Foundations Honored for Advocacy Projects and Other Publicity Efforts

The Council on Foundations this week will present 81 awards to honor grant makers for their annual and biennial reports,

magazines and periodicals, public-information campaigns, and Web sites. The 20th annual Wilmer Shields Rich Awards for Excellence in Communications, named after the council’s first executive director, will be given at the organization’s annual meeting, in Toronto.

The council evaluates public-information campaigns on their design and on how effectively they accomplish their goals.

Among the publicity efforts to receive an award is a campaign by several foundations to help residents of South Carolina’s coastal area who had inherited their land without a clear title or a will. Many of them inherited land from relatives who had been freed as slaves, and as a result their land rights were being challenged by real-estate developers.

The project offered seminars, as well as a brochure and a videotape, designed to make property owners aware of their rights, tax laws, and steps they should take to ensure that they keep their land, or sell it on their own terms.

To make the information widely accessible, the project’s brochures were written at an eighth-grade reading level. The project also created a videotape to give to elderly people who were not physically able to get to the seminars.

The Heirs’ Property Preservation Project was created by the Community Foundation Serving Coastal South Carolina, in Charleston, and the South Carolina Bar Foundation, in Columbia, with a $150,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, in New York.

Another winner, SeaWeb, in Washington, was honored for its efforts to persuade journalists to call attention to the dwindling number of beluga sturgeon in the Caspian Sea, and to encourage people in the United States to buy American-produced caviar. The nonprofit group created the “Caviar Emptor” campaign in 2000 with help from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Wildlife Conservation Society. The campaign was designed not just to alter Americans’ caviar-buying habits, but also to press U.S government officials to declare beluga sturgeon an endangered species so it couldn’t be imported. (The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last week announced that the sturgeon would be considered threatened by overfishing, but not endangered, which means it can continue to be imported to the United States.)

SeaWeb persuaded influential chefs to tout American-produced caviar both for its taste and for environmental reasons. The group also made special efforts to promote domestic caviar at specific times of the year when the delicacy is often purchased, such as the New Year holiday and the bridal season. During the Academy Awards, SeaWeb pushed hard to reach Hollywood stars and journalists who cover the entertainment industry, with advertisements in Variety magazine. The goal was to push American-produced caviar at Oscar celebrations, in the hope that celebrities’ buying habits would influence others.

The campaign got attention from Time and Bon Appétit magazines, among others. The press coverage seems to have helped make a difference: The United States imported 7.2 tons of beluga caviar in 2002, down from 15 tons in 2001, and American caviar farmers have seen their sales increase by up to five times in the past four years, according to SeaWeb.