Speaking with One Voice is Integral to Strengthening Public Trust
Manager, Communications and Member Services
CSTA
The information highway is a great tool. We have access to more information now than we ever have, and it’s literally at our fingertips. It makes life easier in a lot of ways.
However, it poses a challenge to communications professionals like Liz Lumsden, CSTA’s new manager of communications and member services. Liz views the internet as a bit of a Catch-22 — even though we have more information at our fingertips than ever before, we are increasingly living in our own little bubbles.
“Because we can use a variety of apps to customize the kinds of information we receive, we often choose to expose ourselves to information that reinforces our beliefs,” she says. “This is called confirmation bias — our brains are naturally wired to be easily receptive to information that helps us make sense of our world.”
Liz points to confirmation bias as a major challenge she’s excited to tackle.
“It definitely exists outside our industry — social media feeds are rife with disinformation and misinformation about agriculture and seed. This fake news often flourishes due to the power of confirmation bias — the public often has preconceived notions about our industry, and they welcome information that appears to back up what they believe.”
But confirmation bias also exists with agriculture, too, as it does within every industry, she notes. “This is why we can sometimes have a hard time communicating with consumers, for example. We can tell them that the information they are absorbing is flat-out wrong, but it sometimes doesn’t seem to matter.”
It’s a public trust issue. As human beings, we have a hard time trusting people who we don’t think understand us or sympathize with our concerns, she says.
Liz learned this after spending six years in government communications roles. She had to become adept at taking complex and technical government policy and putting it into plain language that the general public would be receptive to. She had to think deeply about who the audience was and what they wanted and expected from their government. Talking to them in the language of the policy wonk just wouldn’t cut it. Whether it was energy prices or recycling programs, they wanted government to get to the point and make clear that their tax dollars were being spent smartly.
[tweetshare tweet=”As human beings, we have a hard time trusting people who we don’t think understand us or sympathize with our concerns.” username=”germinationmag”]
“I believe the public expects something similar from agriculture. They want healthy, affordable food, but they also expect that food to be produced sustainably and in a way that is good for the environment,” says Liz.
Of course, everyone has a different opinion on what that kind of food looks like. Organic, non-organic, GMO, non-GMO, local, non-local — the list goes on. If there’s a demand for it, our industry will fill that demand — but we have to make sure we communicate clearly and respectfully with the public and learn to speak their language, Liz says.
It’s no small task. At CSTA, it’s Liz’s mission to craft a communications strategy for the future.
“All organizations have to have a good communications strategy in this day and age. Yes, all organizations can count clicks and see how many people retweeted them, but you can take it to another level (as CSTA has always strived to do) by escaping the echo chamber and ensuring our industry presents a single, understandable narrative for the public to access.”
Having a cohesive narrative — something actually proposed under the Seed Synergy Collaboration Project via the proposed creation of a single national seed association — is the key to breaking through that bubble, she adds.
Liz looks forward to communicating with our members — and the public — and doing some bubble-breaking. She asks you to stay tuned and please let her know if you have any ideas about how we can better communicate as an industry. You can reach Liz at llumsden@seedinnovation.ca!
