My St. Croix Woods: New Approaches to Landowner Engagement in the St. Croix

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1 My St. Croix Woods: New Approaches to Landowner Engagement in the St. Croix Nicole Butler, Landowner Outreach Assistant, St. Croix River Association The St. Croix River flows more than 160 miles along much of the northern Wisconsin-Minnesota border, providing a cool, healthy water flow into the Mississippi River. Its tributaries stretch across the landscape to form 28 watersheds, and its drainage basin covers more than 7,800 square miles roughly the same size as New Jersey. The watershed is home to rare geological features and habitats, globally significant migratory birds, 40 native mussel species, the rare snake-tail dragonfly and Karner blue butterfly, and a wide array of terrestrial and aquatic wildlife. In 1968 the St. Croix and Namekagon Rivers were among the original eight congressionally designated Wild and Scenic Rivers. The St. Croix and its tributaries also serve as a valuable resource to its local communities, providing drinking water, energy, tourism, and recreational opportunities. Upper St. Croix watershed. (Courtesy drone photo by Craig Blacklock) Over the past 10 years, the St. Croix River Association has become increasingly involved in coordinated, collaborative efforts to institutionalize forest stewardship across the St. Croix watershed. These efforts facilitated the adoption of two landscape stewardship plans the first for the Yellow River watershed of Wisconsin and the second for the Kettle River watershed of Minnesota. These plans and the partnership efforts that made them possible have since grown with groundswell support for forest stewardship and protection across the watershed. In the past year, this growth has culminated in the development of the My St. Croix Woods program. It is no secret that engaging private landowners across a large geographic area can be a challenge for many in the natural resource world. Woodland owners come in all shapes and varieties and have an array of priorities and rationales for owning and caring for their forests. Some are continuing a long family legacy and have lived on their property for generations, while others are interested in the hunting and recreational opportunities to share with their families to create new traditions. Some landowners see their property primarily as a long-term financial investment, and others are brand new to ownership, simply wanting a retreat to immerse themselves in nature and to enjoy wildlife. These differences are clearly evident to those working on the ground with landowners each day, yet when it comes to selling conservation programs and practices, these woodland owners are too often considered as a single, homogenous demographic. As a result, efforts to reach these landowners effectively across landscapes has often resulted in low engagement rates, missed opportunities, and forgotten landowners.

2 This problem was clearly evident in our own watershed, with the Forest Service s National Woodland Owner Survey reporting that fewer than 20% of landowners have received information on forest management in the past 5 years, despite more than 80% being considered prime targets for conservation. In a watershed where more than 75% of the forests are privately owned, this gap seemed enormously problematic for landscape goals of a healthy, well-managed watershed. As the St. Croix River Association (SCRA) began to explore this gap, a few resolvable issues became clear. First and foremost, we needed a better way of engaging private landowners in forest management. We needed to reach more landowners in ways that encouraged them to take action and facilitated continued stewardship. Landscape plans had laid out targets and identified priority areas, but with no way of promoting effective private stewardship in these priority areas, these targets would never be met. Secondly, we needed to connect these landowners to the many resources, professionals, and programs that were already available across the landscape. Finally, we needed to be able to measure and track landowner engagement to maintain their interests in stewardship and to better understand and leverage resources for the capacity needed to meet engaged landowner demand. With the issue identified, SCRA began exploring solutions. It became increasingly clear that the resources and tools to effectively engage these woodland owners, and more importantly keep them engaged, already existed this wasn t an unbreakable code or an unsolvable puzzle. The pieces were right in front of us; they just needed to be placed together. The Tools for Engaging Landowners Effectively (TELE), developed by the Sustaining Family Forests Initiative, provided the launching pad for our efforts. Our staff had the opportunity to attend TELE workshops along with the Advanced TELE training this past fall. TELE offered a strategic and targeted approach to reframe how we were marketing and delivering services to woodland owners. Many of the practitioners in our region understood landowner assistance in the frame of an implementation toolbox or the various assistance, programs, plans, and actions landowners had at their disposal to engage in forest stewardship, ranging in cost and permanence. This toolbox is a phenomenal resource for service providers and helps to provide a wider view of how landowner assistance programs fit together; however, each of these tools appealed to landowners differently and each required a separate series of steps and professionals to assist in the work. This became an issue as too often, the tools lacked the connectivity to guide a landowner from one step to the next.

3 The TELE resources helped us to reframe this box into a ladder of engagement. This shift allowed us to understand each of these tools as a step that a landowner might take in becoming a forest steward and helped us to focus on how to support landowners across the full ladder. We broke each step down to understand the incentives and barriers to different landowners and identify the necessary resources and professional assistance to achieve each step. This in turn allowed us to envision the necessary structure for effectively connecting landowners to these resources and professionals, and more importantly, connecting them to the next steps for continued forest stewardship. The TELE resources also provided guidance for reinventing how we approached our outreach to landowners to take each of these steps. We learned that we needed to step outside the natural resource world and approach this outreach with the perspective of more traditional marketers. By targeting specific landowners and treating conservation as a service or product that we were selling with a clear marketing message, we are able to maximize the response of those specified landowners with a compelling and resonating message, rather than focus our efforts on generalized messages that reach everyone but appeal to no one. With a better means of targeting and marketing to landowners, our attention turned to how we connect landowners to resources and professionals and how we then keep them engaged and track their progress. This led us to the ongoing partnership efforts, pioneered by the American Forest Foundation in our neighboring regions. The My Lake Superior North Woods program to our north and the My Wisconsin Woods program, led by the Aldo Leopold Foundation in the Driftless Area, were successfully utilizing strong partner networks to connect landowners to resources and on-the-ground assistance. These programs were also effectively tracking their outreach efforts and landowner engagement with well-designed, comprehensive tracking databases. Learning from these programs inspired us to bring this type of partnership model to our region, and their guidance and feedback smoothed our learning curve and allowed us a leg up in the process of developing our program. With these resources and models at our disposal and partner support across the landscape, we were able to bring the My St. Croix Woods program to the St. Croix watershed in the autumn of Our hope was to create a program that offered comprehensive support for landowners in the watershed, regardless of their specific priorities, needs, and stage in stewardship. We recognized that there was not a one-size-fits-all option for landowner stewardship, and we wanted to be able to present landowners

4 with a comprehensive suite of options that would help to achieve their specific goals. We also wanted to ensure that we were supporting local service providers with training and capacity growth opportunities and promoting their work by facilitating strong relationships between landowners and those working on the ground. Through funding from the U.S. Forest Service and a close partnership between the St. Croix River Association, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Minnesota Forest Resources Council, and The Nature Conservancy, we developed the infrastructure for the program in April. This included building: A partnership network to include more than 20 organizations providing guidance, input, and resources A network of nearly 20 DNR and district foresters, loggers, private consultants, Natural Resource Conservation Service technical service providers, wildlife management specialists, and other natural resource managers working locally A landowner resource library of more than 350 different materials A dispatch system to match landowners with the resources or professionals based on their needs and interests A website that includes landowner events and networking opportunities, online request forms, and a service provider directory Comprehensive landowner and service provider tracking databases that are compatible with existing DNR tracking structures and flexible enough to work across the watershed for both Wisconsin and Minnesota applications A strategic followup system to keep landowners engaged and learning about stewardship During this development stage, we also utilized the landscape stewardship plans and partner input to identify priority areas and parcels and to select approved woodland stewardship plans as the target of our first campaigns. With our infrastructure in place, priorities set, and targets identified, we were ready to launch our first campaigns in the Kettle River watershed. We began developing our campaign strategy a 6-week, fourtouch direct mailing that included a series of post cards prompting landowners to contact us to get started on a woodland stewardship plan. The campaign was strategically targeted to what TELE defines as Working the Land woodland owners. These are landowners who are driven to get the most out of their woodland, appreciating both the aesthetic beauty qualities and practical financial and resource benefits of their forests. They are also the most likely landowner segment to have a management plan. We designed our materials to maintain the distinctive natural resource and forestry feel with natural tones; photos of views of healthy working forests and deer; and simple, clear text. Our messaging emphasized getting the most out of your woods and was kept minimal to not clutter the postcards. We utilized attention-getting questions to prompt landowners to read the postcard and targeted each question directly to the Working the Land woodland owners. The campaign launched mid-october and was completed in December. We targeted just over 1,400 landowners, each of whom received four postcards. Our goal was to have landowners learn about My St. Croix Woods and take steps toward stewardship planning. After the completion of this first campaign, we are very pleased to report an approximately 20% overall engagement rate. We had more than 300 new landowners visit the My St. Croix website, with a 23%

5 returning user rate. Of those online engagements, more than 75 landowners downloaded forest stewardship fact sheets, more than 65 landowners utilized the service provider directory, 30 landowners requested and received customized information and resource packets, and 11 landowners were directly connected with service providers and are currently working with them on timber, wildlife, and stewardship plans or practices. These latter two metrics alone translate to more than 4,200 acres of private woodlands being impacted by the program. Throughout January and February 2018, we will be following up with these landowners to track their progress and continue to provide support. Our program is still very much a work in progress and we are continually seeking ways to improve. Our future campaigns will focus on increasing the number of direct connections to service providers and building upon online engagement to facilitate on-the-ground actions. Our next campaign will launch in the spring of 2018 and focus on Woodland Retreaters in the Kettle River watershed. We then plan to launch campaigns in the Snake River watershed in This work would not be possible without the ongoing support of the U.S. Forest Service, landscape partners, and neighboring partnership networks. To learn more about My St. Croix Woods, please visit Upper St. Croix watershed. (Courtesy drone photo by Craig Blacklock)