Kidder, Andrea2020-07-222020-07-222020https://hdl.handle.net/11299/214857The 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.enNorthwestNatural ResourcesReport