What is it?

Speech is another one of the most common method many organizations use for outreach. They do so to present their findings, promote their organization, or persuade their audience to care for their causes.

It mainly helps to educate the audience through cognition and affect.

What to look out for when planning for a speech?

There are a lot of pointers to look out for to deliver a good speech. Here are just some tips that are more relevant and commonly used for in environmental issues.

Risk Perception

In general, risk perception is very poor for environmental issues. This is because the time taken for an environmentally degrading action and the outcome it produce is long, and it is not directly observable by the person. As a result, they do not see a fault in many of their actions. One of the ways to overcome this is to specifically outline how a certain action can lead to a detrimental outcome. Using pictures and stories may help as the point is to increase the salience of this process so that every time the person thinks about doing something detrimental to the environment, he would think twice.

The perception of too little control and too much control contribute to this poor risk perception

• Little control: People discount the threat because they feel that there is nothing they can do anyway. They make use of emotion-focused coping because they know that they cannot solve the problem and they avoid thinking about it, deny that it is happening, and so on.
• Too much control: People overestimate their own invulnerability, overestimate themselves, thinking that disaster will not occur to them. Therefore, they often fail to take precautionary measures.

Therefore, it is important to let your audience know that although there is indeed little control over the global issue such as global warming, every small step counts so people do not simply just discount the threats. This can even motivate them to start acting.

Fear

Usage of moderate amount of fear is actually good at emotionally activating people to act. You can put mildly scary slides on what will happen if pollution were to continue, etc. However, it is ineffective if the chance of the incident actually occurring is very low.

It is important not to use too much fear as it may cause denial. It is also crucial to let people know what they can do after inducing fear so that they can actually act to reduce this emotion. This can be done through providing information of behavioural choices. If they are already for your cause, this strategy can give your audience more motivation to act.