How Bushcare is innovating

All over Australia there are thousands of hard working teams of nature conservation volunteers – Landcare, Bushcare and their cousins – each with a handful of active members, scratching their heads about how to grow their numbers.

The reason that Landcare and Bushcare groups get stuck is, surely, not just because of poor marketing, but because of what Landcare and Bushcare ARE. If all you’re doing is weeding the same patch of blighted bushland month after month it’s no wonder your membership gets stuck. So it’s possible that recruiting more volunteers might depend on evolving a better kind of Landcare/Bushcare experience. A more meaningful and enjoyable Bushcare experience would mean more inspired stories to share, better word of mouth (the only kind of marketing that counts) and more people dipping their toes in the water. And a better experience means they’re likely to stay.

And of course there ought to be plenty of innovators already out there, just waiting for a chance to share their ideas.

So, at the 2010 Sydney Bushcare Forum, I facilitated a session with around 100 reps from groups all over Sydney to share their Bushcare innovations.

It turned into a marvellous idea-fest. Here are a few of their innovations:

Reframing the vision from bushland to wildlife corridor

Ross Muller of Roselea Bushcare Group described how his group joined up with two nearby groups and changed their focus from bushland rehabilitation to creating a Wildlife Corridor (a more visionary goal). They have nesting boxes all along the corridor, each one sponsored by a local family (one with a family of seven sugar gliders living in it). They also joined up with a local Heritage group to set up a Heritage Walk.

Partnerships with schools

Ross’s group also talked to a nearby school and now have 25 students spending an hour a week helping out. Several other groups were doing the same thing. (In fact plenty of schools are desperate for someone to walk in and offer this kind of “Beyond the Fence” learning opportunity for kids).

Outsourcing your nursery

Ross’s group have a “native grass farm”, essentially a patch of dense native grasses. They invite school kids to harvest the seeds, plant them in boxes, take them home to germinate, and return to plant them as seedlings.

Cool branding

Chris Bartlett of Cooks River Mudcrabs reckons that having a memorable brand (“Mudcrabs”) really helps. They wear their Mudcrab T-shirts whenever they’re on the job, and have a clean one to wear socially.

Making it fun

The Cooks River Mudcrabs have a birthday party for their group each year.

Another group has annual awards, including “Asparagus Assassin”.

Most groups have morning tea (though this was a surprise to some!)

One group has a regular baking competition to see who made the best cake.

(I’ve been told that The Illawarra Youth Landcare Group always do something social after each work session…swimming at the beach, playing cricket, or going to the pub together.)

Variety

Some groups go and help out other groups occasionally (“sister groups?”). This turns a weeding session into a special occasion and “spreads the love”.

Have a few sites in different environments and shift between them e.g. frog habitat. Make one site could be near pristine so people can really experience the beauty of nature.

Don’t forget to mix in higher energy activities for men and young folks.

Spreading the message

Don Wilson of Willoughby Bushcare talked about the “Major Day Out” initiative. They arranged for all of Willoughby’s bushcare groups to run “bush open days” on the same day so it becomes a major community event. Groups in other parts of Sydney and one in Brisbane are picking up the idea. (Hey isn’t that how Clean Up the World began!?) Just Google “Bushcare Major Day Out”.

One group has a “why we are here” pamphlet and gives it to people when they are in the field, starting a conversation and inviting them to join in.

Another group invited their local State MP (and she became a regular member!).

One group has occasional spotlighting nights, including a BBQ.

Another organises bus trips “free scenic bus trip and bushwalk”.

Give volunteers a special title and spoil them.

Another invited a Mens’ Shed on a tour.

Another invited 8-10 year olds to “Adopt an Animal” as a class research project and then come along and help restore its habitat.

Spot the kind of people who already use the park for recreation and devise a special event for them.

Bronte Gully Bushcare has a website www.brontebushcare.org.au

A flowering calendar of local plants, so everyone can do their bit on their own properties.

More ideas

Who knew that Boy Scouts and Girl Guides have a Landcare badge?

One group had an inventor, so they let him make wheelbarrows and equipment (“let people do what interests them”).

Instead of spraying, one group uses overlapping paper and cardboard, to show “we can be organic”.

One group invites their kids along and gives them their own site to look after responsibly.

And I might add:

An idea that came up in a recent workshop with health promoters who are looking for ways to get and keep volunteers: When you communicate with potential volunteers, clearly specify the extent of their expected commitment (e.g. “two hours per month”), the kind of work, and the support and mentoring they’ll receive. Also clearly identify the extent of their autonomy – the decisions they’ll be able to make themselves, even down to their choice of days. This degree of detail ought to lower potential volunteers’ anxieties about engaging in an unfamiliar activity.

WWF-UKs push for values-based campaigning

World Wildlife Fund UK has recently taken a deep dive into the murky world of psychology to try to understand why those darned humans are so reluctant to do the right thing, especially with a global emergency that doesn’t allow us the leisure of waiting around for people to get it.

The work is led by Tom Crompton, WWF-UKs “Change Strategist”.

Crompton’s first publication, Weathercocks and Signposts, in 2008, was a tortuous read. Essentially it asserted that environmental campaigns that asked people to do easy steps for shallow reasons like saving money or looking good (aka green consumerism) probably wouldn’t be able to leverage those easy behaviours into harder behaviours. To do that we should probably be appealing to deeper values.

In 2009 he wrote Simple and painless - The limitations of spillover in environmental campaigning.

Here he claimed that “If those in government, business or the third sector persist in advocating ‘simple and painless’ behavioural changes as a meaningful response to today’s most pressing environmental challenges, this must be because they are persuaded that such changes will encourage the adoption of other, and particularly other more ambitious, behaviours.”

[That sounds like a straw man argument, but we’ll let it go. He does conceded that many campaigns don’t aim for spillover effects “For example installing loft insulation”.]

By spillover he means the assumption that an easy behaviour like recycling might lead to a harder behaviour like leaving the car at home. 

[My comment: I don’t know any campaigner who operates on this principle, do you? Not only is there little evidence for spillover effects, but it would be an unprofessional program design practice. There’s another kind of spillover, of course, “vertical spillover”, where going along to a workshop about solar panels DOES make it more likely that a person will install solar panels. But I don’t think he’s talking about that.]

In order to encourage spillover he suggests environmental campaigners should make clear the environmental arguments behind new behaviours [ie. not “saving you money” but “saving rainforests”], and to frame around values [like providing “a safe world for our children”].

His latest and most coherent effort (but still a dense academic read) is Meeting Environmental Challenges - The Role of Human Identity, co-written with Tim Kasser, professor of psychology at Knox College, Illinois. (June 2009)

This book reasserts Crompton’s key argument that environmental vaues should be promoted through appeals to positive, deep values (aka identity).

Unfortunately Crompton and Kasser take an selectively negative view of values/identity. They focus on:

- negative “values and life goals” like power, egotism, wealth, rewards, achievement and status;

- “in-groups and out groups”: people who [apparently] define nature as an ‘out-group’; and

- “coping with fear and threats” where they hand-wring over the human capacity for denial in all of it’s guises.

[They seem never to have heard of strengths-based community development or any of the other approaches that build on positives. Instead they prefer to attack the negatives in human nature – don’t they know that only makes them stronger?]

They go on to propose “identity campaigning” as an answer.

Their strategy is:

(i) decrease the extent to which bad values are modeled socially;

(ii) help people cope with feelings of insecurity in more adaptive ways; and

(iii) develop programs and policies that promote intrinsic values like spirituality, community, and health.

They say that environmental organisations should stop appealing to people’s selfish or materialistic values e.g. “green consumerism”, “business cases”, “sustainable development” and “valuing environmental services”. This, they say, “has actually served to reinforce the dominance of these values and goals.”

The alternative is for environmental organisations to wear their higher values on their sleeves, for instance, by talking about the importance of nature to the human spirit. [This is straight out of George Lakoff's script, and it makes good sense. Crompton has already pointed out that appeals to selfish values can easily cause "negative spillover" where people compensate for good acts by doing more bad acts in other parts of their lives.]

Interestingly, they suggest that enviro groups could benefit by providing social support for people who share their values. [A good example is ACF’s champions programs in NSW and Victoria].

They also talk about promoting “implementation intentions” which means not only spreading values but specifying what choices those values require. An example might be “We value nature therefore we oppose destruction of habitat whenever we see it”. An interesting idea. The research ref is Gollwitzer, P. (1999) Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans, American Psychologist, 54, 493-503.

Then they address out-group prejudice. They point out that by ascribing economic values to, for instance, Canadian harp seals, we may inadvertently make them an out-group that it’s OK to exploit. They talk about the importance of more contact between species to reduce out-grouping, for instance through nature-based workshops.

On the third of their identity problems, denial in the face of threats, they write that “in order to help activate positive environmental behaviours, environmental organisations will ultimately need to develop approaches that help people express the fear, anger, sadness, angst or sense of threat from environmental challenges that many are probably already experiencing (whether consciously or otherwise)”. [Interesting idea. Maybe environmentalists would think more clearly if they weren't so grief stricken.]

They also suggest that making people feel threatened might push them further into denial, citing campaigns that vilify SUV drivers. [About time someone said this.]

They conclude by:

1) asserting [unconvincingly] that aspects of values can be changed; and

2) reasserting what has been Crompton’s main argument from the start: that environmental organisations should engage with identity through appeals to deep, abiding, positive human values.

[What is missing is more details on values…so here’s a few we could work with:

- anything to do with children and being a good parent;

- quality of relationships;

- autonomy;

- health;

- altruism;

- joy;

- safety].

What is good about this work:

The importance of learning to communicate in terms of deep human values.

What’s not good:

The academic language.

Lack of examples of how to do it.

The assumption that communicating directly to individuals matters much anyway. Perspectives drawn from Diffusion of Innovations, social networks, product design and setting modification are absent from Crompton’s work. He’s still hooked on traditional marketing assumptions that treat people as isolated individuals and ignore their technological, physical, institutional and social settings. That's where we can really influence behaviour.

The task before us

I've been meaning to post this item from Sean Kidney's authoritative Climate Change blog, from the December Copenhagen Conference, which succinctly scopes some of the infrastructure and behavioural changes we'll need to see in coming decades:

I've just come from a sobering presentation in Copenhagen by Yuki Tanaka and others of the Japanese Institution of Transport Policy Studies. They have done detailed modeling of global transport emissions and how we can reduce them by 2050.They've done different scenarios, and have settled on pushing for keeping emissions at 2000 levels because they believe the lower scenarios are not likely to be achieved. I started off sceptically, thinking "we'll need to figure out how to do better than that". But by the end of the presentation, overwhelmed by the robustness of their research, I can see why they made that decision.

Bear in mind this is in the context of rapidly growing economies in Asia and Latin America.

Key points:

To keep emissions just at 2000 levels will require:

- Cars: an enormous 60% shift of passenger traffic from cars to rail and bus. In cities 80% of remaining cars and 40% of light trucks will be electric by 2050.

- Aviation: half of all sub-1600km trips shift to high-speed rail systems, plus 20-30% fuel saving technology improvements in aviation. They do also include some shifting to technologies like

video-conferencing.

- Shipping: 30% reduction in emissions, largely through large scale engine replacement around 2020, when a disproportionate portion of the world's fleet comes up for renewal.

- Bikes: for short-distance trips there'll be a substantial increase in non-vehicle transport - e.g. bicycles - helped by congestion charges and other traffic control techniques in all major cities.

- Rail: large scale electrification of railways and various substantial improvements in rail efficiency. There will be a doubling (yes!) of kms of rail lines in the world by 2050. They have also assumed that the power grid shifts largely to clean energy during this period.

The net extra investment needed above "business as usual investment" already expected is just under US$12 trillion, 54% in developing countries. And this just to keep at 2000 level emissions!

On the optimistic side, if we can ensure, with some tough government planning decisions that help ensure these investments pay a good return for pension funds, then it's a huge financing opportunity.

Some interesting responses

 

Some interesting responses to my article The problem with social marketing – why you can’t sell change like soap

From a senior social marketing consultant:

I also find social marketing limited but have to report that it has become an industry. It now has to sustain itself and all the bureaucratic university and publishing infrastructure that has grown up around it. Many of the social marketing conferences seem to devote a fair slab of time to navel-gazing or defending the theory. Or they just keep expanding the horizons so it includes EVERYTHING. I recently sat in on a planning meeting for a new social marketing body in Australia recently and it was filled with University social marketing professors who were mainly concerned with the status of the publication associated with the conference.

From a social science professor:

Les - I agree - and I look forward to reading it in more detail – this takes me back to arguments I had in Canada with McKenzie-Mohr about 20 years ago!! - for me there is a big difference between 'enabling' change (which often first involves 'personal healing') and 'manipulating' change - the former is sustainable and co-evolving, whereas the latter is usually transitory and open to the next 'manipulation’.

From a sexual health marketer:

Thanks Les - an excellent, accessible article. I wish we could devote our sexual health marketing dollars to working directly with small groups of young people instead of paying kids in advertising agencies to come up with the next catchy 'grab'.

From a health promotion officer:

You raise lots of great points in your paper. I basically agree with what you say. When I first started out working in communications as a grad I started off by buying into the usual spiel around the influence of mass media etc. which is obviously still true to some extent but at that stage I wasn't able to be as critical of social marketing as I am now. Through my work over the last few years in health promotion, I really do feel like mass media advertising and the like is often money down the drain - it looks like you're doing more than you actually are. Unfortunately though, it's really difficult to use all of the principles you went through in your Enabling Change workshop because of lack of time and money. But I believe that I have personally gotten better at thinking more laterally and abandoning lots of usual practices that sound good but do nothing in terms of impact. Anyway, it's a work in progress and I still have a lot of learn about all of this!

From an state agency social scientist:

Well argued! I think maybe you are a bit unkind to social marketing based programs and frameworks that extend the conception of barriers and benefits beyond the psychosocial, but you are certainly right as far as I can see that major government campaigns and the consultants who provide them tend to generate very narrow and inconsequential interventions (except in visibility impact - perhaps we need a more social change literate electorate policing these things and punishing low change, high visibility efforts).

Cheers.

Also, interestingly, a stinging critique in the New York Times of the use of social marketing to promote the adoption of pesticide-treated mosquito nets in sub-sahara Africa.

The marvel of multi-disciplinary mingling

Howard Jones, pioneering Green activist of the NSW south coast stood up at the annual Raspberry Day get-together this year and said, in his rich, thoughtful voice: “Copenhagen isn’t really about climate change. It’s about cooperation.” Nice.

I witnessed a marvellous case study in cooperation – at a somewhat smaller scale - when asked to facilitate an intensive day of multi-disciplinary planning by Housing NSW this year. The aim was to figure out how to green the public housing estate in NSW: 60,000 dwellings covering 70,000 hectares (and some are awfully bleak).

We had 40 participants from a rich mix of professions - architects, landscape designers, community renewal staff, sustainability gurus, Housing NSW managers, community gardens facilitators - a smorgasbord of jargons and perspectives (but don’t ask me where the public housing tenants were…we obviously can’t achieve perfection overnight!)

The day began with the Minister for Housing, David Borger, saying his goal was to make public housing estates “places you’re proud to live in and happy to come home to.” (deftly expanding the ambit of “sustainability” into the social realm…where it absolutely belongs, after all: no grass-roots buy-in, no sustainment).

Next came 2 hours of inspiring 15 minute talks. Then we split the room into mixed teams of 5-6, each with a facilitator, and gave them a pile of plans and coloured pens. Two hours of brainstorming and mad scribbling later and we had 6 exciting plans for greening different kinds of housing estates.

At the plenary session, well-known sustainability guru, Michael Mobbs, was the spokesman for the team dealing with one big, grim, western suburbs estate.

He reported how each profession made its unique contribution to the plan:

- the architects showed how joining two roads and transforming a rough footpath could make it easy for tenants to navigate the estate;

- the landscape designers spotted two disused tennis courts along the footpath that could become a community garden and meeting place, shaded by a dense grove of trees;

- Michael Mobbs then explained how the temperatures in those areas could be cooled by 10 degrees in summer by water tanks and evaporation pools(!); and

- the community renewal manager showed how framing the changes around the tenants’ hot issues (crime and isolation) could bring them into the planning process;

Then the council guy finally piped up and said, more or less, “that won't work because the road is too narrow and the council garbage trucks will just knock those trees down.” Michael Mobbs’ response was “well we’re just going to have to have that discussion with council’s waste services manager” - illustrating perfectly how making change means continually expanding the conversation.

So, can we successfully bring together diverse professions with different strengths to plan together? And can their results vastly exceed what any single profession could achieve? The answer is “yes”.

Kuhn and Galbraith on habitual ideas

Regarding your thoughts on habitual ideas Karla...I thought you might enjoy the following quotes.

Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, wrote that an accepted body of knowledge “does not aim for novelties of fact or theory, and, when successful, finds none.” (p52)

 

Even when confronted by severe and prolonged failure “though they may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis.” (p77)

J.K. Galbraith, in The Affluent Society, sought to explain the persistence of "the conventional wisdom". He wrote that “Numerous factors contribute to the acceptability of ideas. To a very large extent, of course, we associate truth with convenience – with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort and unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.” (p7)

“Ideas are inherently conservative,” he concluded. “They yield not to the attack of other ideas but to the massive onslaught of circumstances with which they cannot contend.” As a result. “like the Old Guard, the conventional wisdom dies but does not surrender.” (p17, p12)

Sources: Thomas S. Kuhn 1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Third edition 1996, The University of Chicago Press

 J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958) Penguin Books edition 1999

The short answer is that habitual ideas often provide pay-offs, in career, prestige, income, power and convenience etc for those who hold them. These ideas become part of people's identity, so its not surprising they defend them to the death. Such ideas are rarely defeated by frontal attack...they have to be slowly exterminated by the social triumph of better ideas!

- Les

The problem with Social Marketing - why you can't sell change like soap

If you work in health promotion or sustainability, you’ll have heard of “Social Marketing” and “Community-based Social Marketing”.

Lately I’ve noticed how these communication methodologies are being treated with almost magical reverence, as if they are the long-awaited silver bullets for the complex social, health and environmental problems we all struggle with.

I believe many of the expectations being placed on Social Marketing and Community-based Social Marketing are seriously overblown and it’s time social change practitioners reassessed their attitude to these practices.

Here’s why:

Of course you can market brands. But behaviour change is not like buying a different brand of beer, it’s about getting people to DO THINGS THEY ARE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH, DON’T WANT TO DO OR CAN’T DO, or they would already be doing them. Like parents letting their kids walk to school, or smokers quitting, or drivers switching to public transport.

These kinds of social, health and environmental behaviours are intractable because they are part of complex, “wicked” or messy social problems. That’s why they are still with us. They are intractable for very good reasons: they are fixed firmly in place by a powerful matrix of institutional, technological and social factors. To be effective change programs must therefore do more than just communicate persuasive messages, they must aim to modify those factors.

Paul Stern of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the UK’s National Research Council explains that many behaviours are simply not amenable to voluntary change: [i]

“This pattern of [contextual] influences implies that effective laws and regulations, strong financial incentives or penalties, irresistible technology, powerful social norms, and the like can leave little room for personal factors to affect behavior…”

In other words, when people have very little choice how they act, structural changes (like regulation, pricing, infrastructure, service provision, governance reform, social innovation, and technological innovation) should be the preferred approaches.

He goes on to say that: “[however] when contextual influences are weak, personal factors…are likely to be the strongest influence on behavior.” However, if we are realistic, there are very few situations where contextual factors are weak. Every personal decision is thoroughly embedded on its context. Even a simple voluntary behaviour like “turning off the lights” is determined by technology and pricing.

The fact is, every effective social change effort has been predominantly structural. Improving the anti-social behaviour of drinkers, for instance, has required collaboration between police, community leaders and licensing authorities; physical re-design of venues; modified management practices; training for staff; advocacy; political leadership; and legislative change. Marketing has been the least important factor in the mix. Most solutions to “wicked” problems are like this. They involve multi-faceted strategies, and are very much about building relationships and re-designing practices, places and institutions, with marketing taking an important supportive role.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with good marketing. It’s a vital part of the mix. It spreads knowledge, creates interest, helps get people buzzing, and helps spark political action so that politicians get busy with the work of changing institutions and supporting technological innovation. It is an important handmaiden of change, but not the driver....

The rest of this paper is at www.enablingchange.com.au   It looks at the shape of successful interventions into "wicked problems", details weaknesses in the Social Marketing approach, and suggests an alternative approach.

---

[i] Paul C. Stern (2005) Individuals’ Environmentally Significant Behaviour, Environmental Law Reporter News and Analysis 35 10785

How to bust silos

An article by Graham Winter, an Australian organisational psychologist, with some nicely expressed ideas about minimising organisational silos.


When initiatives failed
Our studies showed that when business initiatives failed, the 'players' were likely to be:

1. pursuing their own agenda: there was no shared bigger picture between units and little understanding or empathy for others, and leaders allowed conflicting agendas to prevail
2. avoiding and denying: employees avoided reality checks, there was a limited use of data in feedback and decision-making and the company had poor problem-solving practices
3. stifling communication: there was an absence of listening, e-mail was used as the main means of communication, there was a prevalence of hoarded information and alternative views were often dismissed
4. protecting their own turf: employees prioritised and planned in isolation, used their status to influence decisions and fostered inconsistency in processes and systems
5. playing 'I win, you lose': employees were blamed as soon as things went wrong, and success was rewarded inside the silos rather than across the company.

When initiatives succeeded
When business initiatives succeeded, the 'players' were likely to be:

1. sharing the big picture: companies created and shared one big picture, found common goals and synergies and focused on what was best for the organisation
2. sharing the reality: employees were focused on real performance, made fact-based decisions and had the tough conversation rather than avoiding reality
3. sharing the air: companies invited ideas from employees in every area of the business, and employees expressed opinions clearly and succinctly and listened to others
4. sharing the load: employees prioritised and planned together, were clear about roles and expectations and looked for common ground
5. sharing the wins and losses: companies paid close attention to joint results, learned and adapted together and rewarded true performance.

The dream team to tackle obesity

A recent US National Research Council report, Local Government Actions to Prevent Obesity provides a nice summary of the kind of interventions that have the best potential to tackle childhood obesity. 

According to the press release: “Many of these steps focus on increasing access to healthy foods and opportunities for active play and exercise.  They include:

- providing incentives to lure grocery stores to underserved neighborhoods;

- eliminating outdoor ads for high-calorie, low-nutrient foods and drinks near schools; requiring calorie and other nutritional information on restaurant menus; 

- implementing local "Safe Routes to School" programs; 

- regulating minimum play space and time in child care programs; 

- rerouting buses or developing other transportation strategies that ensure people can get to grocery stores; and 

- using building codes to ensure facilities have working water fountains.”

So, here's the dream team you'd need for a comprehensive attack on obesity at the local government level:

- an incentive manager;

- a regulator; 

- a building code planner; 

- a nutritionist; 

- a transport planner; 

- an educator; 

- a courageous politician or two to drive these changes through; and

- a facilitator, to pull it all together.