The Global Partnership for Plant Conservation website
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Top ten tips for engaging your audience
Sue Minter, Eden Project, Cornwall
- Stop talking to ourselves and broaden our audiences by active outreach to many social classes and ethnicities. Invite them in!
- Be unstuffy in our approach to interpretation and use humour to engage people
- Use economic botany, our daily reliance on plants, to connect with people
- Use interdisciplinary teams to work up interpretation and involve artists at the brief stage-they will help you ‘think out of the box’
- Set your focus firmly on the future and empower people to contribute to it. Involve them in the ‘good news stories’
- Be theatrical with your horticulture, don’t be afraid of ‘set dressing’
- Practise what you preach in the sustainability of your operations-lead the way.
- Actively embrace controversies-performance helps the public engage with ethical dilemmas (historically that has been the role of theatre…)
- Food is our common focus and agriculture has a massive effect on ‘the wild’ and wild plants. Work with the international genebanks to showcase their work on sustainable agriculture via your gardens-they need a public stage (and botanic gardens have a worldwide network of ‘stages’)
- Trade and consumption are not dirty words. Use your shops, catering and supply chains to demonstrate how the consumer can contribute to sustainable trade in plant-based products and ameliorate impacts on the wild. The point is not to understand the world but change it…