19 Connecting with people and organisations like us

It’s especially important to know that you’re not alone in your quest to make the world a better place.

For every issue area a public interest communicator wants to influence, there are thousands of other communicators, nonprofits and even some funding organisations (e.g. foundations and governments) that are interested in this topic too. Find ways to connect with other communicators, other issue-area groups and other organisations that you can learn from, and who can learn from you. You’ll be surprised how willing they are to collaborate, because advancing public interest outcomes – and in fact saving the planet – is in the best interests of all of us.

Many of these organisations will have funds to conduct some research about their audiences. Ask if they’ll share it with you and organisations like you, through webinars or virtual conferences, or even just via email.

They may also have conducted their own systems mapping which could help you with yours, or eradicate the need for you to reinvent the wheel.

One part of expanding the discipline of public interest communication methods, is to show how we can all benefit from the work of each other: the academic learnings about what will help create change; the practitioner learnings about what works and what doesn’t in the implementation of our work; and the funder learnings who have spent resources on understanding audiences, targeting them with media interventions, and evaluating their own programmes and portfolios.

A large part of our work at Good Place Comms [https://goodplacecomms.com] is to try to make this sharing easier: persuading large organisations to better distribute their learnings and finding better ways to connect them with the change-makers who exist all over the world.

Collaboration is key to being a public interest communicator, and if there are communities to join, join them. If there aren’t, create them. You’ll be amazed at what you might learn.