560 F. Dobson et al.


FIG. 2 Relative preferences (± SE) for the significant conservation area attributes in Group 1, 2 and 3 of the latent class model.


suggests that trust in UK charities has recently been di- minishing (Hyndman & McConville, 2018). However, these preferences may instead have resulted from a reluctance to support government- or privately-owned conservation areas and this possibility warrants further investigation. Some biodiversity-related factors were important to our


respondents, as presence of threatened bird species was the second most highly valued attribute and presence of charis- matic mammals was fourth. Preference for these attributes was expected, as a number of studies have shown that people place a high value on the protection of threatened birds in conservation projects (Loomis & White, 1996; Lewis et al., 2018) and prefer charismatic mammal species as flagships (Veríssimo et al., 2017). Less expected was the fact that the threatened bird species appealed more to donors than the charismatic, non-threatened mammal species. Charisma has


been found to be one of the few consistently important flag- ship species traits (Clucas et al., 2008; Smith et al., 2012), although a recent willingness to pay study found that donors were more interested in funding species in need of con- servation attention than species with high aesthetic appeal (Lundberg et al., 2019). Our finding could be related to how our choice experiment was framed, as it was made clear that the funding was for the conservation area and that the charismatic mammal species was not threatened. Low existing conservation funding was the third most important attribute, suggesting that people preferred to do- nate to more neglected sites. This is in contrast to a previous study, which found that donor support was not related to whether a species was already receiving conservation atten- tion (Veríssimo et al., 2017). Our results suggest that flagship areas could be used to generate resources for wider initia- tives to fill funding gaps, supporting conservation areas that are currently neglected, although current shortfalls mean that some of these areas may need more funding to become viable (Coad et al., 2019). The final attribute, pro- tected area status, did not significantly affect people’s choices. This could be because of a lack of understanding of legal designations for conservation areas; Booth et al. (2009) found that visitors to protected sites in the UK are generally unaware of the specific designations of areas. The non-significant result suggests that although protected area status is important for policy (Borrini-Feyerabend et al., 2013), it is not as important for marketing.


Considerations for the design of area-based flagship campaigns


FIG. 3 Willingness to pay (± SE) for the significant conservation area attributes in Groups 2 and 3 of the latent class model.


Analysis of our latent class model groups revealed that not everyone was willing to pay for this kind of conservation


Oryx, 2022, 56(4), 555–563 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321000259


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