A Communications Plan for "Keep it Clean," Lake of the Woods
2020
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A Communications Plan for "Keep it Clean," Lake of the Woods
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2020
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The following report and communications plan was created for the Keep it Clean Committee
through a Community Assistance Project with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban
and Regional Affairs. The research team consisted of Andrea Kidder, the graduate research
assistant and author of this report, Vanessa Voller and C Terrence Anderson of CURA’s
community-based research department, Mike Hirst from the Keep it Clean committee and Linda
Kingery of the Northwest Regional Sustainability Development Partnership. The goals for the
project were to research and create a communications plan to bolster the committee’s efforts to
protect and preserve the beauty of Lake of the Woods, particularly considering the issue of trash
left behind on the lake during the winter ice fishing seasons. This project is a recommended
next step from a capstone project sustainability assessment conducted by students in the
Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota in Spring 2019.
As a premier ice fishing destination, Lake of the Woods is a
vital resource for the community in northwestern
Minnesota, as shown in the map in Figure 1. In 2012-2013,
Keep it Clean (KIC) was established to protect, maintain
and promote cleanliness for the beautiful landscape, water
resources and shorelines of Lake of the Woods as a
special place for everyone to visit and enjoy. An initial effort
of the KIC committee was the provision of dumpsters at
strategic lake access points. Ice anglers who recreate on
the lake independently, without the provision of services
from a resort, needed a convenient place to dispose of their
trash. However, in 2018, KIC was no longer able to provide
those dumpsters and some resort owners said they thought
the amount of trash left on the ice increased, as did their
burden to deal with it. Therefore, and upon the
recommendation of the capstone report to continue a
partnership with the University of Minnesota, the KIC
committee requested the help of a CURA graduate
research assistant to create a communications plan to
spread the message and mission of KIC to independent ice anglers through point-of-contact
interactions with invested stakeholders like the resort owners who sell passes for these anglers
to use their plowed ice roads to access the lake.
Utilizing the theory of planned behavior, the KIC committee should craft messages that respond
to two important cognitive processes that affect the way a person behaves: the social norms
regarding a behavior, and the perceived difficulty of a behavior. The messages used at point-ofcontact
interactions, as well as proactive messaging on social media, should seek to enforce
norms of ethical environmental behavior as suggested by the Leave No Trace Center for
Outdoor Ethics, and should help alleviate the difficulty and inconvenience of trash disposal by
increasing awareness of available dumpsters or garbage services for independent anglers.
The report contains a literature review of education and communications based on ethical
behavior in the outdoors, as well as a discussion of a survey conducted by a CURA graduate
research assistant, a SWOT analysis for the committee’s position as a source for the
messaging, recommended communications strategies in the short and long term, samples of
messaging, as well as a plan for evaluating the effectiveness of the communications plan.
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Prepared in partnership with Keep it Clean, Lake of the Woods, by the Community Assistantship Program (CAP), which is administered by the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) at the University of Minnesota.
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Kidder, Andrea. (2020). A Communications Plan for "Keep it Clean," Lake of the Woods. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/214857.
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