Outreach
Spending Your Outreach Dollar Wisely: Increasing Recycling Using Community-Based Social Marketing
With a well-designed Community-Based Social Marketing program, not only can you meet your budget, but you could also reap higher tonnages over a longer period of time.
Lisa A. Skumatz, Ph.D. and Juri Freeman
Haulers, recyclers, and program managers certainly recognize that a well-planned outreach and education campaign can help improve the performance of a recycling program. Outreach can increase participation and tonnage, decrease contamination and help build stronger customer relationships. Yet, there are scores of ways to approach outreach and not all of them are built the same. How much money should you invest in outreach to realize noticeable gains and what will be the eventual return, if any, on that investment? How does “social marketing” compare to traditional outreach? Will the impact last long enough to be worth the investment? This article is based on years of field experience and outreach programs by the authors, and walks through what we have learned about crafting effective—and cost-effective—outreach in the recycling and solid waste field. We put ourselves in the shoes of hauler or city clients, and we use an example of a campaign to increase recycling. Of course, the lessons are applicable to dozens of other waste management topics.
What is Community-Based Social Marketing (CBSM)?
First, “social marketing” is not social media. Creating a Facebook™ account and tweeting about your company’s recycling events may be part of your social marketing campaign; however, online social media sites are only one of the many tools at your disposal in a broader campaign.
Social marketing combines traditional marketing techniques with sociological and psychological tools to more effectively influence a target behavior. Examples over the years include campaigns related to teen drug use, drunk driving, obesity, energy efficiency and many others. On the recycling side, various published social marketing campaigns have claimed a 10 to 66 percent increase in curbside recycling rates. Notable differences between social marketing and a traditional outreach campaign include a focus on barriers and motivations, targeting a specific sector (as opposed to a more generic campaign), and the use of special tools to encourage and retain behavior change, including techniques called social norms, prompts and feedback.
Targeting a Specific Sector
Unlike a traditional broad-based outreach program, social marketing focuses on a specific sector of the community—the “target”. For a recycling program, your target audience may be the person in the household who most often undertakes the action you want to address. If your goal is to increase participation and frequency of recycling, knowing who in the household is responsible for bringing the cart to the curb would be needed. A parallel analysis would be needed for multifamily or business targets. Neighborhoods (business or residential) may also represent targets. Once the proper actor is identified, the outreach material can be designed to reach him or her by addressing the specific motivations to act and the barriers that prevent them from undertaking that action.
Barriers and Motivations
What makes it hard for customers to recycle—specifically the target actor? This is a core early question in social marketing strategizing—and it can’t be skipped. You may have your own guesses as to the barriers, but until you have identified the actual barrier(s) for your target audience, you should hold off on conducting your outreach. The barrier may be something obvious like residents that are unaware of what day to recycle or that residents are unsure of what to recycle. However, the barrier may be something unexpected. In a recent energy efficiency program we worked on, the barrier to savings from programmable thermostats was the complexity of initially programming the devices. Despite success in getting the thermostats installed, we found that no energy was saved; in fact, more energy was used in some households due to a failure to program the thermostats. Once key barriers have been identified, the remainder of the outreach program should focus on ways to overcome that barrier. If, for example, residents are unsure what day to set out recycling, your outreach might include a calendar showing recycling days and/or a catchy pneumonic for remembering days, and/or other strategies you develop.
What motivates any recycling, more recycling, better recycling? How can one leverage motivating factors to get more recycling? This is another core question that distinguishes a social marketing campaign. Along with identifying barriers, knowing what motivates your target audience to act is important. One of the hardest parts of any marketing campaign is getting people to actually act on the information they have been given—and CBSM works hard on this angle. An example of one of our client projects (this one in the Mountain West) illustrates this point. As any hauler in the region could tell you, with ample land available and tip fees in the area around $15/ton, saving space in the landfill probably isn’t a driving reason to recycling in the region. Local recycling coordinators suggested greenhouse gas reduction is very important. However, our research found that the main reason the ultimate target group for the outreach campaign wanted to recycle was to save landfill space. Thus, much of the outreach material in the campaign included language about how recycling reduces the amount of materials sent to the landfill. CBSM goes beyond the information-based approach of traditional outreach, and needs more specific information to create change. There are well-tested and defensible methods for drilling down on both barriers and motivations to get to what should be the focus of the CBSM campaign—and these first steps are at the core of an effective and cost-effective campaign.
Social Marketing Tools
CBSM borrows powerful tools from social psychology to increase a target audience’s likelihood of adopting a desired behavior. This is one more place that CBSM differs from the “tell them and hope for the best” technique of traditional broad-based outreach. They include:
Prompts: Prompts remind actors to complete a certain action. While it may be relatively easy to get consumers to purchase reusable grocery bags, getting consumers to remember to bring the bags is another story. An “A-frame” sign out front of the store might be a prompt. Recycling magnets “prompt” customers about what can be recycled and the collection days. A sign in a neighborhood can remind (“prompt”) participants about the campaign’s goals. Catchy designs and logos, personalization and effective placement are critical to success—and to ensuring prompts are not just thrown in the trash.
Commitments: People who publicly commit to an action and follow through are valued in our society. This can be leveraged for behavior change in your campaign. We distribute carefully worded commitment cards asking for a written commitment to undertake more recycling actions and publish the committed households’ names on the project website (or in newsletters/local publications) to make the commitment public. Special window decals, yard signs, buttons/pins, invitations to special events, etc. are other examples of public ways to acknowledge valued changes in action—and, based on our experience (and the literature), they work.
Norms: People want to “belong” (so say the psychologists), and they tend to do things if their group does them. We can use this to motivate behavior change. People do not want to stand out from the crowd; they prefer to act and behave in a way that society deems as normal. In social marketing, we work on a campaign to make the desired (recycling) behavior the norm. This can be complicated in recycling, because recycling behaviors are personal and some are invisible (not seen by others); a proxy or some other symbol for participation is sometimes used to establish the norm.
These three elements distinguish CBSM from traditional outreach. Note that these factors imply your campaign isn’t just a one-hit-wonder. A well-designed CBSM campaign engages customers more than once and in more than one way to motivate and maintain change.
Door-to-Door and Other Outreach Delivery Options
Choice of delivery method for the message/material must suit the target recipient—and delivery is a key element of CBSM. Once you have designed your outreach materials (based on the target audience’s motivators and barriers), and decided which tools to incorporate in your campaign (prompts, norms, commitments, etc.), you will need to decide how to deliver the message and design/produce appropriate materials. Bill inserts and mail are some obvious choices. Bill inserts add virtually zero cost to deliver and are easily sent to all—or just targeted—customers. However, the target audience may or may not pay much attention to inserts in their bill. Traditional media are also options—radio, TV, newspapers, calls, flyers, etc.
CBSM prides itself on being creative about delivery methods. You are trying to leverage social commitments and norms. Some successful CBSM campaigns work to distribute materials in ways that add credibility and community; customers will better adopt behavior change if it comes from someone they respect. That might mean formally or informally partnering with Chambers of Commerce (for business targets), church or community groups or other social options.
Going door to door, providing information on how and why to recycle, and using social marketing tools such as commitments and prompts, might not seem like a cost-effective way to reach your customers. However, work for haulers and cities/counties by the authors has found otherwise. We have evaluated our CBSM projects to determine which outreach method(s) are cost-effective, and we have found that door to door outreach is certainly costly per household, but it is also quite a cost effective method of delivering a social marketing campaign and causing behavior change. The authors found that (well-designed) door to door outreach, on a dollars per ton basis, can be several times more cost-effective than many of the other methods of message delivery. Of course, effective design is an important part of this result.
Conducting an Effective Campaign
Doing the same old outreach will get you the same old results. Based on work with hauler and city/county clients, designing an effective campaign does not have to break the bank. Conducting an effective CBSM campaign can achieve more tons of recycling at lower cost per ton than a number of other outreach strategies (and even cheaper than many broader programmatic strategies, according to other research by the authors).
For an effective CBSM program, the message must be appropriate and designed to appeal to the specific target audience. It helps them solve their problem/barrier, appeals to what motivates them, potentially “recognizes” them, and makes them feel connected to a group they respect. It celebrates success.
The “community” part of CBSM can mean many different types of communities—certain household types, multi-family, commercial businesses (in whole, certain business types, those with certain waste streams), neighborhoods (residential or business), specific household streets that need to change setouts from alley to curb or many, many other potential targets. CBSM is especially well-suited to harder-to-reach groups because of the tailored focus.
CBSM can be used to modify a wide variety of behaviors—and is potentially more cost-effectively than traditional outreach. If your budget is limited, target a segment of your customers, and cycle through over a period of a couple years. With a well-designed CBSM program, you can still meet your budget, but you could very well reap higher tonnages over a longer period of time than using the same old mailers or calendars.
Lisa A. Skumatz, Ph.D. is Principal of Skumatz Economic Research Associates (Superior, CO). An economist, she brings a numbers focus to assignments, blending real-world experience on performance of strategies with what will “fit” in the client’s specific situation. She maintains a database of programs and costs from more than 1,300 communities to identify successful options for clients. Lisa previously worked for a solid waste utility, government, and consulting. She has more than 150 publications, and she has given presentations at the major national and state recycling conferences.
Juri Freeman is a Senior Analyst with Skumatz Economic Research Associates. He works with cities, counties and states across the U.S. to assist in the design and implementation of a wide range of diversion activities. Lisa and Juri’s work has been widely published. They can be reached at (303) 494-1178 or at [email protected] or [email protected].
Sidebar
Lessons from A Case Study
A recent social marketing project involved a homeowners association (HOA) neighborhood with 1,600 residences. Skumatz Economic Research Associates Inc. (SERA)partnered with a hauler, the city and the State to deliver—and carefully measure the impacts of—a social marketing program to increase recycling. They conducted careful measurement of behaviors and tonnage “before” the program, as well as during and after the social marketing outreach campaign delivered. SERA found cost-effective ways of conducting ongoing measurement, which allowed them to examine the impacts from various rounds of outreach (including reactions following prompts, commitments, challenges/contests, etc.). Coupled with detailed cost recording, SERA tracked the cost-per-ton of recycling attributable to the program. After comparing the results to “control” groups—households that only received “traditional” outreach—it was found that door-to-door outreach increased recycling by more than double the non-door-to-door approaches and almost five times the increase from traditional outreach campaign methods. While much more costly to conduct per house (door-to-door is obviously labor intensive), the authors computations showed the door-to-door social marketing campaign was considerably less expensive per ton than using mail and cart hangers. In addition, our follow-up showed the behavior change lasted longer for the door-to-door outreach. Data like this, collected over the years, allows design and delivery of optimal and cost-effective city, county, or hauler CBSM campaigns.