Most public outreach and education programs these days are very ambitious, Not only do they hope to raise people's awareness of an issue or provide them with information. They also expect people to behave differently because of what they've learned; to use less water, drive more safely, turn off lights, exercise more or even vote. The expectation is that if people know something, they will align their behavior with what they know.
Unfortunately this rarely happens. Social science has shown that people have all kinds of reasons for not aligning their behavior to their beliefs. Think of New Year's Resolutions. How often do you list what you know is best, good, or right, only to find yourself doing the same old things just a few months, weeks, days, even minutes later? It's a common experience.
Behaviors are complicated things, and there are lots of reasons people do or don't do what aligns with their knowledge or even their values. To really understand the complexities takes more than a good guess.
I encourage folks who want to create programs to explore people's motivations and behaviors thoroughly, then design their education or outreach program accordingly. Exploring people's behavior isn't difficult, but it does require contact with the folks for whom you are designing your program.
Focus groups are an excellent and efficient method for hearing from people. But if you've got no skill or no budget for it, there's no need to skip this step entirely. Being a good listener and using a few consistently chosen questions can move you a long way into understanding what might help people do what you're hoping they will. Taking the time to explore these things before you choose your program's approach can yeild much more satisfying returns than a good guess.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
Social marketing - it's been around longer than you may think!
An anti-drug campaign that started up in my hometown of Milwaukee in the 1990s used an approach that we today call 'social marketing.' Read on...
I first heard about social marketing when I took a graduate school course at the University of Wisconsin in 2003. The class challenged students to look at how outreach campaigns to, for example, protect the environment actually work on the ground. It was really compelling to learn about a new approach called “social marketing” that starts with finding out what people do and why they do it, and then uses that data to design an informed outreach campaign. By the end of the class, I remember thinking What a great new approach!
Likewise, through my work over the last year and a half with a number of social marketing projects, I have learned that this ‘new’ approach is catching on. More and more government and non-profit organizations are taking this approach to encourage safe, healthy and pro-environmental behaviors.
So, when I organized a presentation session for a conference this September about social marketing, I figured all of the speakers would talk about projects from at most 5 or 10 years ago. It was eye-opening to realize that an anti-drug program that started in my hometown back in the 1980s used a social marketing approach, even if they didn’t call it “social marketing” back then.
This happened because Professor John Korso of Western Washington University graciously agreed to talk about his work at the session I organized. John worked back in the early 1990s to promote anti–drug attitudes among youth when he worked with Milwaukee’s Hang Tough program.
I hail from Milwaukee and had heard of the Hang Tough campaign, but it was a new idea to think about how it follows a social marketing approach. John showed a video of skits that kids created to share how they would say ‘no’ when offered drugs. By showing these videos to youth groups, Hang Tough encourages youth to say ‘no’ to drugs. The Hang Tough program was establishing just saying ‘no’ as a norm, a behavior people see as a normal way to act in their community. Social marketing researchers know that establishing a norm is one of the most powerful ways to encourage lasting change in behavior.
Also, I never knew that the program got its name because a number of kids talked about ‘hanging tough’ as part of their message about how to say no to taking drugs.
The conference was hosted by the Society for Human Ecology and was held at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. The Society for Human Ecology is an interesting mix of folks who think about how humans affect their environment and vice-versa. This includes phenomena from how humans protect or pollute the earth to how the amount of natural light coming into people’s offices affects their productivity. For me, someone who has focused on environmental protection, it broadened my ideas about studying ecology!
The conference was great forum for exchanging ideas with other researchers, educators and people working in the field to understand people’s behaviors. SHE is an international organization that promotes using an ecological perspective in research, education, and real-world projects. The theme of the SHE conference was ‘Integrative Thinking for Complex Futures’ and researchers from around the world attended.
I first heard about social marketing when I took a graduate school course at the University of Wisconsin in 2003. The class challenged students to look at how outreach campaigns to, for example, protect the environment actually work on the ground. It was really compelling to learn about a new approach called “social marketing” that starts with finding out what people do and why they do it, and then uses that data to design an informed outreach campaign. By the end of the class, I remember thinking What a great new approach!
Likewise, through my work over the last year and a half with a number of social marketing projects, I have learned that this ‘new’ approach is catching on. More and more government and non-profit organizations are taking this approach to encourage safe, healthy and pro-environmental behaviors.
So, when I organized a presentation session for a conference this September about social marketing, I figured all of the speakers would talk about projects from at most 5 or 10 years ago. It was eye-opening to realize that an anti-drug program that started in my hometown back in the 1980s used a social marketing approach, even if they didn’t call it “social marketing” back then.
This happened because Professor John Korso of Western Washington University graciously agreed to talk about his work at the session I organized. John worked back in the early 1990s to promote anti–drug attitudes among youth when he worked with Milwaukee’s Hang Tough program.
I hail from Milwaukee and had heard of the Hang Tough campaign, but it was a new idea to think about how it follows a social marketing approach. John showed a video of skits that kids created to share how they would say ‘no’ when offered drugs. By showing these videos to youth groups, Hang Tough encourages youth to say ‘no’ to drugs. The Hang Tough program was establishing just saying ‘no’ as a norm, a behavior people see as a normal way to act in their community. Social marketing researchers know that establishing a norm is one of the most powerful ways to encourage lasting change in behavior.
Also, I never knew that the program got its name because a number of kids talked about ‘hanging tough’ as part of their message about how to say no to taking drugs.
The conference was hosted by the Society for Human Ecology and was held at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. The Society for Human Ecology is an interesting mix of folks who think about how humans affect their environment and vice-versa. This includes phenomena from how humans protect or pollute the earth to how the amount of natural light coming into people’s offices affects their productivity. For me, someone who has focused on environmental protection, it broadened my ideas about studying ecology!
The conference was great forum for exchanging ideas with other researchers, educators and people working in the field to understand people’s behaviors. SHE is an international organization that promotes using an ecological perspective in research, education, and real-world projects. The theme of the SHE conference was ‘Integrative Thinking for Complex Futures’ and researchers from around the world attended.
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