Driving behaviour change with awareness days

Are you using Awareness Days to engage your audience with environmental issues?

Here are some tips to go beyond awareness and drive behaviour change.

1. Focus on people taking ACTION not just the problem for 2 reasons:

a) NEGATIVE DESCRIPTIVE NORMS – Talking about the scale of the problem can leave people thinking that no one else is acting and everyone else is doing the negative behaviour.

b) PLURALISTIC IGNORANCE demonstrates that people think others don’t care like they do, so they don’t talk about social and environmental issues. But as soon as they know others care- they talk and act.

This is where AWARENESS DAYS can help to change the narrative and the social norms by highlighting those who are acting

2. Ask people to make PUBLIC COMMITMENTS that they have accountability around.

This is because people like to live up to their public persona and image. Having someone, like a buddy or colleague, to check in on them is even better

4. Encourage TRIALS of behaviours

These give people a chance to give something a go, without feeling like it is forever and to see if their initial concerns and perceived barriers are still an issue

5. Avoid CHOICE OVERLOAD by providing too many actions to do

It’s easy to want to suggest lots of actions, but this overwhelms the brain and leads to inaction as the brain hates making decisions and will worry it has made the wrong choice.