I work for the City of Seattle as the Outreach Coordinator for a healthy water campaign called Restore Our Waters. I am in the planning stages to coordinate a public engagement campaign using a web-based "challenge" strategy. For example, Washington State has a health challenge www.whf.org in which you log your healthy activities, like biking, yoga, walking, etc. Seattle is looking at doing the same type of thing around water quality. So, for example, you can join the "otter" team, log on and calculate your "stewardship" by getting points for actions that support healthy water - like not using pesticides, properly maintaining your car and volunteering for a local creek project.
My question is: Does anyone know of research done regarding getting people to sign up to be part of a challenge in general? In a way, the behavior I want to encourage is to get people to join the challenge. The next behavior would be to do one of the activities and log their points. Thanks for any feedback or help on this.
Susan
Susan Harper
Restore Our Waters
Outreach Coordinator
www.seattle.gov/util/restoreourwaters
Seattle Public Utilities
700 5th Ave, Ste. 4900
PO Box 34018
Seattle, WA 98124-4018
Phone: (206) 386-9139
[email protected]
Using a "Challenge" Framework to Engage the Public
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I don't know of any research, though the Center for a New American Dream has used this technique through their online community and may have evaluation information. I also just heard of an interesting "challenge" initiative through the EcoMom Alliance (www.ecomomalliance.org), which is sponsoring an EcoMom Challenge to get mothers across the country changing 10 common behaviors and then promoting the challenge with other mothers. They would at least have numbers (you sign up) and anecdotal information about how this works through social networking.
Shannon W. Earle
Manager
Global Engagement and Training
Strategic Marketing + Global Communications
Division Conservation International
2011 Crystal Drive, Suite 500
Arlington, VA 22202
www.conservation.org
[email protected]
Tel: 703 341 2705
Fax 703 892 0238
The University of Guelph is doing a sustainability pledge on campus, if you have any questions about how we are getting people involved, etc, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].
Kristi
Kristi Mahy
Composting Coordinator
University of Guelph
[email protected]
519-824-4129 extension 58129
We recently used a 'challenge' framework to encourage ridesharing by introducing a 'Pledge to Pool' campaign as part of the our annual Rideshare Week campaigns. Commuters are encouraged to make an on-line pledge to carpool at least once during the campaign. A random draw for prizes is used as incentive. All winning pledges are verified. For Pledge campaign details, please visit the Rideshare Week page of our website, www.carpool.ca. Please note that the Pledge form has been de-activated until our next campaign. Campaign results from our Fall 2007 Rideshare Week promotions (held in Edmonton, Calgary and Regina) are also included in our Winter 2008 newsletter... which can be downloaded from the Newsletters page of our website. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.
Anne Marie
Anne Marie Thornton
Trans Canada
Carpool.ca
Web: www.carpool.ca
Tel: 250.743.8035
Fax: 250.743.8000
Email: [email protected]
Our group at Environment Canada was responsible for a large-scale "challenge" - The One-Tonne Challenge. The purpose of the program/campaign was to get people to make changes to their lifestyle to reduce their personal GHG emissions by one tonne (admittedly, a difficult concept to communicate). In a relatively short time, we were able to convince ~ 50,000 Canadians to "take the challenge" by providing their name, email address, and postal code on our website. In trying to understand why people took the challenge, we looked at demographic and psychographic data for clues. Unfortunately, the data ranged the full spectrum, and the only variables that differentiated our subscribers from the general population were their income and education levels (which were slightly above average). I'm convinced that further analysis would have given us more insight - but the One-Tonne Challenge program was cancelled. Susan, my advice would be to follow the traditional marketing framework: once you've identified your "product" (i.e. the behaviour you're promoting), segment your market to identify those groups that would be most likely to take up the behaviour. Then position the behaviour based on the barriers and benefits that exist in the minds of target segments. Then test, tweak, and test some more.
Maurice Muise
Program Manager,
Online Marketing
Outreach Division
Environment Canada
(819) 956-5643
www.ec.gc.ca/eco
Susan,
I once did a type of challenge where people got points for volunteering, points for recycling, etc. I got a fair number of people involved because I offered prizes that appealed to kids. I say this because the only people that earned enough points for the prizes were kids. The prizes were free ice cream cones at McDonalds (waste-free), free T-shirt (made with recycled content) and other low cost items. So, my conclusion after one non-scientific try, is appeal to kids and get the adults to learn while they assist.
Marta Keane,
Recycling Program
Specialist Will County Land Use
Waste Services
58 E. Clinton Street, Suite 500
Joliet, IL 60432
815-774-4343
[email protected]
Hi All -
Please consider this: What will foster sustainable behavior is either a complete cultural makeover with new standards of morality and behavior, or awareness of a crisis that scares the living daylights out of people. And the former is highly unlikely without the latter. We have the crisis, foremost in climate, but with many others not far behind. What we don't have is the awareness. Jim Hansen, one of the world's leading climatologists and the man who started the climate ball rolling in earnest in 1988, has recently said that the "safe" level of CO2 is 350 ppm - we're currently at 384 ppm. What we need is a population that is in a state of rational panic, and some ideas of what to do about it. Until recently I thought that the best we could do was to reduce our emissions to zero. I am now becoming familiar with an approach called Holistic Management, by which we could, in theory, sequester enough gigatons of CO2 to bring our atmospheric CO2 below 300 ppm - using natural processes involving restoring perennial grasslands without resorting to untested, unintended-consequential and harebrained schemes like burying greenhouse gases in deep wells. Of course we should still reduce our emissions to zero, but recapturing CO2 in the soils may actually be able to turn the current climate devastation around in a matter of years - if we decide to do it. None of this will happen by cajoling, token or baby steps, clever advertising, etc. Too much of a change is required. Educating and terrifying are all that will work to divert us from the path we've taken to date. Either that, or share what you're smoking with me (contact high through e-mail works), I could use it.
Cheers!
Adam, in sunny Massachusetts, where the weather changes much faster than the weather report
P.S. - More on Holistic Management here: http://www.holisticmanagement.org/
Hi Susan,
My question is: Does anyone know of research done regarding getting people to sign up to be part of a challenge in general? In a way, the behavior I want to encourage is to get people to join the challenge.
I have some weak experience of that. By and large, people do not willingly expose themselves to challenges. They will gladly talk to you about the theoretical rights and wrongs, and may come up with any number of suggestions for the unidentified "us" (or "them") to do, but when it comes to starting something going it's another matter. You will need all the wiles of Social Marketing to help you, because getting people to sign up to the ACTUAL challenges is surely the hardest and most fundamental hurdle. ONCE YOU HAVE THEIR COMMITMENT AND COOPERATION, you can then invite their suggestions and feed-back as to how and what to tackle, where and when and who. The next behavior would be to do one of the activities and log their points. As I said, once your target participants are committed, the sky will be the limit. Getting them committed to PRACTICALITIES is the hardest stage of all.
Elizabeth Griffin
(Victoria, BC)
For my two-pennorth....my experience is that people are willing to take up, and meet, a challenge, if they can see there are other peers doing the same, as then they can see it all might just add up to something collective. Peer support is also provided, which helps enormously. We run a network of businesses and they do tend to respond well - but they are responding well to a collective call to them as MEMBERS of something, not just individuals. The call is to the network. The advantage is that they are members of a sustainable business network, so highly motivated; but I am reasonably confident that for example should a parent and toddler group, or a local chamber of commerce, or a sports club, be challenged - as a sports club, or a local chamber of commerce, or a parent and toddler group - they may well respond rather well. Like the work that has gone on in the UK with waste reduction work with a whole street, or energy use and a whole village - or weightwatchers...or the recent work done by a young guy to get a whole school of adolescent and stroppy boys to set up it's (very first) choir and perform in the Albert Hall (big venue in London) - it's the group/collective dynamic that makes such a difference. It immediately over-rides the problem of "my bit doesn't make enough difference so why bother/no-one else is so I'm not going to been seen dead doing it. "And then of course once they as a group have made a difference, they can move that energy and passion for change into the other groups they are intersecting with in their different ways. (currently traveling on a train so time to have lots of ideas, but not much editing of them for sense! Apologies!) (and thinking about it - that's just how the Transition Network works - one community at a time..."www.transitiontowns.org.uk"...it ends up expanding exponentially..
Manda Brookman
Director
CoaST: Cornwall Sustainable Tourism Project
Penstraze Business Centre,
Truro, Cornwall, UK TR4 8HY
w: www.coastproject.co.uk