 I know that colleagues at FAO have been impressed by what C4's communications team has been doing over the last few years to implement our new strategy. So what I'm going to do this morning is just spend a little bit of time talking about new messages from my perspective, spend most of the time talking about the use of new media, a new model, and C4's experience implementing it, and then close with just a few reflections on what I think the implications are for our and other organizations. So about the message, I think in the forestry community there's a sense that we need to up our game and improve our forest-related communications. First of all, to increase awareness of the general issues, what they are, but also to update what may be some outdated perceptions of our business, a sense that people don't understand what sustainable forest management is all about. Reflected on what are some of the specific challenges of forest-related communications, on the one hand, we have it easy. When we're talking about forest conservation, we have all these very wonderful images of pristine forests and wildlife. But I think the images of sustainable forest management may be a little bit more difficult to digest. And we all know the problem of the big logging trucks and trees falling down may be not being the most accessible image, but especially as urban elites become increasingly remote from daily experience, they may not immediately connect with the images of what life in and around forest is about. So we're often told, for example, that an image of a smiling child is one of the best to draw people into your messages. But when that smiling child is draped in a bloody bushmeat carcass, maybe that could be alienating to some of our audience. So we have a challenge in communicating what sustainable forest management might look like. We also have to deal with complexity. I think many of this room have had to deal with the challenge of communicating what red is about, even within the forestry community, much less to other audiences. And dynamism, the story changes pretty quickly. Yesterday afternoon at our AFP event, we talked about how the storyline on the Indonesian government's law enforcement efforts to deal with illegal logging changed completely within just a matter of years. So we have to be updating our messages on a regular basis. But I do think that there are opportunities that we're not fully capturing to link forests to key societal objectives, not traditionally linked to forests and to do so in new fora. So when I was a child back in the 60s, there was a famous bumper sticker. If you want peace, work for justice. Well, I think we can appropriate that basic style for the forestry agenda and talk about if you want X, fill in the blank, conserve forests. So X could be food security because forests provide hydrological and pollination services to agriculture. X could be poverty reduction because forests provide diverse income sources to rural communities. And we have no new research showing that that can be, on average, 24% of rural household income comes from forests. X could be mitigation of climate change because of the carbon storage function of trees and vegetation and soils. And X could be resilience to climate change because forests can stabilize hillsides and coastlines from severe storm events and also provide resistance to land fires. Another issue related to new messaging is that we probably shouldn't try to create a wave of attention on issues that are of importance to us, but instead try to surf the waves of attention that may already be out there. So we need to anticipate what's going to be in the news in the coming months and plan our messages around them. And then be prepared to give fast response to those news stories that are breaking for other reasons and get into the so-called second day news with opinion or reaction stories. So for example, we're currently following the media in the run-up to the Durban Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC in December and preparing ourselves and getting pre-position to respond to what's likely to be the news in December. Another example of using these new messages in FORA would be the issue of food security, which as we all know is something that's very high on the public agenda because of rising food prices and famine in the Horn of Africa. I think under an old approach, our message would be a very narrow one on the direct contribution of forest products to nutrition, you know, forest fruits and caterpillars and honey and that sort of thing. But I think we need to broaden our perspective and also to include the role that forests play in providing cash income to communities with which they can buy food to ensure their food security. And maybe even more important, stress those environmental services that sustain the productivity of mainstream agriculture. We also need to revisit how we frame issues. For example, for many years, the bushmeat harvest issue was framed as a challenge because it led to threats to endangered species. But in fact, there are many species that can be harvested sustainably and are importantly a source of food security for many rural people. So there's an opportunity to reframe. And then also where do we extend our messages? It doesn't make sense to talk about forests and food security in a meeting like this where we are all already converted believers in what forests can do. Instead, we need to take our message to other FORA, such as agricultural related events, and get that message on their agenda. Another dilemma that you may hear other speakers this morning talking about is the so-called love versus loss dilemma. There is a story line or a conventional wisdom that goes that we have alienated many of our audiences because our messages are so often doom and gloom. You know, we're always talking about deforestation and extinctions and things are, you know, bad and getting worse and people just turn off our messages. My communication team feels that while it is true, we always need to give people hope in our stories and give policy prescriptions for what can be done. But we shouldn't try to hide the bad news. And in fact, the credibility with our audiences will really lie with our striking the right balance between the bad news which may be the reality and the good news that there are solutions that can be pursued. Now, I'm going to switch gears and talk about new media and how C4 has tried to take advantage of new opportunities and overcome challenges. So what's changed since I entered this profession? First of all, there's a decline in people reading traditional publications. And there's good data on this, at least from the United States. People are much less likely to read a newspaper for their news. They're much less likely to read a book from cover to cover and increasingly are getting their information from other sources. There's also been a decline in traditional news coverage. The big news outlets are no longer posting full-time correspondence all over the world. They no longer have budgets for lots of original news gathering. And so they're open to content being provided by others. I don't need to tell you about the globalization of internet access and the rise of social media. We've got two billion people on the internet now and rising and almost half of those are here in the Asia Pacific region. So this is a whole new avenue of how to reach people. And interestingly, this has been accompanied by a decline in the costs of production of content. Used to be to put your own video together, you had to purchase a $40,000 camera. Well, now you can get a video camera for about $4,000. So by a factor of 10, the costs have come down in doing it yourself, which leads to an opportunity to be your own CNN. In a traditional communications model, communications were seen as like throwing a pebble in a pond and you make a ripple that gradually expands outward. This image is of a cover of an award-winning annual report from the CGIR from a number of years ago. But in this model, information transfer is essentially unidirectional from the producer to the consumer. It's passive and it takes a pretty long time to get to ultimate impact. In a new knowledge sharing model, we take the image of a hurricane. And in the same way that a hurricane draws its strength and energy from the warm water that the wind flows over, in this communication model, the energy of the message derives from the interest of stakeholders, the demand that are out there in Internet world. And so in this model, the output from your organization, and for this I just put C4 in the center, is surrounded by concentric circles of stakeholders, which immediate circle within the organization, then among key partner organizations, then in the wider research and development community, policymakers and donors, and finally the media and the general public. Key fundamentals of the model are that, A, it is web-based. It draws its strength and interactivity from the online community. It combines, though, with traditional outreach methods, publications, news media, in other ways that I'll describe in a moment. It is very much demand-driven in that we try to tailor both the message and the medium to the preferences of stakeholders. It is based on shared platforms and shared content with other partners so that you're using multiple vehicles as well as drawing on multiple sources of content. But it requires constant monitoring, review, and adaptation to adjust to this feedback that you're constantly getting. So we started out a little over a year ago in developing a new model of a website for the community interested in forests and climate change. And to design this website, we looked at the features of the, we thought with the very best websites doing what we wanted to do. So we looked at how Amazon sells books. We looked at National Geographic website and put together a website on forest and climate change that encapsulated those features. And you can see the monthly visits to the website have been steadily increasing. We also have experimented with doing specific language websites and in collaboration with the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry have a Bahasa language website where we put all of our Indonesian specific and red plus related contents, been very successful. We've also been establishing a presence on online media with new media, such social media such as Facebook and Twitter. And these allow certain stakeholder groups who want to access our content through these portals to do so. And also for those who have limited bandwidth, often a Facebook entry can be easier than the website entry. For example, in many places in Africa. We've also been experimenting with blogs and have invested in getting our scientists to blog, our communication teams to blog, to blog from events like this one. And it's been quite successful. Again, you can see the page views going steadily up on our blogs. The power of the blog is illustrated by what happens when a C4 publication is referenced in a blog. And this quote from one of our colleagues that publishing is good but being read is better, I think tells the story. This colleague Bruno Locatelli published a journal article on forest and adaptation back in March. And before it was featured in a blog was being downloaded about three downloads per day. During the three days immediately following the blog posting, that jumped up to 35 downloads per day. And since then has leveled back down to a rate of about seven per day. So just an example of how a blog feature can up the downloads of traditional publications. We've also become a source for Google News. And having been certified as being an unbiased source of news and committed to providing constant content. We're now able to make sure that content that we've provided is available online. So for example, a recent search on forest and adaptation generated five hits, three of which were from C4 generated content. We've also invested in developing various online multimedia packages on specific topics, and I'll show you an example of one about red in the Amazon in just a moment. Events, we don't think of events as being online, because events are what we do here in person. But in fact, we've tried to integrate our events into our online presence. And here the examples are the Forest Indonesia conference, some of you may have heard about from last September in Jakarta. And the Forest Day events that we do every year as part of the UNFCCC conferences of the parties. We blog from these events. We do streaming media from these events. We post videos of the speakers on YouTube. And all of these combine to generate increased web traffic to our website and news stories. So the combined effect of all this investment has been an incredible upsurge in visits to C4's main website. And you can see when the new website and the Clement Forest website were launched at the end of last year, we just had a dramatic uptick that was fueled by the social media presence and blogging. So you can see from 750,000 per quarter up to more than 3 million per quarter page views, a very dramatic difference. But all of these link to our traditional publications as well. In a typical year, C4 sets up a booth at events like this one and others and gives away publications or puts them in the mail, about 80 to 90,000 per year. But at this point, we're now getting almost 80,000 per month of PDF downloads of our publications without the shipping costs. So much decline in cost, but it's driven an increase in a citation of our work. Mailing lists, another traditional way to communicate. We've got about 24,000 email addresses that we've subdivided by language, by interest, by sector, and use that as a vehicle to get out our newsletter to point people to other web content as well as our regular polex updates. Traditional media, we do continue the sort of bread and butter work of cultivating our contacts with journalists. We have upped our game in more frequent media advisories and press releases. And we also spend a lot of time actually arranging field trips for journalists who are visiting and want to see what's going on for us on the ground. We've also invested in training journalists in these complex issues like red. And so for example, in Indonesia over the last year have conducted two workshops, one in Bali, one in Kalimantan, and funded 19 journalists from the regions in Indonesia to come to Jakarta for the Forests Indonesia conference in September. And as a result got more than 70 stories in the media from that conference. So added all together, what has this meant? Over the last three years, we've had a three fold increase in the average monthly media hits, both directly of C4 related stories, but also stories such as the Economist special report where we provided significant background content. Now, let me just give you some examples from the online media. This is just a minute and a half video to give you a sense. The idea behind red is we need to keep the forest standing and avoid the deforestation. Basically, this would be done through payments to forest rich countries to not cut down their forest. This whole workshop is brought together journalists from across Indonesia to learn about the role of wetlands and especially the role of wetlands and mangroves in their relationship to climate change. The main thing is of great value of Indonesia, that there are now more than 40 red plus panels for demonstration projects across Indonesia. This makes us a pioneer in creative ways to address climate change. Opening statements by his Excellency the President, I think that was really heartless. And the change in society always needs the support of the head of state. That is very, very positive. I would like to thank the support that has touched this conference. I hope this kind of meeting can be organized in time that will come. The second thing that you knew 10 years ago is out of date and really needs to be updated. The second is that in addition to that initial upfront investment, you need continuous budgeting for communications not just for new activities but also for maintenance of your websites and of your mailing lists. This is something that program staff often resists, yet we found when we went back to some of our websites after only a couple of years, almost two-thirds of the addresses were out of date. It takes constant attention. It also requires constant investment in monitoring and evaluation and impact assessment of the communications effort itself so that you see what's working, what's getting hits, what's not. Other implications have to do with human resources management. We have to change the incentives of our staff and our organizations so that participating in communications efforts is part of their jobs. Having a blog, helping prepare for an event takes additional time and it's not necessarily what people are used to doing. We found that with C4 scientists, they had to wait and see the impact and the benefit for them before they were willing to make that investment. It's been a cultural change. Second and this is a big one is that you have to take the risk of disintermediating between the staff and external audiences. If your press release has to be approved by six people in the chain of command, you're going to miss the news cycle. That means taking risks of allowing your staff to speak directly to the media, to post blogs with just one level of review. It means that every now and then I have to apologize to somebody because we get it wrong, but calibrating that risk about getting out there quickly versus having too many layers of quality control is one that every organization is going to have to deal with. Finally, and I think this is especially important in a forum like this one, is we need to increase the permeability of boundaries with other organization's content. We're all here in forestry world together and so we shouldn't think of each other as competitors for attention with target audiences. We've had great experience collaborating within the collaborative partnership on forest with other organizations including FAO represented here in doing joint press releases, joint events, sharing content across our websites and I think it's good for everybody. So on that note, I encourage you to join us, visit us through our website and I look forward to follow-up discussions. Thank you very much.