Initiatives for 2010 and Beyond: Since its founding in the late 1990s by a handful of leading aquariums and other ocean conservation organizations The Ocean Project has developed into a credible, reliable, and quietly powerful catalyst for advancing conservation with its network of Partners.
The Ocean Project has been a collaborative leader in conducting, collecting, and disseminating information on public perceptions of the ocean, climate change, and related threats and challenges our blue planet is facing. During this time, The Ocean Project has built the largest global network for ocean conservation, with over 950 Partner institutions and organizations, primarily zoos, aquariums, and museums (ZAMs), as well as other conservation organizations. The network grows weekly and we now include Partners in nearly all 50 states and 85 other countries.
The Ocean Project works with our Partner ZAMs to bring about positive change, by educating for action. We have been helping to create a paradigm change in the way informal education centers and organizations approach and conduct education by helping them more effectively reach their visitors for conservation outcomes. Everything we work on is in conjunction with and for our Partner ZAMs, as wonderful "gatekeepers" to the public.
We help our Partner ZAMs incorporate inspirational and informative values-based communications strategies and tools to enhance ocean awareness among the public; change attitudes and behaviors for conservation; increase civic involvement in community conservation activities; and generate regional and national policy-focused action.
We have three major initiatives at this time:
Environmental Communications Research Initiative — The Ocean Project plays a collaborative leadership role in providing conservation communications research, strategies, and tools to enhance Partner efforts to motivate their millions of visitors for positive action. We conduct cutting edge public opinion and market research and analysis about how the public relates to the ocean in order to build environmental literacy and encourage conservation action. We also closely monitor all other relevant public opinion and other market research (qualitative and quantitative research related to ocean and environmental values, attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors) and synthesize and analyze findings for our Partners. We also identify social marketing efforts, publications and other information related to human dimensions and the environment and summarize findings for distribution to our network, and we work with Partners to develop case studies related to effectively communicating about ocean conservation and environmental issues.
Seas the Day Initiative — The Ocean Project helps our Partners effectively reach their audiences for personal and societal action by developing inspirational information, tools, and products based on the latest market and public opinion research. This initiative has been set up for our Partners to take full advantage of (e.g. customizing the content for their own audiences) and it also reaches the public directly. Our Seas the Day website features a new conservation theme each month and highlights comprehensive conservation action tips from our large database of personal action ideas. We are continually developing ideas for innovative tools, products, and partnerships that will help our Partners and the public take conservation action. As part of this personal action initiative, we also help promote and coordinate World Oceans Day, an annual celebration of our world's ocean on or around June 8th.
Watershed-Ocean Initiative — The Ocean Project is developing a worldwide mapping and water connectivity effort to help advance watershed and ocean conservation by completely changing how people perceive their sense of place, and making a stronger connection between where people live and work and the impact on the ocean.
