Rare Pride Programme
Pride Manuals. Rare Conservation, 2006. Worldwide.
Through its signature Pride Programme, Rare uniquely leverages the techniques and theory of social marketing for behaviour change and thus aims to achieve lasting conservation action all around the world. When I did the cartoons below, Rare's focus was on building local capacity, formally training local leaders at Masters level to construct and execute Pride Campaigns - social marketing projects targeting specific audiences to achieve the desired behaviour change and thereby reduce threats and obtain conservation results.
In 2006, Rare commissioned the following stand-alone cartoons in order to liven up the Pride training manual, at the time produced in English, Spanish, Mandarin, Filipino and Bahasa Indonesian.
Click to make the images larger and see the detail.
The power of digital editing: Rare was not happy with the version on the left, so I managed to transform it to the version on the right – without touching paper or pen.
This scene was inspired by the library at the University of Kent, Canterbury, England, which I used many times. This university was Rare’s original training centre for Anglophone partners.
Puppet shows are a highly effective communication tool used in Pride campaigns. When I worked at Rare many years later, I had a lot of fun teaching my students how to build a puppet theatre.
Environmental education is often confused with Pride; in fact, Pride complements education with research-based social marketing and goes much further than just raising awareness.
One of my personal favourites.
I've always loved turning things on their head and imagining the animals taking control over humans. Using cartoons, I can make it happen!
At the time I created this cartoon Rare was already addressing near-shore fishing and the creation of community-based No-Take-Zones in several regions of the world. They have since made this their chief programme: Fish Forever.
Rare trains their selected local partners to apply the tools of Pride, one of which is the use of mascots (costumes representing the particular campaign's flagship species) to rally local communities. Many years later when working at Rare, I was amazed to see how effective mascots are.
All Pride campaigns involve very careful planning based on qualitative and quantitative research to thoroughly understand the target audience of each campaign.
It was Rare's idea to exploit the potential humour in the danger of addressing the wrong target audience - something that would wreck a Pride campaign before it even started. If I were a peccary (a kind of wild pig, and the favourite food of jaguars) I would not want to be in this one’s shoes. This may be my favourite cartoon of all.
Every Pride campaign has a flagship species, which is selected as part of the research with the target audiences. Anyone who has had a job interview may sympathise with the expression on Jaguar’s face...
A central element of Pride's quantitative research component is the KAP survey (K=Knowledge; A=Attitude; P=Practice). This requires the compliance of the target audience members to take the time to answer the survey questions. I'm not sure the crab (bottom centre) is going to have much luck...
Behaviour change for conservation is what Rare is all about. The threat to biodiversity caused by oil palm plantations is a top conservation issue - as is the consequent destruction of orang-utan habitat. Here we see an orang-utan activist.
Pride was built on the success story of the St. Lucia parrot, brought back from the brink of extinction thanks to Pride's founder, Paul Butler, who many years later became my Rare colleague, mentor and friend. At the time of drawing this cartoon I did not know Paul, so the fellow in the cartoon looks nothing like him.
The caption to this cartoon as it appears in the Rare manual reads:
“There are many ways to raise money for your Pride campaign. This should NOT be one of them.”
My original idea was to leave out the second phrase, but the folks at Rare insisted I add it in. What a missed opportunity for humour! Well, my kind of humour anyway...
"Alan is a pleasure to work with. As a small, dynamic, and entrepreneurial nonprofit organization, Rare brings tight deadlines, shifting priorities and many levels of sign-off to consultant projects. Alan handled our changing needs with professionalism, patience, and a smile. He was able to develop great cartoons that are useful, relevant, and descriptive of the training course that we provide to local conservationists around the world. Navigating multi-cultural and multi-lingual needs, he gave us a wonderful product, for a very reasonable price. We're still using the images two years later on the covers of our newly-designed training curriculum text. If we need images like these again, we'll definitely contact Alan first."
Sharon Price, Global Alumni Network, Rare