Communications is an essential part of what we do as a community. Environmentalists need to think about strategy, message, distribution of messages and reactions to outreach. How do we set up our organizations to communicate effectively? How do we build the budgets, collect the tools, and raise the funds needed for communications and communications tools?

Many of us do not have communications training. We are busy monitoring policy, working in the field, organizing our membership, fundraising and fighting. We rarely think about communications. Most environmental groups only think of communications when we are in the middle of a crisis, when we have a big victory or when we are planning campaigns.

The basic challenges that environmental staff face are:

* Building support for communications within their organizations.
* Finding the time (staffing) to implement a sustained communications effort.
* Refining the skills needed to define a message and deliver it to a target audience.
* Getting access to all the tools that support communications efforts.

Green Media Toolshed is here to help. We want to help you overcome these challenges. We also want to share what we know about the communications process, technology and the activities of opponents. We want you to benefit from our learning curve and share knowledge of communications across the network of environmental groups. We hope you join and take everything we offer. We also hope that when you run across an interesting web site, trick, book or information that other communications folks might find useful you'll send us an email.