Wednesday, 01 September 2004
FSC-US Marketing and Communications
FSC-US has been working hard to support our stakeholders in their efforts to market FSC-certified products. This work includes coordinating FSC’s presence at events, speaking in public forums, providing up-to-date information about the FSC system, educating customers about FSC certification, and referring interested customers to the resources that can help them find the suppliers they seek. We thought it might be helpful to take a moment and share with you the various activities we are engaged in, and we invite you to comment on and participate in them.
FSC-US marketing and communications efforts have two goals: to increase the visibility of the FSC brand in the market and to provide system wide information for our members, certificate holders and other stakeholders.
To assist in the delivery of basic information we redesigned our website in January of this year. We have had a great deal of positive feedback, but we are always looking for ways to improve the site. Your comments are always welcome. Visits to our website and the time spent there have increased dramatically over the last year. Moreover, the fact that those users are spending more time on the site suggests that we have created more interesting and useful content and made it easier to access. The average number of page views per month for this year to date is nearly 88,000. We also now offer FSC brochures and Principles and Criteria Guides on request.
We offer a PSA (Public Service Announcement—see March 2004 newsletter) that serves as a starting point for companies who want to advertise in print. This image can be customized with your brand and helps to clarify why certified products are special. We recently ran the PSA on the back cover of Environmental Design and Construction Magazine. This was viewed by attendees to the American Institute of Architects annual conference, which triggered 25,000 hits to our website.
We routinely offer editorial content for media that we believe can be helpful in getting the word out. Many of our stories get printed, and the FSC staff is being contacted frequently for interviews. See the September/October issue of Ecostructure Magazine as one example.
The number of “subscribers” to our newsletter has increased by over 20 percent in the last twelve months. This remains our primary link with our diverse stakeholders. We are always happy to add people to the list.
Total FSC monthly media exposure has increased in the last year by just over 25 percent. More importantly, monthly exposures in targeted trade magazines (reflecting our business-to-business marketing approach) have increased from nine in June 2003, to 16 in June 2004. Our media exposures in aggregate are getting to more and more people—in 2003 our print media exposure reached a total circulation of more than 45 million.
We are continuing to see a rise on a daily basis in the number of inquiries to our office from people seeking information and/or sources of products. Over the past several months we have begun to keep an internal “response log” in the FSC-US office of the types of phone and email inquiries we receive. As we see patterns develop in this log, it helps us to better understand the needs of both certificate holders and the public, and work to develop ways to fulfill those needs. As always, if you are looking for certified products, please see: www.fsc-info.org and/orwww.certifiedwood.org. Both sites do an excellent job of providing information to help you find suppliers. If you are having trouble finding what you seek, please email us at info@fscus.organd we will try to help.