove;
• The number of fishermen who adopt the use of nets, rather than dynamite;
• The acres of forest that people agree to protect.

These are the most common visible signs that a Pride campaign is making an impact and progressing towards its goal of conservation.  While these signs are critically important milestones in any Pride campaign to protect an endangered ecosystem, they may take months or even years to develop.  In response, Rare has developed success measures that can give an earlier indication of the likely success of a Pride campaign.  These indicators measure achievements that often occur during the organizing portion of a Pride campaign and offer some prediction of the long-term viability of a campaign. Rare measures its success by looking at three categories of measures:

• 1) Capacity
• 2) Constituency
• 3) Conservation

In addition, a “Theory of Change” is developed for each campaign to clarify the expected sequence of outcomes, and determine whether we are on track at each step.

Capacity

Capacity is a measure of a local partner’s ability and willingness to manage a social marketing campaign in the future.  One measure is the percentage of former campaign managers who have stayed in conservation.  Based on longitudinal studies, more than 95 percent of all people trained by Rare are still in conservation roles and nearly 100 percent continue to use the skills they learned from Pride.  Many Pride campaign managers are internationally recognized leaders.  For example, in 2006, Tisna Nando of Indonesia was recognized by Time magazine as one of five Asian “eco-heroes.”  Rare focuses on individual capacity – the capacity a campaign manager develops during the university phase of the Pride Program, as well as the capacity that this new training brings to his or her organization.

Constituency

Constituency is a measure of the local community’s commitment to conservation.  This year, estimates show that 1.3 million people will be touched by a Pride campaign.  Rare and its partners also track the number of volunteers who support a campaign and what that might mean for a community.  For example, Salvador Garcia Ruvalcaba organized over 2,000 volunteers to collect 16 tons of trash around a critical watershed in Manantlán, Mexico.  Through follow-up research, estimates show that over 2 million people have changed their attitude towards conservation due to a Pride campaign, which is a good leading indicator of future behavior change.

Conservation

Conservation is a Pride campaign’s actual impact on the environment. Our ultimate measure is the actual threat reduction of a campaign.  Another measure is the community’s change in knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP).  Each campaign manager should be able to begin measuring the conservation impacts of his or her work (such as area of forest conserved, threats measurably reduced) by the time he or she has completed Pride training. For example, Titus Letaapo, a campaign manager from Kenya, measured the number of forest fires that occurred in his district each year before and after his campaign. Prior to the campaign, there were 14; two years later, there were only five.

These categories, known as the “3 C’s,” form the three pillars that support Rare’s ability to not only measure the success of a Pride campaign but also to help predict the likelihood of continued success after the campaign has ended.  They also help determine if corrective actions are needed while a campaign is in progress, i.e. if the capacity objective is not being met.

A second important tool is a campaign’s “Theory of Change” (ToC).  A clearly articulated Theory of Change serves to create a commonly understood vision of a campaign’s long-term goals, how they will be reached, and what will be used to measure progress along the way. Producing a “ToC” is an iterative process which begins in the application stage of the Pride Program and which is continually re-worked throughout the planning phase and into implementation. The Theory of Change is represented using the following equation:

K + A + IC + BR → BC → TR → CR

Where:

• 1) Conservation Result (CR) — What biological target are we trying to conserve?
• 2) Threat Reduction (TR) — What are the main threats to our conservation target, and which can we reduce?
• 3) Behavior Change (BC) — What behaviors for which group(s) must change in order to reduce these threats?
• 4) Barrier Removal (BR) — What are the barriers to adoption of the new behavior we want to see, and how can we remove them?
• 5) IC (Interpersonal Communication) — What conversations are needed to encourage people to adopt the new behavior?
• 6) Attitude (A) — What attitudes must shift for these conversations to happen?
• 7) Knowledge (K) — What knowledge is needed to increase awareness and help shift these attitudes?

In other words, this equation represents Rare’s hypothesis of how Pride campaigns can help address critical biodiversity issues, namely that “an increase in knowledge plus a change in attitude resulting from interpersonal communication, in the presence of an appropriate[1] barrier removal ‘tool,’ lead to behavior change, which facilitates threat reduction and ultimately ensures conservation.”  For each step in the equation, Rare campaign managers establish “SMART” Objectives and metrics to track progress over, and beyond, the timeline of their campaigns.

An entire division within Rare (Quality Management & Improvement) has been established to work with Rare’s regional staff and project partners to help assess and evaluate the progress being made. Launched in March 2009, the Quality Management and Improvement Team’s mission is to:

Create and manage a set of processes and tools to ensure that Rare is running the most effective conservation projects possible and that Rare has a system to monitor and ensure success. The team will gather and use data, cases, best practices and other tools to improve Pride campaigns, and to improve the overall processes that support Pride.

One such tool is the undertaking of cross-regional campaign visits, with the goal of:

• Ground-truthing processes to check if there are gaps between what was planned to happen, what is actually happening, and what is purported to happen;
• Determining what could make campaigns better and feeding these lessons back into the Pride campaign design (including the formal curriculum);
• Compliance to ensure that there is no gap between reported information and actual results.

I was delighted to be part of the first cross-regional campaign visit, when I joined a team composed of Dale Galvin (COO), Daniel Hayden (Director of Quality Management and Improvement) and Annalisa Bianchessi (Pride Program Manager) on a visit to the Andavadoaka Coast in southwest Madagascar. The trip reviewed progress toward the 3 C’s (Capacity, Constituency, and Conservation) and this campaign’s Theory of Change [2]. I was excited to see the campaign for several reasons. First, it was a marine campaign, and would therefore help us with a suite of new campaigns Rare is proposing for next year (as many as 24 campaigns around the world with a marine theme).  Second, Madagascar was a place I had not visited before.

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[1] Economically viable, socially and culturally appropriate, as well as easily accessible and adoptable.

[2] Take a look at every Pride campaign featured on RarePlanet and you will be able to see its Theory of Change.

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