An exclusive interview with Jamie Biggar
Re.Climate sat down with My Climate Plan co-founder Jamie Biggar to discuss the success of their “Don’t Let Canada Burn” campaign and hear how the segmentation research conducted by EcoAnalytics and Re.Climate helped them reach out to critical supporters.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Emma Bider: First thing’s first. What was the inspiration for this campaign?
Jamie Biggar: Our underlying perspective is that we need to be centering how people are being impacted by climate change right now, and we need to support each other through this crisis–that’s the only way we’ll really get through it.
Part of that work is telling the stories of the people across Canada who are responding to these climate disasters and who are turning into some of the greatest heroes of the climate crisis era. They are also a big part of why Canadians are responding to these disasters, and we think they should be heard and their stories should be amplified.
The consequences of climate change are being felt so acutely by wildfire fighters who are putting their bodies on the line, who are very proud of that work, but they don’t have good working conditions. Too many burn out because they don’t get the support they need, whether that’s pay, health benefits, or equipment. The fires are getting worse and much harder to deal with. So, we have to give firefighters the support they need and the resources they need to keep us safe and make sure that forests have a chance to draw down climate pollution.
EB: I’m really interested in hearing how you identified the audiences you wanted to reach with this campaign.
JB: We started by looking at ridings that are being impacted by climate change, and then looking at which of those ridings are swing ridings that political parties care about the most. We did that because our mission is to make sure that everybody is living in a climate-safe community. And if you want to do that you need strong government action and leadership. If you want strong government action and leadership then you need to be connecting with and engaging with and organizing with the people whose votes matter the most in a first-past-the-post system. And those are the people who live in swing ridings.
EB: Of course, swing ridings were just one piece of this. You used Dr. Louise Comeau and Dr. Erick Lachapelle’s Five Canada’s audience segmentation research to craft your campaign messaging. Can you walk me through how the research influenced the messages and videos you created?
I’d just like to say first off, we deeply appreciate the leadership Re.Climate and EcoAnalytics are providing the climate movement with this research. This kind of research is fundamentally about getting better at listening to people. For us, having a community identified as “Civic nationals” was very clarifying. much easier for us to focus on connecting with them, with what they want, and with how they want to hear from us.
So, the research influenced some of the voices we sought to reflect back. For example, we did a video from the perspective of a farmer who talked about the need for more support for wildfire fighters, and that was specifically inspired by knowing that Civic nationals would be interested in hearing that perspective.
Then, I think there’s a further piece, which is that it helped us validate and confirm our use of Facebook as an outreach platform. Civic nationals tend to be older, and as a result, are much more likely to be connected on Facebook. For all its challenges and problems, Facebook remains one of the main ways people connect with one another across Canada. That’s even more true for rural communities and older Canadians.
We also looked at some of the interests of Civic nationals, like birding and gardening, being community minded, and interested in the outdoors, all things that Louise and Erick identified as being important to Civic nationals.
So, I think that piece is going to lead to really interesting future directions around organizing and connecting with people through, say, birding and gardening associations, and organizations and content creators that they’re already paying attention to.
EB: Could you talk a little bit about why you initially only marketed to women and the challenges using Facebook in general?
JB: So we began by focussing initially on reaching women because we’ve found it is much more likely that if you have an audience who aren’t climate activists, and you start with only women, you are going to be able to create a comment section under the Facebook post where people are having a conversation. It’s not that they are necessarily agreeing. But there’s a conversation going on. Once there’s that conversation that’s when we further expand out the audience so we’re inviting in more male perspectives.
I want to be clear here. Men, like the wildfire fighters we need to support, are doing incredible work in the climate crisis. We have seen many men who are profoundly moved by the call to action to make our communities climate safe.
EB: Now that you’ve done this phase of the campaign, what are you thinking about next?
JB: Well first off, we are committed to winning this campaign in the short term and then building for the long term. So in the short term, that means securing that doubling of support for wildfire fighters. Part of that, ais continuing to connect with engaged Canadians to
talk to their MPs and the federal government to see if we can get significant commitments and action now, before the next federal election.
We also want to be able to do more work at the provincial level because the provinces have an enormous responsibility for wildfire fighting specifically.
We are engaging now with the community, too, and we’re doing that on a couple of different fronts. One is, we’ve put billboards up in a bunch of the impacted ridings in Nova Scotia, Edmonton, and Ottawa. So that’s been one tactic to begin to move offline and into places where folks are living. We really appreciate the support of our members for making that possible.
We’re also beginning to talk with folks in our community, many of whom would have never done this before, about themselves having an MP meeting or doing an MP visit, and in many cases, we intend to mirror the delegation of wildfire fighters and climate disaster survivors who went to Ottawa last week to present the petition to the federal government, in order to show that there’s really broad concern and support
I’d say, an interesting future direction is for us to better understand and connect with a lot of the folks who are in the “Disengaged middle.” That’ll be key, as many feel that they are struggling to get by and climate change is already making life worse for them. And I’m excited for us to have more conversations with folks who are in the “Fossil fuel conservative” segment, many of whom are deeply impacted by wildfires, and who are people who really value service and service to their community. I think they are rightly moved and inspired by the wild firefighters keeping us safe.
EB: Any suggestions for climate communicators who want to mirror your success with this campaign?
JB: I do think that more people should be foregrounding the stories of climate survivors, but I say that with a caveat: This needs to be done really sensitively. If you’re doing this work, it needs to have a trauma-informed approach. A group like the Climate Disaster Project is so great at this, and we have a lot to learn.
All that being said, you don’t need to only seek out the stories of those who have been acutely impacted–people in Jasper; Yellowknife; Lytton, B.C.; or Fort MacMurray, AB for example. Because there are people who have been affected in other ways already. If you expand the circle of people impacted by climate change, that is already a really big group.
Jamie Biggar is a co-founder of My Climate Plan. He has a decades-long track record of co-founding high-impact organizations that empower people to improve their climate, democracy, and economy. Before starting work on My Climate Plan full-time, Jamie served as the global leader of the country-based citizen-empowerment teams at Change.org, overseeing their work to help 80 million people around the world win their campaigns in 2021 alone.
Interview conducted by Emma Bider, PhD, Resource and Training Coordinator at Re.Climate.
