The objective of the Cancer Prevention and Education Society (CPES) is to engage medics and academics in environmental health issues. These are usually championed by campaigning, non-government organisations who (rightly or wrongly) can be perceived by these generally conservative audiences as aggressive, unscientific and scaremongering.

This perception obviously puts these audiences off becoming involved in environmental campaigning. The issues are, however, very real, and there is a large and growing body of scientific evidence connecting everyday exposure to environmental chemicals with health problems from obesity to cancer.

The job of the website is to convey that information in a manner engaging to people who are put off by the image of organisations such as Greenpeace, to raise their awareness of environmental issues and engage them in activities which will help improve the condition of environmental health regulation in the UK and the EU.

See the site here: http://www.cancerpreventionsociety.org

How we did it

• Put scientific credibility front and centre. CPES’ audiences expect to judge the evidence for themselves, so the website presents the scientific basis for the claims of the environment movement first and its significance second.
• Present a wide selection of resources. Again, CPES’ audiences are used to finding things out for themselves, so the site presents useful, credible sources of information of which users might be unaware (such as environmental health journals) and allows the user to get on with it.
• Uses CPES’ credibility to justify campaigning activities. CPES can use its credibility with a conservative audience to secure time and attention for the activities of campaigning organisations which might be otherwise be missed or dismissed. This is what the news section of the site can be used for.