Social Marketing Consultants

An article was forwarded to me the other day that claimed it was going to discuss the six biggest mistakes of social marketing. Of course, it did not live up to its claim. The article was about social media as a marketing tool for non profit organizations, and how it is misused as such.

While interesting, the article was not remotely about social marketing, which is the integrated communications process of promoting behavior change for social good.

Social media websites can be used as an effective tool for promoting social change, yet You Tube, Facebook, Twitter and the like are merely part of an integrated suite of tools that can be used to promote changes in behavior.

I believe it is incumbant upon we social marketers to help make that important distinction and keep the 38-year-old name, Social Marketing, pure in its meaning.

Drug free community coalitions usually have a fair amount of data at their disposal. With partners who represent the schools, the courts and justice system, treatment facilities, health departments, and law enforcement, among others, coalitions often have access to hard numbers about substance abuse in their communities. If they focus largely on youth substance abuse prevention and where the schools have student surveys about alcohol, tabacco and other drugs, they may also have a sense of opinions and perceptions among school age youth. But what about the community at large?

Public perception (public opinion) surveys can be a very effective way to learn more about the the parents and other citizens in your community think and believe about substance abuse. One reason many small location substance abuse prevention coalitions don’t conduct public surveys is the cost. Hiring a marketing research consulting firm to professionally write, conduct and analyze a telephone survey can cost easily $5,000 - $10,000 or more. Conducting a survey yourself door-to-door, or at public gatherings, for example, using coalition members and volunteers can be very time consuming and may not yield statistically significant and reliable results. Web options, like Survey Monkey, can reduce your workload, but also may not provide a very representative sampling. Once concern about web-based surveys is that your public has to seek you out to take the survey. Those with the strongest opinions will usually participate more often and more willingly than will the so-called silent majority.

Where does that leave you? It leaves you with tough choioces to make. Your dataset will be richer and the choices you make will be richer and more informed with good public perception data. My advice is to be a good consumer. Weigh your options. I tell my clients that there are usually at least two roads to the same result: the meny intensive road or the labor (effort) intensive road. There are several books and other resources available that will teach you how to write a good survey and conduct a good interview. Software programs exist at relatively resonable prices that will help you format your survey, enter the data and analayze the results. You can conduct in person intercept surveys at malls, grocery stores, etc. to help you get a representative sampling. Training volunteers how to conduct effective, non-biased interviews does not take that much time. However, when you put all of those aspects together, there is a lot of time, effort, learning curve and some expense involved in conducting your own survey.

Whether you go the money route or the do-it-yourself approach, the important point to remember is haing the public perception data is a key ingredient to a successul community substance abuse prevention and social marketing campaign.

I joined my first groupsite website in early November. I am quickly seeing the value of these sites as a collaboration tool for any associated group of people or colleagues who don’t get as much person to person face time as they would like or need to be successful in their collaborative efforts.

Groupsites are a new class of websites that basically allow any group the ability to create their own unique social network and collaboration site. Groupsites combine the features of traditional websites, blogs, collaboration software and social networks. Groupsites can be either public or private and provide a meeting place that typically provides members with a shared calendar, discussion forums, group blog member profiles, photo gallery, and file storage. These kinds of sites are part of what is known as the web 2.0 revolution.

The site I joined is a private site, which can be joined by invitation from the person or people in control of the group. Public sites allow anyone to join.

The site I joined is a social marketing-oriented groupsite of water pollution educators in the Long Island Sound area of CT and NY. The site is very new, and more people than just me may be new to this type of networking opportunity, so it remains to be seen how much people will take advantage of it and what they will do on the site.

The Long Island Sound group went through Collective X http://www.collectivex.com/ to set up their site. Other groupsite creation sites include Group Box http://groupbox.com/ , and Ning http://www.ning.com/.

Certainly group websites can serve a large number of business and personal purposes, but as a place to share ideas and accomplishments in like projects or efforts, group sites have the potential to be worth their weight in gold.

Recently  the  East Canyon social marketing efforts have stalled out somewhat. The main factor in the temporary glitch is  not enough capacity in terms of local committee members who could step up when others stepped out. Two paid positions in the watershed were vacant for a period of time in the summer.

Following environmental assessments, the beginning of the total maximum daily load (TMDL) allocation process, and both quantitative and qualitative audience research, the watershed committee started a social marketing campaign in February 2008. Phase one of the campaign was centered around dog waste left on the extensive system of trails in the area. We developed radio and newspaper advertising spots, and planned to deliver copies of the print ads to veterinary offices and pet stores in the area. We would also have a display at local spring and summer community events.

It all started out well enough. Then, less than two months into the campaign, the education coordinator from the Swaner Ecocenter left her position. She was the person on the local watershed education committee with whom I was working to implement the behavior change campaign. She left and I got busy with other spring and summer projects, which slowed progress. Additionally, the overall watershed coordinator left his job to take a better paying federal job in California. What started out as a promising integrated campaign at the beginning of 2008, has turned into an anemic local advertising effort, with little or no grassroots, community based, marketing and outreach to compliment and bolster the media efforts.

On the up side, the basic structure of the watershed committee has stayed in place, the funding still exists, and the key personnel have, or will soon be replaced. Everything should be fine in the East Canyon watershed. However, that isn’t always the case when a watershed group is faced with similar circumstances.

Loss of key personnel, funding and other local capacity issues are not unique to the East Canyon watershed committee. In my experience it seems all too common for locally lead conservation efforts to fail or slow down because of manpower or funding capacity issues.

While I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all solution, networking and partnership building seem to be fairly effective ways of avoiding failure or loss of momentum in local conservation efforts.

A friend of mine who, until recently, worked at EPA in Washington, DC, is a social anthropologist who co-wrote a guidebook titled Community, Culture and the Environment. This guide teaches several capacity building tools used by sociologists, psychologists, and the like. One of the tools is called social network mapping. Another tool is asset mapping. In all, the suite of tools offered in this publication can help local coordinated efforts to be sustaining from the manpower and motivation side. The funding part of the equation—especially in the current unpredictable economic times—is an entirely different story.

Another fairly simple tool I like to use  related to organizational capacity is a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths , Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It is a great tool for determining what you need in funding, manpower, materials needs, etc , in relationship to what you and your partners have. Do you need a public relations expert, for example? Do you need one? If one of your key people were to leave, how long would it take to find a replacement, and who would step up and keep the momentum going in the mean time?

I have seen capacity issues raise their ugly heads many times in my experiences, in small projects and large ones, and in small and large communities. I don’t have any simple answers. Suffice it to say, try to think through as many contingencies and you can at the onset, and good luck avoiding the capacity issues that face so many community based social marketing efforts.

10-06-2008

A new study from the World Wildlife Fund—United Kingdom questions the long-term validity and sustainability of current behavior change education that uses social marketing principles, and makes a case for the idea that if your end goal is to create sustainable environmental actions and ethics among your constituents, people have to be willing to change for the right reasons, rather than selfish reasons, which social marketing campaigns often promote.

Social marketing is designed to promote a compelling reason for people to make a change in their lifestyle. Much of the time, especially where the environment is concerned, we promote personal gain as the reason for change. We tell people that will can save money, look cool to friends and neighbors, save time or keep their kids and pets safe. While that is true—I personally only promote benefits I believe to be true—my employers want people to take on actions to improve or preserve the quality of the water, air, wildlife, etc.

The bottom line question seems to be: If people make a change that benefits the earth, does it really matter if they do it to save a little bit of time or money, or to fit into their community norms? The authors of the WWF-UK study believe that it does matter.

Marketing approaches to creating behavioural change may be the most

effective way of motivating specific change, on a piecemeal basis. But

the evidence presented in this report suggests that such approaches may

actually serve to defer, or even undermine, prospects for the more far-reaching and systemic behavioural changes that are needed.

There is little evidence that, in the course of encouraging individuals to

adopt simple and painless behavioural changes, this will in turn motivate them

to engage in more significant changes. Tom Crompton, Change Strategist, as part of WWF-UK’s Strategies for Change Project.

http://www.wwf.org.uk/strategiesforchange

Crompton refers to traditional social marketing strategies as “Toe in the door” approaches to behavior change. He believes that these approaches are not effective at creating a lasting environmental ethic. He does not believe that people will take on larger, more substantial changes for the environment’s sake, unless they started by adopting small simple changes for the sake of the environment, instead of for some personal, unrelated reason.

While I think that Crompton and the WWF make some very good points, I believe you can create an environmental effect that started with one or a few simple actions that were done for personal gain.

Recycling is a personal example. In America, many of us got our introduction to personal recycling in the 70s or 80s by recycling aluminum cans for a few cents a pound. As an adolescent and a teenager I would collect all the cans our family would use. I also collected cans that were thrown away at the small business my father owned. After I had collected a bunch, I’d cash in. At least once I donated them to a can drive that my school was doing as a fundraiser. While there are a lot of adults I know who still collect their cans and take them to the recycling center for money, I have long since given up that habit for disposing of my cans in the curbside recycling bin. Because of those bins (that were originally promoted as convenient and what everyone is doing) I now recycle paper and plastics as well. Our local city does not accept glass. We often save up our glass and take it to a recycling bin that accepts it. We don’t do that 100 percent of the time. However, in my case, and the anecdotal cases of several people I know, we have a fairly strong environmental ethic that started by getting a few pennies for collecting cans. I am now experimenting with wind and solar energy on a small scale. If I save 10, 20, or even 30 percent on my monthly power bill, it will still take a long time to see a profit on the time, effort and money I am investing in this effort. It isn’t about the money for me. I truly am interested in helping conserve our resources.

However, my most compelling argument for promoting simple behavior changes for any reason, is that if they change for personal gain, they still change. Despite Al Gore’s WE foundation and the Pickens Plan, I think there are a lot of people in this country who aren’t worried about our limited resources, who don’t believe in global warming, and who don’t believe they cause water pollution. I think we are far behind England and the rest of Europe, when it comes to environmental consciousness. If people are not likely to change for the “right” reasons any time soon; if they do not believe that their actions make that much of a difference, then we need to entice them to change for any reason that works for them. In the meantime, we continue to educate people, and help them to understand the right reasons to change.

That’s my take. I encourage you to read the report and share your opinion.

I was recently in New York and Connecticut conducting introductory social marketing workshops for representatives of organizations that work in and around the Long Island Sound to promote improve water quality, wildlife habitat, etc.

The Long Island Sound divides CT and Long Island NY. While I was there I was thinking some about division and differences. There are some cultural and social differences among locals in various parts of Long Island, between them and many people on the CT side of the Sound, and among more urban and more suburban residents in Connecticut. Then I thought about places where I have on-going projects, such a rural area in Central Pennsylvania, inner city South East Washington D.C., part of the Dallas, Texas Metroplex, and the three or four distinct areas of Utah where I am helping out with on-going efforts. I usually think about the social and cultural difference within watersheds and between watersheds from different regions because almost always when I teach social marketing workshops, there is a person or two in the class who asks how the process can be universal when the people in his or her area are so unique.

I usually offer two answers: there are some aspects about human nature that are universal, and the social marketing process is designed to learn about and tap into those cultural, social and geographic differences that exist within your watershed and make your watershed unique compared to other places. Some of the behavior change approaches that tap into universal aspects of human nature include the use of social norms, incentives, prompts, commitments and building motivation over time. We study existing audience research data and conduct new research to tap into what makes an individual community unique and to understand which approaches, techniques, and message distribution choices will provide the best results.

When it is all said and done, social marketing provides a relatively standardized approach to behavior change-based outreach that celebrates our cultural, social and geographic differences. When used correctly, social marketing can be as effective in Clear Creek as Muddy Creek, Long Island Sound and Short Creek, and Little Nishaminy River and Big Water.