Sustainability Communications
Overview
The Arthur W. Page Center is the home for the Sustainability Communications Initiative. Grant funding for the initiative comes from the Sustainability Institute at Penn State. Funding for the initiative was secured by Center director Denise Bortree and senior research fello Lee Ahern.
Initiative research analyzes public communication on sustainability topics with a goal of offering researched-based insights into best practices in sustainability communication across disciplines, including nonprofit, education, government and for-profit. The initiative conducts and funds sustainability communication research projects, the results of which are publicly available to nonprofit organizations, corporations, and government entities. The goal of SCI’s projects will be to provide communications practitioners with information to help them be more effective in their sustainability communication.
Read more about our sustainability research on the Page Center blog.
2014/2015 Call: Sustainability Communications
Projects funded
"Emotions and Climate Change: Moving Beyond Fear to Examine the Role of Hope, Happiness, Sadness and Guilt" Lucy Atkinson, University of Texas at Austin.
"Visual Best Practices in Communicating Sustainability: A Cognitive Science Approach" Serena Carpenter, Bruno Takahashi, and Kristen Lynch, all of Michigan State University.
"Identifying with (In)Congruent Narratives: Determining the Effectiveness of Sustainability Initiatives in Advertisements for Congruent and Incongruent Companies" Jennifer Hoewe and Brett Sherrick, University of Alabama.
"Distinguishing Real from Fake: How Consumers Evaluate Authenticity of Corporate Social Responsibility Programs and What it Means for the Bottom line" Rajul Jain, DePaul University.
"The Effect of Organization Sustainability Communication (OSC) on Publics’ Evaluations of an Organization" Eyun-Jung Ki, University of Alabama.
"The Third-Person Effects in Investment Decision-Making: The Case of Corporate Sustainability" Alexander Laskin, Quinnipiac University.
"Can Green Opinion Leaders Close the Green Gap?: An Investigation of Citizens’ Perceptions of Green Behaviors, Self-Efficacy and Information Needs" Kim Sheehan and Derek Moscato, University of Oregon.
"Visual Narratives in Environmental Communication" Fuyuan Shen, The Pennsylvania State University.
"Systemic and Heuristic Processing of Messages about Climate Change" Janet Swim and Nathaniel Geiger, The Pennsylvania State University.