Using the ‘F’ Word: How Framing Can Motivate Behavior Change

Nancy Roberts
Can we re-frame enviro issues to make them palatable?

A constant challenge in environmental outreach is how to portray an issue in a way that reaches people with varied worldviews. Neuroscientist George Lakoff and the concept of framing has been much in the political news lately, as opposing sides try to create impressions (also known as bias) in their listeners’ minds. Lakoff notes that all communication has frames:

“The elements of the Communication Frame include: A message, an audience, a messenger, a medium, images, a context, and especially, higher-level moral and conceptual frames.”

We know that facts alone don’t change behavior; to succeed, a message needs that emotional element that reaches the deeper parts of our brain. How can environmental outreach frame important issues in a way that reaches, convinces, and persists to make long-term positive change in behavior?

Lakoff gives one example in his blog, suggesting that instead of talking about environmental regulations, we reframe laws as environmental protections.

Framing a concept like food waste should be simple – no one likes “waste,” right?
The message of buying only what you need, using leftovers, and composting what is left is quite straightforward, but we have a long way to go to tackle the huge amount of food that is wasted. Two recent examples show how framing the issue, while acknowledging the facts, can show success.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.
Activist Selina Juul has worked for years on a multi-touch approach to reducing food waste in her adopted country of Denmark. She recognized that change had to come from all sides: business, government and, most of all, consumers. In this video, she reframes food waste as disrespectful to nature, farmers and to the individual’s own time and money.

 

Ugly? No, Beautiful!
2 "ugly" tomatoes kissingA more local success story focuses on our friend and colleague Jordan Figueiredo. Jordan’s Ugly Fruit and Veg campaign aims to reframe frequently wasted, less than perfect produce with humor and heart, in order to make what had been rejected, acceptable and even coveted.

Jordan couches his multi-touch campaign work as Funactivism, which counters the view some hold of activists as overly serious or shrill. Jordan successfully uses many of the tools of activism and behavior change: touting simple individual steps, assurance that individual actions make a difference, use of pledges and norming, combined with a top-down approach to companies. He has used charming photos spread via social media to challenge people to change their attitudes about what is “ugly,” reframing ugly fruit and vegetables, and by extension, reframing our view of what is beautiful.

Choosing the most effective way to frame an issue takes research, patience and testing. Most of all, it takes creativity and always remembering that change comes from within, and people act because of what they feel even more than because of what they think.

How will you frame your next campaign?

Who Are You Talking To? Choosing a Strategy for Social Media Channels

Nancy Roberts

sample tweet from @giganticideas

Are you planning an environmental outreach campaign that includes social media? I hope so! As you probably know, social media is a great way to spread the word about your organization’s activities and to encourage public participation. But “social media” is not a single, uniform bucket. Just as you would plan a different print ad for a publication that reaches high school students than for one that focuses on businesses, so your posts in social media should be guided by who you are trying to reach and why.

How to get started with a channel-specific strategy?

To start, try creating a mission statement for each channel. The mission statements should be based on your organizational goals and the audience you are most likely to reach with each channel. For example, are you trying to reach young people? Snapchat (60% of Snapchat users are under 25) is a good channel to consider. If you’re trying to reach Baby Boomers or businesses, not so much.

Here are some sample mission statements by channel:

We will use Twitter to raise our profile with influencers in the U.S. and beyond.
We will use Facebook to keep our fans updated and informed about our organization’s activities and to provide calls to action to the public.
We will use Instagram to promote the joy of a waste-free lifestyle with the local community.
Our blog provides detail and a personal voice on our organization’s issues and activities for those who already know about us.

Next, tailor your content by channel. Some organizations, looking to save time, make all of their Facebook posts automatically post to Twitter. This may undermine your efforts when your audience and mission  are different for each channel.

This doesn’t mean you should not cross-post the same topic in different channels. But it is a good idea to structure the content for your target audience: customize the language and images to achieve your mission.

Measure, Measure, Measure

How do you know if your channel strategy is working? Measure the results and compare your progress to your goals. For instance, your Twitter feed may be focused on reaching influencers. You can then evaluate your Twitter efforts by the number of key influencers who follow or retweet you. (In other words, it may be that the quality of your followers is more important than the number of them.) If your goal is to raise awareness of an issue, then the metric of reach/impressions is key. If your goal is to have users respond to a call to action, you will want to look at both click-through rate and number of clicks.

There is so much more to say about social media strategy, but starting with a channel mission statement is a useful guide when you are creating and customizing your communications. Happy posting!

Gigantic Welcomes Nicole Greenspan to the Team

Nancy Roberts

Nicole GreenspanWe’re excited to introduce Nicole Greenspan, our new Associate here at Gigantic Idea Studio! An East Bay native, Nicole comes to us most recently from Stanford University, where she worked for several years in the University’s award-winning sustainability program after completing her undergraduate and graduate degrees in the interdisciplinary Earth Systems Program with a focus on Sustainability Communication and Education. At Stanford, she designed and managed a wide range of projects and programs, spanning waste, energy, water and agriculture. One key project, the now annual Give & Go Move Out Donation Program, diverts over 100,000 pounds of reusable materials from landfill each June. Another, the Sustainable Stanford Internship Program (formerly HSCI), has provided dozens of students the opportunity to work on projects applying their educational background directly to improving campus sustainability. From working with the government in Brazil on climate change education, to promoting best practices in campus sustainability with U.S. Green Building Council, Nicole has a diverse range of experience and skills to inform her work with Gigantic. She recently received her Four Seasons Permaculture Design Certificate from the Regenerative Design Institute.

For the last year and a half, Nicole’s curiosity took her around the world, volunteering and exploring in Costa Rica, Panama, Nepal, Cambodia, Indonesia and Australia. This experience helped her learn to communicate, empathize and build relationships wiNicole Greenspan new Associate at Giganticth people of diverse backgrounds and cultures. From experiencing the April 2015 earthquake and aftermath in Nepal, to hearing the first hand stories of survivors of the Khmer Rouge, she truly appreciates the importance of community resilience and collaboration in order to solve the wicked problems facing our world today. She is particularly passionate about working with communities to co-create a more just and sustainable future, using tools such as design thinking, community-based social marketing, anti-oppression facilitation and regenerative design. She’s excited to collaborate with such an incredible team and clients, offering her perspective and skillset to an organization that makes such a positive impact on the world. When she’s not at Gigantic, you can find her dancing, backpacking or digging in her backyard garden in Oakland.

5 Tips to Turn Your Environmental Outreach from “Meh” to “Magnificent”

Kas Neteler
The (bruised) bananaphone connects the Gigantic staff at CRRA
The (bruised) bananaphone connects the Gigantic staff at CRRA

It’s easy to fall into a rut with environmental outreach tools (websites, brochures, bill inserts, how-to-recycle guides, etc.) But even the smallest touch-up can really help make a piece become more effective. In preparation for the recent California Resource Recovery Association (CRRA) annual conference, the Gigantic team put out a call to our email list, asking for samples of outreach materials that were ready for a makeover. We selected two submissions – the City of Fremont’s multi-family recycling guide and the Conservation Corps North Bay’s services flyer, and got to work.

See the results in the presentation below. In doing these makeovers, a few key takeaways emerged that we’d like to share:

1) Tailor by Audience – Often agencies and organizations don’t have the resources to make separate pieces for each audience (for example, multi-family building residents and property managers), but you can use visual cues and wording to clarify to whom you are speaking within a piece.

2) Give a Clear Call to Action – Laundry lists of do’s and don’t’s can make people’s eyes glaze over. Single, clear action steps are more likely to get results.

3) Use Clear Instructions – There are some best practices for information such as waste sorting guides: use color coding, group images by type, and don’t overlap images – the brain takes in the shape of an uncluttered image and retains it better.

4) Tell Your Story – Stories stick. Make your messages come alive with vivid words and images, and beware of jargon and “internal speak.” Investing in custom photography with “real” community members pays off, as people see themselves in your outreach and are more likely to respond.

5) Be Consistent and Multi-Touch – No single brochure, no matter how well designed, can do all the work. Your message will go farther when all communication pieces work together visually and verbally, reinforcing your message across channels.

If your organization needs an outreach makeover, feel free to contact us and let’s see what we can do together!

Gigantic Adds New Owner

Kas Neteler
Kas (l) with Lisa and Stef at NCRA
Kas (l) with Lisa and Stef at CRRA

It is with great pleasure and pride that I announce my new position as Principal at Gigantic Idea Studio! I am now co-leading the company with founder Lisa Duba. I feel I have truly landed in my professional home, as we collaborate with our clients to create positive environmental change.

It’s been a wonderful journey. As many of you know, I’ve been a regular contributor to Gigantic projects since 2009. What you might not know is that in 2009, I found myself at a point of personal reinvention: I was finishing my Green MBA degree; ending 14 years with a previous employer  (the recession “eliminated” my position) and mourning the passing of my mom from cancer. All occurred within weeks of one another. After all that I realized I did not want to work full-time for anyone again …unless I was an owner.

kas taking photos
Action! Kas at a photo shoot for StopWaste

I’ve been preparing to be an entrepreneur for a long time. I grew up with a family business—John Neteler Auto Sales and Service—and I went to grad school to learn triple bottom line business management. So when I found myself at a crossroads, I was prepared to strike out on my own as a freelancer. Within six months of launching my independent business I was working with an extensive list of clients across several industries: sustainability, tech, healthcare, education and more.

Gigantic Idea Studio was one of my first, and proved to be one of my best, clients. Over the years, Gigantic allowed me to fully exercise so many of skills: creative brainstorming, strategizing, designing, photographing, facilitating, and engaging communities.

Fast forward to fall 2015, when Lisa Duba and I began a conversation about co-ownership of Gigantic. We took our time and thoroughly discussed the opportunities and challenges of partnership and how best to co-create a successful path forward for Gigantic. Now it is official! I look forward to many years of collaboration with Gigantic’s fabulous team and our amazing clients to make the world a better place. Please contact me if you would have questions.

Ugly Food Grabs the Spotlight in Fight against Food Waste

Lisa Duba

UglyFruit_Veg

Food waste prevention gained mainstream traction this past year, and deservedly so. Different from the effort to recycle food scraps, eliminating food waste before it happens is an issue that that most people—even those across stark ideological divides—can agree makes sense to tackle.

Approximately 25% to 40% of food grown and processed in the U.S. is wasted. That statistic alone is staggering, but considering that over 20% of all children in the county live in food-insecure households, it becomes even more astounding that this waste exists.

Fortunately, thanks to inspired individuals, nonprofits and private companies, there is new effort to combat the problem.

In the fall of 2014, our colleague Jordan Figueiredo launched the Bay Area’s first Food Waste Forum and helped sponsor a local Feeding the 5000 event in Oakland. It was at the Forum that many of us saw “Just Eat It,” a documentary made by a Canadian couple, which vividly shows just how much food is wasted by farms, supermarkets, and restaurants.

The food waste issue went viral in 2015, with Jordan Figueiredo’s @UglyFruitAndVeg, a clever social media campaign using amusing, shareable images of funny-looking produce—perfectly good to eat, yet discarded by most farms and supermarkets as unsellable. @UglyFruitAndVeg even garnered coverage on Fab Life with Tyra Banks!

But more than just an awareness effort, private companies and nonprofits are working on hands-on, innovative solutions to the food waste problem. Our client StopWaste is working with private company LeanPath to help reduce avoidable, pre-consumer food waste from commercial and institutional kitchens in Alameda County as part of the Smart Kitchen Initiative. Lean Path’s technology helps track pre-consumer food waste as it occurs, giving management and kitchen staff the information they need to make better buying and planning decisions.

The EPA had already taken note of the issue and in 2012 launched the “Food Too Good To Waste Campaign,“ which provides a ready-to-go campaign toolkit, to reach out to residents on the local level about wasted food.

This movement has even inspired start-up businesses such as Imperfect Produce and Hungry Harvest that market unsellable fruit and vegetables by providing delivery of “ugly” produce boxes, similar to CSA subscriptions. Trendy chefs in New York are creating entire menus from excess food waste at pop-ups. All, in all, 2015 has been a “tipping point” for this important issue.

We applaud everyone involved in the food waste reduction effort, and look forward to continuing our support of this important work in years to come.

 

Gigantic Idea Studio Hosts NewCo Oakland Session

Lisa Duba

Last Thursday, October 8, we opened our Gigantic doors to host a diverse group of visitors interested in learning more about us and our work as part of the NewCo Festival. NewCo engages companies with an innovative mission to share their vision and ideas with festival attendees. This year, the event expanded from San Francisco to include Oakland for the first time, and we are so proud to have been selected to participate as a host company. Host businesses include small, specialized groups like us, along with big players like Twitter, Pandora, Uber, and everything in between. NewCo is an inspiring event, and a great way to share ideas across business disciplines, as our attendees were from well-known tech companies, a university, an online retailer and more.

Surprisingly, preparing this presentation became a bit of a trip down memory lane for me. I realized the history of Gigantic’s founding and early development is intertwined with the advent of recycling, the tipping  point of green as mainstream, and the rise of social science research on how to change behaviors related to environment and sustainability—and this made a cool story. It was great to meet people interested in taking the latest ideas and techniques back to their workplaces to inspire change. Here is the presentation:

Enlivening Outreach: 5 Techniques for Creating Vivid Communication

Kas Neteler

This post is the third in a three-part series summarizing our presentation on messaging at this year’s California Resource Recovery Association (CRRA) conference: “Not Just the Facts, Ma’am: Getting Your Message to Matter.” 

At this point in the story you now know the power of emotional appeal and storytelling. Now it’s time to add another element to the mix: vivid communication.

By vivid communication, we mean communication that forms distinct and striking mental images.  Vivid communication works because it gets attention and aids recall. Without attention, there is no recall. Without recall, there is no action.

Consider these five techniques to incorporate vivid communication to your projects.

1) Make the Invisible, Visible.
Vivid1

Take a look at this ad campaign from Georgia’s Clean Air Program. This is a clever way to depict the positive impact of public transit and carpool options on Atlanta’s freeways.

 2) Relate to what people know.

Vivid3

PG&E learned how to weave vivid communications into scripts. PG&E noticed when they sent auditors to visit homeowners to talk about weather stripping, caulking and attic insulation alone – they did not see homeowners take action to correct issues.

However, once auditors were trained to incorporate vivid communication into their discussions with homeowners, they noticed a significant increase in repairs being made. For example, if an auditor found a lack of insulation in the attic they would say “We call that a ‘naked attic’ – it’s as if your home is facing winter not just without a coat, but without any clothing at all.

3) Illustrate your data.

Vivid2

Yes, facts are important! However, facts with visuals can really get your point across. It’s one thing to say a glacier receded eight miles in 100 years and another eight miles in the last 10 years; we hit another level of comprehension when those facts are illustrated visually.

4) Create an infographic.

Vivid4

This technique is perfect for grabbing someone’s attention and keeping it.

5) Engage the senses.

Vivid5

We created a three-cart game for Oakland Recycles to promote composting and recycling behaviors. The game begins with a noisy and attention-getting prize wheel. The prize wheel lands on a photo of a common discard and the player must find the game piece and walk over and determine which is the proper cart to use. The booth team coaches players as needed and we encourage them to look for clues under the lids. The player is engaged kinetically by taking the item, recognizing what it is and physically placing it in the right cart. This aids recall when they are back home and encountering the same item.

Remember…

No matter the budget dollars behind your campaign, you can weave vivid communications into all your existing outreach efforts including newsletters, bill inserts, presentations, social media posts, event tabling and more! You can change the script, add imagery feature community members, even add a game or activity.

The complete CRRA presentation can be viewed here.

Let Me Tell You a Story: Increasing Recall of Environmental Outreach

Stefanie Pruegel

This post is the second in a three-part series summarizing our presentation on messaging at this year’s California Resource Recovery Association (CRRA) conference: “Not Just the Facts, Ma’am: Getting Your Message to Matter.” 

 

Story_ppt_ssWhich is more powerful: presenting environmental facts and a call to action in a bullet-point list, or embedding them in a narrative? As you may have guessed, the latter! Stories help us understand cause and effect and how things fit together. They also let us access emotions, making the message more memorable.

Storytelling has been part of the human experience for a very long time—just think of the narratives depicted in prehistoric cave paintings. The human brain has evolved to work in narrative structures; it’s how we make sense of the world.

To understand what makes storytelling so effective, let’s look at what happens in the brain. When we absorb facts, the brain gets activated in the areas responsible for language recognition and decoding words into meaning. However, when we listen to a narrative, additional areas in the brain show activity: those responsible for directing physical motion and tracking sensations. For example, when we hear metaphors like “he had leathery hands,” the brain’s sensory cortex — which perceives texture through touch — is stimulated. And the more parts of our brains are engaged, the better our attention and recall.

How can we use these insights in environmental outreach work? There are many ways to weave in narratives. For example, use positive stories about real people to promote a behavior. It may take a bit of research to find the right “hero” for your story, but you can’t beat the persuasive value (and norming effect!) of a local couple sharing their enthusiasm about, say, cooking with leftovers, along with tips in their own words and a photo showing them having fun in the kitchen while reducing waste.

If you’re dealing with frequent barriers to practices you’re trying to promote, try a “success story” of somebody who has overcome these challenges. Their authentic voice and the emotional connection their story can make with your audience will be more effective than any list of facts.

The complete CRRA presentation can be viewed here.

Once More, with Feeling: Incorporating Emotion in Environmental Outreach

Nancy Roberts
This post is the first in a three-part series summarizing our presentation on messaging at this year’s California Resource Recovery Association (CRRA) conference: “Not Just the Facts, Ma’am: Getting Your Message to Matter.” 
sitting brain
People are not just brains on a chair – they respond to emotional appeal
Environmental outreach depends on getting the facts about pollution, recycling, and other eco-challenges to the public in order to encourage more sustainable behaviors. But over and over, we see that facts alone don’t change public behavior. We have to make our messages matter and be memorable. To do this, we recommend three key strategies.
Our first strategy: appeal to the whole person by using emotion. People are not just brains sitting on a chair, motivated by facts and data. Getting people to laugh, cry, sigh or shake their heads in wonder or disgust is what makes a message stick. Businesses have known this for ages. Think about it: Coca-Cola doesn’t focus on telling you exactly what’s in their bottles of acidic sugar water. No! They work to associate their product with emotions of joy, happiness, or belonging, with slogans like “Share a Coke and a Smile” or “Coke Adds Life” or…well, you get the picture.
Emotional appeals do not have to be shocking to work. When we need to convince others to act, it is an invitation to display passion, instill a sense of immediacy or threat, or to invite people to be part of something…there are many emotional appeals to choose from.  See examples of emotional appeals in videos, display ads, and more, in the complete presentation, below.
So the next time you are planning an outreach campaign, consider how to include an emotional appeal. Far from being fluffy or silly, that emotional appeal will make your message more likely to stick.
The complete CRRA presentation can be viewed here.