As Sarah introduced, I’m Anna from Sustainability West Midlands.
I’m not an academic but what I’d like to share with you is just some experiences
of my own really over the last few years supporting organisations on trying to encourage more
sustainable behaviours.
We are not experts in behaviour change but we have supported lots of different organisations
and we also work with organisations that are experts, like Climate Outreach and Global
Action Partnership.
So hopefully this will be interesting for you.
And just very briefly, who is Sustainability West Midlands?
We were set up back in 2002, we’re a not-for-profit and we work across the private, public and
third sector and our membership is trying to drive sustainable behaviour.
We have a board of 15 individuals, largely from the private sector who really heavily
influence our activity.
So everything we do is in line with our vision and that is that by 2020 businesses and communities
in the West Midlands are thriving in an area that is environmentally sustainable and socially
just, and we actually define that.
We look at three different measures: so we look at economic productivity, which we believe
is a positive thing; we’d like to see that increasing: jobs have such a positive impact
on people’s lives and particularly if those jobs are in low carbon sectors in sustainability,
so we monitor that.
We look at carbon emissions for the region.
Obviously we want to see those going down and both of those parameters are actually
moving in the direction we’d like to see and we also look at health inequality between
the best and worst areas of the region and unfortunately what we’re seeing is the gap
between heath inequality is actually getting worse.
So there’s a lot for us to do in terms of supporting organisations.
These are some of our members.
We have about 50 members and you can see that the University of Birmingham are members,
along with Aston, various other public sector and private sector businesses.
We also run lots of different networks.
You can see them on the screen there.
We support the NHS, we support local authorities, we have a climate resilience network.
So each of these networks has hundreds of members and they’re really there to allow
us to share good practice.
There’s an awful lot of good sustainable behaviour happening across the West Midlands
but often people aren’t aware of it and what we’re trying to do is break down barriers
and allow people to learn from each other.
So really our success is underpinned by catalysing long-term sustainable behaviour change with
our members, our network members and our customers and we do that through our communications.
We’ve developed lots of tools which we use and our messages, but having said all that
it isn’t easy and what I’d like to share is just some thoughts on how we can perhaps
think about communicating effectively.
So I’m sure we’re all familiar with behavioural change campaigns like the ones you can see
on the screen.
Funnily enough lots of them are around this time of year so back in February we had the
Go Green Week at Aston University.
You can see the branding there with the kestrel; they’ve actually chosen that branding because
they’ve got kestrels nesting on the campus in Aston so that is a recognisable symbol
that students/staff can recognise when it comes to messages around behaviour change.
On the top, Go Green Week, that was at Coventry last week.
That was a partnership between the university, the council and businesses.
Lots of fun activities happening, so they had a model UN summit, a pub quiz, litter
picks, tours of the energy centre, so all sorts of exciting things happening.
There’s the NHS Sustainability Day and also Earth Hour which I’m sure you’re all aware
of which is coming up towards the end of March.
I think all of these activities and events have their place and they do engage with people,
you know, in a positive way.
Quite often they’re quite informal, they’re self-selecting in terms of people choosing
whether or not to be part of them.
They’re often quite specific, so it can be focused on waste or energy.
They’re generally time-bound, so it’s a short period where people are asked to think
about their behaviour and how they might get involved.
They’re high profile, they’re visible and they’re fun but I would question whether
they actually influence people’s behaviour in the long term.
What do people take away from those events and really stick to going forwards?
There’s other programmes out there that are sort of longer term and I’ve just pulled
out one here which is the Green Impact support which was developed by the NUS and the idea
is that it brings together students and staff to drive behaviour change and green campuses,
curriculums and communities.
It is very effective, it’s a national programme.
I think they’re working with about 50 education establishments – I’m sure some of you
are well aware of the Green Impact tool – I think about 45,000 staff are involved, so
it’s an excellent programme but again I think we can perhaps go one step further than
that and try and get a bit more out of individuals.
A really good example that I came across, it was only last week actually, is a programme
at Manchester Uni called 10,000 Actions.
They’re working with an organisation called Net Positive Futures who’ve developed this
bespoke tool for the university and I was really impressed by it.
What they try and do is get staff to – it’s an online dashboard – all of the staff,
and I think they’re hoping to roll it out to students as well, can log in, go through
certain exercises that ask questions about their particular role, what do they do, what
budgets are they responsible for, what other activities are they involved with, and they
can develop their own action plan.
So it’s really very bespoke to that individual and I think it allows people to be really
quite creative with the things that they are putting forward.
There are fun elements to it.
I know there’s quizzes in there, there’s very visible data so people can see how their
actions compared to others and I think it’s a very good way as well of collecting data
around people’s activities and then using that to think about what’s our next steps
in terms of sustainable behaviour.
So that was quite new, I hadn’t come across that before.
As far as I know that is only in place at Manchester but I really liked the way that
that’s a bit more bespoke perhaps than some of the other programmes.
So I’d just like to go into the five – I mean there’s lots more, many more important
factors – but I’d just like to pull out five key things maybe that we could think
about when we’re trying to communicate around climate change the need for people to make
changes to their behaviour to be more sustainable.
Quite high level but things that, you know, perhaps are fundamental to behaviour change
campaigns.
So firstly is to think about identifying the sustainable behaviour that you want to see
happening and obviously providing rewards or incentives to do that, and equally disincentivising
undesirable behaviour.
I’ve just put a couple of examples on there.
Obviously coffee cups is a massive issue and I know Starbucks and I’ve put Cost there
– that should say Costa – are trying to encourage people to bring their own cups along
by giving you a fairly small discount on the price of your coffee if you do.
The reports are that that is successful, you know, there is a visible decrease in the number
of coffee cups but as a whole it’s not huge, the millions of coffee cups that are used
each day.
But it is still an incentive that would work for some people.
Another example is the 5p carrier bag charge which I think is a great incentive scheme.
You can see the results there in terms of the number of bags that have been taken out
of circulation and the amount of money that’s been raised for charity.
I think with that it’s also important to recognise that by bringing in that, when people
are at the checkout and they are taking their reusable bags along, it’s just highlighting
reuse as a behaviour that is perhaps then much more visible and people might take away
and apply to other aspects of their lifestyle.
Secondly I think it’s important to think about actual physical, real barriers, or perceived
barriers that might be there for individuals and for this one I just thought a little bit
about my own experience in cycle community to work which was something I’d wanted to
do for a long time.
I hadn’t done it for various different reasons and then the steps that I went through to
actually start doing it regularly.
So first of all I had no bike but I was able to use the cycle scheme which is obviously
a government initiative which is a salary sacrifice scheme and allows you to more cheaply
buy a bicycle over a period of time.
So I took advantage of that.
I also had a perception that actually cycling around Birmingham was quite dangerous, it
was going to be a scary thing to do, so I got hold of the free Birmingham Green Ways
leaflet which has some excellent cycling and walking routes on.
I did a couple of practice goes getting in and out of work so that overcame that barrier.
Cycle maintenance, my skills are absolutely zero.
I’m quite lucky that my dad is pretty good at that and he can be bribed with a bacon
sandwich to come over and have a look at my bike, but I know Birmingham City Council through
their Cycle Revolution programme are offering free training.
They do some ladies only courses and I think that’s really positive in overcoming those
perceived barriers.
And then finally it was just asking at work, ‘I’d like to cycle in’ – that’s
my office at the bottom there – ‘is there a shower?
Where can I put my bike?’, so it’s a ground work UK office, they’ve ensured that those
facilities are there to allow me to cycle in, be more sustainable and all of those barriers
are broken down.
I think it’s also important to realise the power of social norms, how people generally
want to behave and do what everybody else is doing.
There is often an element of competitiveness as well and I know there was a study done
in America looking at hotel towel reuse which you might be aware of.
It was really interesting, just the difference in subtle messaging that’s used on the little
things that you get in your hotel room which really increased the levels of towel reuse.
They compared three different information notices; one of them said ‘we’d like you
to reuse your towel for the good of the planet’ and there was a certain increase in reuse
of towels.
The other one said ‘we’d like you to do it and so many people in this hotel are already
doing it and reusing their towels for two or three days’ – had a bit of an increase.
And then their final notice said ‘so many people in this room reuse their towels’
and there’s really quite a big increase in the number of people who actually reuse
their towels.
So I think it’s a really simple but powerful message around how we communicate sustainable
behaviour.
Just a few others to finish on really.
I think focusing on motivations, we talked about extrinsic factors, things like monetary
incentives and rewards and I think they are important but actually for longer term behaviour
change it’s often critical to appeal to people’s values, what they hold important
to themselves to make sure that that behaviour change is long term.
And it’s important to think about how you frame messages.
Climate Outreach which are an organisation who do an awful lot on communicating, they
have got all sorts of resources on their website and it’s very subtle differences in language
to talk to different community groups from Faith groups to climate change deniers, and
it’s really thinking about what values will be important to them.
Just words that will really resonate with different community groups, so I’d recommend
having a look on their website and there is a strong link between intrinsic values and
sustainable behaviour.
And then the fifth one, the fifth and final, is really to look at leveraging the natural
human instinct to play, to compete, and we’ve touched on that already with things like quizzes
and competitions to earn rewards to test ourselves and to take care of loved ones.
They’re all intrinsic behaviours and just to finish, I’d just like to quickly go through
a case study of the Operational TLC campaign.
So this was a behaviour change programme that was developed by GAP – which is Global Action
Partnership – and Bart’s Health NHS and they developed a big campaign.
It was called Operation TLC which in itself I think is a great name, it’s sort of nurturing
and I think particularly relevant for the NHS.
TLC actually stands for Turning equipment off, Lights out and Controlling temperatures,
so it’s all around energy efficiency and cost saving.
But the messaging was done very much around the patient experience.
So obviously for those working in the NHS this is a big reason why they choose that
profession, they want to care for people and so this is appealing to their intrinsic values.
All of the messaging was around the patient experience, so it was ‘let’s help our
patients to get more sleep by turning the lights out’, ‘let’s make the temperature
more comfortable by turning the heating down a bit’, ‘let’s shut doors’, obviously
stopping draughts and reducing energy because it’s going to decrease disturbances for
our patients.
There was no green messaging at all around the campaign.
So as I say, it’s been delivered in various different Trusts – you can see them there
– and there are some estimates that if it was implemented across all NHS Trusts, it
could see huge savings.
But just to finish really on some of the achievements that they’ve had there, so the reports from
patients were that there’s been about a quarter less intrusions on their privacy,
a third less disruptions to sleep and as we all know, sleep is really important when you
are recovering in hospital, there’s about 40% less requests from patients to turn the
heating down or change the temperature in their room.
So hopefully the results are there in terms of a better patient experience.
Almost as an aside really, they’ve saved 2,000 tonnes per year of carbon, over £425,000
in costs, which they do communicate and they do celebrate so that people can see the impact
of their behaviour change and as I say, the potential is there if this is rolled out to
save a lot more money and a lot more carbon.
So I really like that case study as one where we don’t actually even need to mention the
‘green’ impact sometimes of the things that we’re trying to achieve.
So I hope that was interesting.
If anybody wants any more information, contact me and I’ll be more than happy to help.
Thank you.