By Loretta Lohman, CSU Cooperative Extension
The fourth national conference on Nonpoint Source and Stormwater Pollution Education Programs held Oct. 17 to 20 in Chicago featured “social marketing” in many sessions. Environmental psychologist Doug McKenzie-Mohr, author of Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing kicked off the conference.
His full-day workshop, Fostering Sustainable Behavior: Beyond Brochures, was heavily anecdotal. Personal experiences and case studies illustrated his major point that beliefs and behavior aren’t always related or constant. Changing behavior doesn’t correlate to beliefs when the change may require some inconvenience or a new way of doing something.
Currently, most education campaigns are information intensive and link attitudes or economic self-interest to behavior. Unfortunately, research doesn’t find this approach very successful. Case studies show little or no relationship between knowledge or economic self-interest and sustained behavior change.
California annually spends about $200 million in utility ads promoting energy conservation tips and methods. The program has had little discernable effect, and the offer of free in-home energy audits had only a slight effect. Only 6 percent of the target population requested the audit and less than half of those took any action to achieve a 2 percent to 3 percent energy savings, which demonstrates that redirecting the education advertisement money could have retrofitted many low-income homes with significant energy conservation measures.
In a related example, a group of 40 participants voluntarily attended a three-hour energy-efficiency workshop and received a low-flow showerhead. Pre- and post-workshop surveys showed knowledge and attitudes changed dramatically. However, follow-up some months later found that only one of 40 lowered water heater temperature and only eight had installed the free low-flow showerheads.
Even worse results were obtained from a water efficiency effort involving a randomly selected group with water meters. Despite intensive education for half the group, the result was no change in water usage from either group.
There’s not a lot of evidence that information intensive or economic self-interest campaigns work. So why do we keep taking these two approaches? Because these tools make program managers feel good and it seems as if we’re doing something. This approach is further supported as long as we continue to evaluate outputs (advertisements, presentations, etc.) rather than outcomes. Also, our failure to measure actual behavior change contributes to adherence to information and economic self-interest approaches that produce few results.
The difficulty of changing behavior is systematically underestimated and the literature of environmental psychology is not easily accessible. This is one reason McKenzie-Mohr created a Web site at www.cbsm.com. Its online guide demonstrates how to use community-based social marketing to design and evaluate programs to foster sustainable behavior. And there are searchable databases of articles, downloadable reports, graphics, case studies and a listserv to share information and discuss issues with like-minded practitioners.
Specific steps are recommended for undertaking community-based social marketing to achieve an environmental goal:
- First, the behaviors in need of change must be selected.
- The barriers or benefits of changing those behaviors need to be identified.
- A program must be designed to overcome the barriers and amplify the benefits.
- The program must be piloted, tested, and piloted again.
- Finally, the program is implemented with thorough and ongoing evaluation.
Selecting behaviors is critical in this process as each suggested change has its own barriers and benefits—this is an incremental process. Only one change, or an additional closely related change, can be approached in a given program. Even though it is tempting to gravitate to the biggest bang for your dollar, it is important to gauge the probability of success.
Nancy Lee, of Social Marketing Services, echoed this list in her keynote address, emphasizing that the program should start with the audience most ready for action and that barriers to change must be identified. Both Lee and McKenzie-Mohr urged that simple, doable behaviors that can be repeated be selected.
One methodology is to determine the intersection between desired impact and likelihood of changing behavior using very specific actions. Determining the probability of success is, because of the lack of documented evaluations, educated guesswork based on as much knowledge as possible developed from a broad literature review and results from other types of social marketing projects. Along with the review, a program should utilize all available tools to determine barriers, including observation, focus groups and surveys.
For example, using observation one can see that determining proper tire inflation involves a series of steps. Each step is a behavior that has its own set of barriers. An activity is a series of behaviors. That means focus groups are very specific and guided, and surveys are targeted for barrier and benefit identification of a specific behavior.
The entire process is a series of steps. A first, small request increases larger participation and can utilize controls to measure success. For example, a program test in California followed up those who had energy audits with a promised callback in a specified time. Using that promise of follow-up increased actual behavioral change.
A critical step is to get a commitment to make a change that is public and visible in the community. A commitment checklist will:
- Not be coercive
- Obtain written or public commitment
- Actively involve the person
- Assist in changing self-perceptions
- Facilitate social diffusion and creates a social norm
This is not an easy process. It works best with face-to-face contact with testing, evaluation and more implementation over a time. Changing behavior involves research, a willingness to prioritize targets, selection of incremental changes that will lead to incorporation of additional changes and testing and re-testing the program and methods selected.
Note: Doug McKenzie-Mohr will present a workshop on community-based social marketing tools at the Colorado Nonpoint Source Forum, Sept. 6. For more information logon www.npscolorado.com or download a flyer at http://npscolorado.com/FSBWorkshop.pdf.
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