How to communicate?
On Tuesday November 11 the Interreg Aurora-project ClimateForest hosted a cross-border webinar focusing on communication and advisory services within the Finnish Forest Centre and the Swedish Forest Agency. The aim with event was to exchange knowledge, experiences and good examples. This to inspire new ideas and increased networking between the agencies.
The programme contained a comparison between the agencies’ different prerequisites when it comes to finance and number of employees, number of private forest owners and how the agencies have chosen to approach them as well as larger forest companies.
Social media
For instance, the agencies have chosen different ways when it comes to social media. The Finnish Forest Centre encourage their staff to use their own private accounts for posts about their expertise in forestry. The Swedish Forest Agency has official accounts. Both agencies agreed upon the challenges of responding to posts. It is a fine line to choose which posts to answer and which not to. There was also a discussion about trends and what platforms may be most effective way to reach target groups in the future.
Advisory services
There are also differences between the countries when it comes to advisory services. As an example, both agencies have a “My page”-service but in Finland forest owners can use the platform to contact forest loggers directly. Another difference is that the Swedish Forest Agency still has a lot of direct contact with small private forest owners whereas the Finnish Forest Centre mostly correspond via larger forest companies.
Participants
– The participants represented both agencies and mirrored of how each agency work with communication, says organizer Mika Tapio. In Sweden, communication is carried out by both professional communicators as well as forest officers compared to Finland, where most of the communication is handled by professionals.