We hear it all the time from folks looking to promote an environmental program or behavior: “We don’t want to preach to the choir.” This old adage is quoted so often, it must be true, right? Wrong. When it comes to behavior change, it turns out that preaching to the choir is actually the answer to your outreach prayers!

Why focus on choir members and not the unconverted, you ask? After all, isn’t it the sinners who cause all the trouble in the first place? Maybe so, but the return on investment you’ll get from chasing after those sinners will be low. You only have so many hours in the day and so many outreach dollars to spend. A tried and true choir member — or Early Adopter in marketing parlance — will influence countless others, while your run-of-the mill sinner, or Laggard, isn’t likely to influence anyone at all. And this only if you achieve the near-impossible and successfully convert him to your cause at long last. The fact is, Early Adopters and Laggards are different by nature, so you can pretty much count on your choir member whistling a happy tune to all her friends while Laggard Larry hum-bugs away at home.

Keep ’em Singin’!
If you’re lucky enough to have found yourself with a good-sized choir coming to church every week — not to mention those tiresome rehearsals — don’t let them get away! For example, you’ve got a high curbside recycling participation rate in a certain neighborhood. That’s fantastic, but now’s not the time to rest on your laurels. Have a behavior confirmation campaign at the ready, or you risk hearing only crickets in the pews once again.

What’s a confirmation campaign? It can employ any number of tactics, but it always involves some sort of expression of gratitude. A simple “Thanks for recycling!” inserted into the next trash bill mailing would be a great start. This, plus a little concrete feedback (“You recycled 5,000 tons last year alone!”) serves to reinforce the desired behavior and help sustain it into the future. Without that, you can actually lose those valued members of your flock, who begin to think their efforts aren’t being noticed or making a difference after all.

Add a New Song to Their Repertoire
Another nifty thing about the so-called Confirmation stage of behavior adoption is that you can often successfully “piggy-back” a new habit onto the old. You say you’ve already got over 50% of your community recycling yard trimmings? Wonderful! Now get them to add food scraps or, for those already doing that, food-soiled paper. It’s like asking a choir to try some new material that’s a bit more challenging. And, while you’re at it, mobilize them to recruit new members. After all, you can’t do it all yourself, and your choir members are your biggest allies.

Recruit Soloists from the Ranks
Certain choir members are likely to stand out from the rest. If you work for a public agency, this is the guy who shows up at every board meeting, the lady who volunteers every year for your Earth Day clean-up event, or the high school kid who just won your poster contest. These are people who are already engaged and, best of all, they got that way of their own accord. Once again, it’s that ROI staring you in the face: “I’m going to give you a big return on a small investment!,” they’re saying through their stellar actions. Why not invite them to engage further by joining a steering committee, becoming a volunteer captain for next year’s event or doing a presentation at their school? This is how an outreach program gets rolling on its own.

The Coda
A final note: We hope by now it’s clear that good outreach takes more than faith (although a good dose of hope and optimism doesn’t hurt). Outreach that produces real and lasting behavior change requires a strategic approach. Sometimes that means doing precisely the opposite of what “common sense” tells you to do.

Are public agencies charged with waste diversion giving up on people too easily?

As an environmental outreach firm working in the solid waste realm, mostly for public agencies, Gigantic Idea Studio has a unique vantage point. We
have long observed a marked underinvestment in outreach by the majority of public agencies. Now these same agencies appear to be giving up on the public when it comes to full compliance and participation in curbside recycling and other resource recovery programs. “It just isn’t working,” or “This is just a community that is never going to cooperate,” are phrases we hear commonly these days. The presumed answer? Technology … such as dirty MRFs, for example.

Will Dirty MRFs Help Us Get to Zero Waste?

What’s a dirty MRF, you ask? Well, a MRF is a Materials Recovery Facility—traditionally an operation in which a combination of people and machines handle the sorting and other processing not taken care of prior to the recyclable materials being placed in curbside carts (or recycling dumpsters, in the case of businesses). At a dirty MRF, unsorted trash—containing all kinds of recyclable material is separated, mostly mechanically, at great expense. And now there are “wet MRFs,” that use water to separate and clean recyclables, and dissolve organic material. These systems require no sorting on the part of residents or businesses, who can throw anything and everything into their cart or dumpster. To many working tirelessly to increase diversion and even reach Zero Waste, this appears to be a wish come true. No more reliance on those pesky humans to do what you want them to, and no more mucking around in the messy business of communication. Or so it would seem.

Giving Up On People Too Soon?

But here’s the thing: wouldn’t it be more beneficial in the long run to change the public’s behavior around recycling? It seems to us that outreach hasn’t been given a proper chance, given the tactics, messaging, design and other communications components that have been used by agencies and haulers thus far. True public outreach is conducted strategically, methodically and unrelentingly—not just when a new program rolls out, but before, during and long after. Effective outreach, resulting in maximum participation by the majority of the public, takes an unceasing drum beat of consistent messaging, compelling professional design and tactics that meet people where they are: out in their communities, not just in their garbage bills. All of this takes resources: budgets of $20,000-60,000 a year in a community of 150,000 just isn’t going to cut it, especially when you remember that public agencies are competing with everyone else’s messaging for “mindshare,” including large corporations with multi-million dollar marketing budgets.

Weighing the Price of Investment: Technology Or Outreach

We can hear the cries of protest already: “If we spent $2.00 a person on outreach, we’d hear from our constituents, and it wouldn’t be pretty.” In a climate of economic downturn and diminishing support for government, we understand that spending on things like websites, recycling guides or exhibit booths can make an agency vulnerable to criticism, and we’re sensitive to that. But consider this: The price tag for building and running a typical dirty MRF runs into the many millions of dollars. If we were sitting in the walnut seats of the venerable City Council chambers around the State, we’d be more worried about the potential outcry about that! Beyond the financial bottom line is the ultimate goal of environmental outreach and a healthier planet And we believe that’s worth working and spending for.

If you want to promote a behavior like recycling, appeal to your audience’s aspirations and call those who do the right thing “heroes.” Makes sense, right? We actually don’t think so. After some strategic musings, based on findings from a range of behavior experts, here’s why we think this common approach won’t work.

1. According to the dictionary, a hero is “a person of superhuman qualities and often semi-divine origin …” In other words, a hero is someone who is special—by nature, outside the norm.
2. Norming has been proven time and time again to be the most powerful strategy in changing behaviors. To norm a behavior, you want to give the impression that it is literally the normal thing to do. As sophisticated and independent as we like to think we are, the “everyone’s doing it” argument works best with us humans.
3. So if heroes aren’t normal, and we all want to be normal, it follows that we don’t want to be heroes. Another way to put it is that heroes are anti-norming. (They wear tights in public, after all. Ack!)

But whom to put forth as a model of your target behavior, if not a hero? Why, Clark Kent, of course! Or, if you prefer, Joe Blow, the girl next door, Everyman. Clark will be your best influencer precisely because he is not special.

We recommend featuring a person who appears to be just like the average member of your priority group—in every way but one: the desired behavior. Clark lives in your neighborhood, dresses like you, has the same level of education and makes about the same amount of money as you do. The only difference is he recycles his food scraps, and you don’t. Better yet: Clark and all the rest of your neighbors recycle their food scraps. Sadly, you’re the last one on your block who doesn’t.

The message is two-fold: one, if you aren’t currently practicing a certain behavior (recycling food scraps, for example), you’re standing conspicuously outside your peer group; and two, if you do begin practicing the behavior, we promise you won’t stand out.

Contests are everywhere—particularly in our field of behavior change—so we know the argument we’re about to make will be unpopular with a lot of people. Here it is: while competition is exciting in Olympic events, we believe contests are not the hands-down outreach winner so many assume them to be.

The “spirit of competition” is often touted as an effective motivator, with vast resources being poured into contests that pit neighbor against neighbor, for example. We believe there are two problems with contests like these:

1. The pleasure of winning is not a universal emotion, and
2. Prizes place the motivation outside the individual and so only create temporary behavior change, at best.

Questionable Assumptions and Labeling Losers

It’s often assumed that winning a competition evokes happiness, pride in achievement and satisfaction in everyone. These are core human emotions identified by psychologists as being universal. However, we know from copious cross-cultural research that winning does not always bring happiness, pride and satisfaction. In many cultures, collaboration is valued more highly than competition. While winning a game might make one person feel proud, another might feel ashamed because of his/her particular background and values. So it is vitally important to put on cross-cultural “goggles” when we design outreach campaigns.

Another consequence of contests is all of the “losers,” who don’t win a prize and are therefore disappointed. This is typically the majority of participants, so why alienate most of your audience by dooming them to the label of loser?

Is Competition Now a Religion?

It is incorrect to assume that the desire to win will always motivate and change behavior. According to Alfie Kohn, author of No Contest: The Case Against Competition, “The race to be Number One has been described as America’s state religion. We have been trained … to believe in the value of beating people … Research and experience, however, demonstrate that competition is actually destructive … and counterproductive …” In another Kohn book entitled Punished by Rewards, he argues persuasively that holding out a potential reward (extrinsic motivation) is highly ineffective at changing behavior long-term.

A carefully designed contest can be an effective tactic for a target group that is more competitively oriented, if it is part of a larger, integrated campaign. In general we suggest using more constructive tactics that are more likely to result in long-term behavior change. We think that’s a winning idea.

Image by skynesher via iStockphoto