PROVISION OF THE SHALE GAS COMMUNICATIONS CONSUMER PANEL PROJECT TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Description

Our communications campaign aims to raise public awareness and understanding of the role of fracking and shale gas. This is essential to the success of the shale policy as public opposition is currently one of the key barriers. In order to do this we need to make sure our communications messages, materials, tactics and channels are helping to increase support for the development of a shale gas industry in the UK, ensuring we’re using our resources as effectively as possible. DECC’s latest Public Attitudes Tracker survey shows that almost half (43%) of the people surveyed remain undecided about whether or not they support shale gas. Our comms campaign has been developed to target this undecided group, which is largely made-up of women (aged 25-44) and young people (aged 16-35). We are currently carrying out a separate piece of research to breakdown the demographics of the undecided group in further detail. We want this second piece of research to focus on testing messages among the demographical groups of ‘undecided’ people that were identified in the first stage of research. Overall, we want this research to answer the following questions: • How do certain messages or phrases affect people’s views of shale / fracking in the UK? What messages are helpful / unhelpful towards creating a ‘social licence to operate’? • How are people’s views of shale/fracking affected by the source of the message? • Which channels/sources are our target audiences most likely to gain their information from? And which channels are they most likely to trust?