Problem: To increase the awareness about dying gorillas and chimpanzees in Gabon and Congo and prevent Ebola disease epidemics through organizing the flow of information to hunters, local authorities and international publics.

Background: Studies conducted from 1998 to 2000 found that ape populations shrunk by more than a half since 1983. The main causes are hunting for bushmeat and epidemic of Ebola hemorrhagic fever. Although scientists didn’t come up with common idea how to deal with this problem, they decided to appoint a meeting next month in Washington.

New study will involve searching for nesting sites in Gabon and Congo. Demand for bushmeat on African market is increasing despite efforts on educating people who risk dying from Ebola-tainted meat. The new study predicts that ape populations will decline another 80 percent in the next 33 years. That justifies implementing politically unpopular crackdowns on poachers and an emergency infusion of $10 million for field research from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

That agency currently spends about $250,000 a year on ape conservation in Congo and Gabon. The preventive health program for gorillas and a great-ape disease study are among the Wildlife Conservation agency’s program.

Discussion: As a PR director of the Wildlife Conservation Society I am dealing with a complicated problem: on the one hand, we are supposed to save ape populations which are sick with mysterious Ebola disease, on the other hand we should take into account interests of such publics like local villagers who view gorillas as sources of the food; government doesn’t seem able to control the situation.

Gabon and Republic of Congo are not industrially developed countries; mass media are controlled by government, not available to everyone and aren’t focused on problems like this one.

Being responsible for restoring ape populations, I would start from the investigation of Congo’s history: such a fast decline for last 20 year might be explained not only Ebola viruses, but also a governmental policy in this field; if that’s true, we should blow the whistle and try to increase world’s interest to this point. In fact, this case undoubtedly should attract international interest, because it has international impact (virus Ebola).

However, my task as a PR practitioner is not simple, because I am practicing in the foreign country. That means that foreign media, foreign government and foreign culture limit my tools. In this situation I should try to use media, government and community relations together, reaching the synergy.

So, get our objective defined: to stop the decline of ape populations, the means for this goals might be the establishing of the communications with following stakeholders: local villagers, international publics, media and government.

Recommendations: The most important target publics for us in this case are local villagers (community relations). Those people who hunt gorillas not only terminate apes but also risk to get the Ebola virus and to start the epidemics. They probably are not exposed to media too much; so, we should launch the campaign designed to increase villagers’ awareness about this problem.

We may reach people through the following channels:

1) newsletters – unlike the another print media (newspapers, magazines), newsletter is free, what may be vital for poor Africans;
2) posters and flyers; visual symbol is a key factor when dealing with uneducated and illiterate people; the language of picture is obvious and speaks for itself;
3) to stress the role of radio in this campaign; in many African villages they still don’t have TV sets or newspapers, but they have radio;
4) the role of opinion leaders (tribes’ leaders, old people, shamans & etc.).

Another option may be the lectures in schools about the risks of eating the gorillas’ meat. Posters and brochures disseminated among villagers must emphasize this point and propose some receipts based on different ration (say, vegetarianism-based or pork-, chicken-based). We can even involve food manufacturer like Nestle or Kraft and make a sort of cross-marketing (or, mutual marketing/PR campaign designed to educate those Africans to switch their gorilla-based diet to something more healthy).

The problem of apes population decline in fact is not just Gabon’s or Congolese problem but rather an international one. For saving apes’ population I would start global campaign for fundraising and increasing the awareness about gorillas depopulation.

First of all, the main tool of communication is an interactive web site, which must provide all necessary information about the problem and its sides: hunters for gorillas, Ebola disease, situation in Congo & etc. Here we should not only show the intention to help but also persuade people that this problem is important: the gorilla, sick with Ebola virus, might be the best example of “concrete problem.”

We can show it on TV and have special web site devoted to the poor gorilla (i.e. gorilla becomes a symbol of campaign, like Ronald McDonald in McDonald’s commercials). It is known that people tend to be compassionate if an object is concrete (like in this case).

In fact, we have two intersecting (to some extent) groups of stakeholders: the government and international publics. Neither Gabon’s, nor Congolese governments solved this problem so far. Making this problem well known means negative attitude of international community to governments of those countries. That’s why they would prefer and we should encourage the governments to help Wildlife Conservation Society in supporting rare animals: part of our program may be realized via Gabon and Congolese embassies worldwide; they should pitch this story to media and get additional publicity for our project. In community relations (i.e. communication with villagers) the governments should help us to reach government-controlled media.

Media relations are not very important factor in this case: We are not supposed to build our campaign on this. Local or national media are supposed to be either controlled by government or ignored by local villagers because of their illiteracy. Anyhow, with a governmental support we’ll get the support of the media.