Would you like your staff to go beyond awareness raising and inspire action in your public engagement campaigns?

The Sustainable Sidekicks were commissioned by an environmental charity to: 

  • Upskill their staff in behavioural science to apply the insights to their future work 
  • Ensure that people from across the organisation understood the approaches and methodologies that their campaigns team take

Upskilling the team through practical application 

As the charity is based around the country, we developed a three-part online interactive series where the team learned about behavioural science and applied it to waste challenges that they worked on all together and in teams. 

The three sessions included:  

  1. The barriers and motivators to change –  Collectively the team explored these through journey mapping the steps a ‘single mother persona’ faced when buying new toys online versus going to a toy library. 
  2. Developing an initiative – in groups the teams ideated on solutions to challenges after learning about successful mechanisms that are  EASY, ATTRACTIVE, SOCIAL and TIMELY – the EAST framework
  3. Communicating campaigns – the groups worked through the CAMPAIGNS THAT WORK wheel to make sure their campaign included the essential components

Tools and frameworks for the future

During the sessions, the team got to experience several tools and frameworks. At the end, they reflected on what they would be using in their future work: 

  • The ‘doorstepping’ team identified the benefit of reviewing their scripts with the insights to focus on more positive content and to use the hero’s journey approach to talk about neighbours and local people’s actions
  • For their school programme the EAST framework was considered to be a good sense-check to ensure materials were EASY, ATTRACTIVE, SOCIAL and TIMELY 
  • For the public campaigns team, The Campaigns that Work Wheel was identified as something they would use as a final checklist to ensure they had not included any of the ’watch-outs’ or ‘avoids’

Separating out awareness-raising and behaviour change 

A team member acknowledged that the organisation needs to do both awareness-raising and behaviour change but the two must be considered as separate campaigns with separate audiences.  

  1. Awareness raising is focused on their political lobbying campaigns targeting MPs and system change 
  2. Whilst the behavioural change approach is required for their public-engagement campaigns that require different messages and focus.  

Would you like to upskill your team so your campaigns can be more impactful and they have the tools and resources to deliver behaviour change? 

Get in contact to discuss how we can collaborate on delivering more change with your work