Tag: action

The Cause Marketing Approach to Life: Anya Liddiard

Posted on by SGA SGA

Meet Anya Liddiard, our primary Marketing Manager on LA Stormwater, whose life trajectory followed the question: What can I contribute to make the world a little better? A native Russian who holds advanced degrees in Economics and Mass Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University, Anya later relocated to the West Coast, even though she initially didn’t like the weather in California. Today, you can find her enjoying California’s splendors with her family and upcycling abandoned furniture. “I’m that person that drives and picks up interesting items off the street to repurpose them. It is my way to consume less,” Anya says.

Her passion for sustainability and cause marketing has been successfully harnessed while working at her previous marketing and advertising jobs with NBC and E! Networks, Tesla, and Hyundai. Today, she brings her experience and her belief that doing good is good business to SGA.

Here’s what she has learned along the way:
I come from the fast world of traditional advertising and I have always been driven to find that component to do good in this world. Throughout my journey I have developed a certain approach to my life and my work.

Go Beyond Consumerism: Encourage people to buy more than the product and get behind a positive cause. While working at Hyundai, I was challenged to ask deeper questions. How can someone benefit from this company rather than just motivating people to buy our product?

Go Beyond Promotion: Promote positive behavior change. Find ways to challenge yourself and change people’s behavior for the benefit of all. Search for patterns and opportunities to solve brands’ business problems by adding value to the world, even if it’s as small as motivating people at work to use one paper towel at a time.

Go Beyond Messaging: Make people think differently. Find ways to help brands and consumers prove who they are through the actions they take. This could mean creating meaningful partnerships, acting on a cause, creating inspiring ideas of social change or simply giving reusable water bottles for people’s birthdays (been there, done that!).

Above all, the most important approach to my life lies in my daughter. I began Russian in the Park in Long Beach to immerse my daughter in her culture while getting families together to celebrate Russian culture.  As a mother, I am lovingly driven by the needs of my daughter and hope to keep her interested in her culture and language.

The 3 I’s of a Successful Facebook Page

Posted on by SGA SGA

Facebook is the platform that gives your organization a voice and an identity in a community of more than a billion active users. Whether you’re a local agency striving to make positive behavior change with residents or a for-profit marketer selling an idea, Facebook provides a concrete space to communicate with your target audience.

SGA helps a large number of local agencies operate Facebook pages and we’ve found a few key trends that have proven successful. We call them the 3-I’s:

  1. Identity. Facebook is hugely visual and this visibility enables you to transform your mission into a brand perception. SGA has successfully integrated the Facebook page of the City of Los Angeles Stormwater Program to support and promote their community events, website, and eNewsletter efforts. By forming a steady image online, your organization forms a stronger presence offline and a community around your brand.
  2. Interaction. Facebook provides an arena for your organization to be a part of a meaningful conversation in a targeted way. You can communicate your organization’s perspective and share your values on trending issues that matter most. Communication can also be narrowly targeted and tailored to provide an authentic voice for your audience.  For example, SGA’s work on the San Bernardino County Stormwater Facebook page interacted with fans at the local level and found that audiences reacted best when content was localized to their specific city or community.
  3. Insight. Facebook is a multi-tool that enhances communication by giving you insight into your fans and their interests. Facebook makes its money by selling ads, therefore, they need to empower the ad buyer. That means giving you data on your target audience. An effectively built Facebook campaign will incorporate data that is every bit as analytical as a countywide survey but at virtually no cost. Every Facebook post becomes a survey question with real-time analysis that can inform the next campaign. Using Facebook Insights gives you an opportunity to further enhance your reach and cultivate a loyal fan base.

The ultimate goal of any strong Facebook profile is to form a tangible identity which your audience can resonate with, interact with, and, ultimately, support. Facebook is not just another tactic in your arsenal. Rather, Facebook provides a platform where you can brand yourself and your vision as an organization to a diverse target audience at a low cost and an abundance of data.

The Poop on Poop

Posted on by SGA SGA

Dog waste isn’t a topic most people talk about on a daily basis, but this “business” should be discussed. Pet owners who don’t have their dog’s droppings top of mind likely aren’t aware of how harmful it is to our environment when the poop isn’t scooped.

So, I’m out to start and share the conversation. You see, it’s been pretty commonplace in my family. My mother-in-law is English. Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, she embodies many English ways of thinking, including a love for dogs I believe can only be topped by Queen Elizabeth’s love for her corgis.

When you’ve got a dog lover like this for a relative, you hear everything about dogs: what goes in and what comes out. Over the years, I’ve heard more than I ever intended to hear about dog waste. I didn’t think it was a topic to share beyond the family. Who speaks of poop in polite company?

Well, when I joined SGA, I discovered that everyone in the office talks about dog waste because we know the problems it causes. And now, I want to get you talking about it with your family and other pet-loving friends, too.

Dog waste isn’t fertilizer. It doesn’t help the environment; it hurts it. Dog poop contains unhealthy bacteria. In fact, the EPA estimates that if there was a spot with just two or three days of dog waste from 100 dogs, that would equate to enough bacteria to close all watersheds within 20 miles of such a location. That’s because dog waste that is not picked up washes into these waterways. That bacteria? It can lead to a variety of harmful viruses that can cause intestinal illnesses and kidney disorders in humans. In the book, “The Truth About Dogs,” author Stephan Budiansky states that there are 65 diseases that can be transmitted to humans from dog feces. Some will give you skin rashes, but others can be more harmful and may turn deadly.

So get the conversation going. Let others know the poop on poop. Picking up after your pooch isn’t simply the right thing to do, scooping the poop and disposing it in the trash or toilet keeps it from washing into waterways. This, in turn, keeps our rivers and ocean cleaner for all of us.

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Education Led to Passion to Motivate Others: Whitney Schmucker

Posted on by SGA SGA

(This biographical piece is part of our series to introduce you to the SGA staff.)

After graduating from UC Berkeley, where I studied Marketing, I jumped into my dream job at Grey Advertising in San Francisco. I spent five years planning advertising campaigns for companies like: Adobe, Sandisk, BMW, and University of Phoenix.

After five years, I realized the work I was doing was just one small piece of the puzzle and I found it a constant source of frustration that I was not able to improve the parts of strategy that I felt were weaknesses. I wanted to be in a position to craft the strategy and problem solve to make a product successful, which would require me to expand my occupation from advertising to marketing.

I knew making this career change would be much easier with more education. So sitting in my office with a view of the Bay Bridge, I applied to business school in Paris, France, where I could not only further my education, but do so in an environment where people live consciously and savor the things (and products) around them.

Like most things in my life, I moved quickly. Six months later I was on a transcontinental plane with a very large suitcase (ok, possibly three).

Around the same time I launched into this adventure, I began to experience some serious health issues that forced me to become aware of the quality of our food sources, environmental chemicals, and other man-made byproducts that harm health and the environment. Having been a lifelong athlete, I had always prided myself on my health, knowledge of diet and self care practices, but what I was learning about the effects of man-made pollutants and their effects on health was truly eye opening.  The most shocking part was the lack of awareness and education that the general population had about what I now view as life-threatening concerns. For example, the amount of chemicals in our food, personal care products, and in our general environment is something the majority of Americans are completely unaware of.

I continued my environmental growth and education when I moved back to America and began to work in the marketing departments of various Fortune 500 companies, fine-tuning my skills, creating marketing strategies and observing consumer behavior.  Happy with my success but unsatisfied with its short lived rewards, my passion for creating true impact became apparent.

It’s one thing to convince someone to make a purchase: buy a t-shirt or computer software. It’s another thing to introduce information to people that inspires them to make a behavior change.

To me, this is the pinnacle of marketing: not selling goods but changing minds.

I made my way to SGA, where I combine my knowledge in environmental issues and social marketing to change minds and change behavior. Now, I strategize ways to eliminate barriers to zero waste, influence recycling behaviors and empower communities to improve water quality. The rewards are not short lived and the impact will incrementally contribute to a better world.

Tips Before Taking Out Your Greenway Lawn

Posted on by SGA SGA

California residents know that having an environmentally friendly lawn is important during this ongoing drought. However, before you dig up the lawn and make changes, have a plan in place. I did, but I also learned a few lessons along way. Here, I offer some insight that might save you from headaches.

Knowing I could do more to save water beyond our low-flow showerheads and low-water toilets, the L-shaped greenway lawn bordering the street was fair game for saving on weekly waterings.

Deciding to go lawn-less, I had two goals:

1) Save water.

2) Save money by having lower water bills and by reducing gardening expense by selecting every-other-week maintenance for my remaining landscaping.

Before deciding how to go about the task, I did a fair amount of internet research. I looked around my neighborhood, snapped photos and figured out what I wanted to do. I spoke with my gardener and a landscaper, and I checked with the city to learn about suggestions and rebates.

The easiest (though not cheapest) route was to remove the grass and plants completely. (Your city may require a percentage of planting in order to qualify your project for rebates). Just four bubbler sprinklers now support two, native, drought-tolerant trees in wood-chip planter areas. The remaining greenway contains decomposed granite with intermittent three-piece pathways of bouquet canyon stone.

The good news: I am saving water and money (though it will take a while to recoup my investment).

Not-so-good news: I need to tuck away some money to improve my design because it didn’t work out exactly as I envisioned it.

What you can learn from my mistakes:

1)    Think about the daily foot traffic along your greenway. If you have a lot of pedestrians, consider how they might impact your landscaping choices. In my case, once the rains began, the decomposed granite proved to be an irresistible target for footprints and gouges. In all fairness, passengers exiting cars along the no-longer-greenway had no choice but to step onto the wet surface. In retrospect, it’s not the ideal surface to use in this much-traveled space.

2)    Consider how a zero-plant greenway will affect your home’s curb appeal. I have abundant plants surrounding my home; nonetheless my initial reaction to losing the border greenery was “uh oh.” Incorporating even a few drought-tolerant plants along the greenway would introduce some height variation to the border; I’ll plan to purchase a few when the budget allows.

All said, once my new trees mature and I’m able to install enough stone and a few plants to eliminate the foot traffic and curb appeal issues, I’ll feel good about having made changes that are water-wise, functional, and attractive.

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4 Simple Ideas to Improve Outreach

Posted on by SGA SGA

It’s difficult to imagine a time before randomized trials and data. But as an article in the December 12 issue of the Economist points out, before the 20th century, “The sick were wise to stay away from doctors. Medical treatments were often worthless and sometimes dangerous.”
Then in the 1920s, English statistician Ronald Fisher used randomized controlled experiments to test the effectiveness of fertilizer on farms, and quality and production escalated. The medical field soon picked up the method. More than any single discovery, controlled experimentation contributed to the 20th century’s miraculous increase in lifespan.

In the realm of public policy and outreach, this technique can be tricky. Changing behavior is often hard to observe and quantify. What’s more, local government programs don’t have the budgets for lengthy experimentation and controls.

But things are changing. Online media provides the ability to conduct small and inexpensive controlled experiments that allow us to determine if people are taking the initial steps towards behavior change. For example, we can test degree of awareness, intent to change, influence of social norms and more.

In 2015, SGA began testing out how online experiments can help build better, more reliable outreach programs. Here are four simple, but important, lessons we’ve learned:

  1. Reach beyond likes and unique visitors. The biggest problem using social media likes and website visits as a proxy for success is that you don’t know why people took the action. They could have been searching for your content and found it engaging. Or they might have randomly clicked on your website during a Google search and quickly jumped off, never to return again. You just don’t know. While building a strong foundation of fans is important, it’s just the beginning. To build a community, you need to test how engaged your fans are through controlled messaging experiments.
  1. Embrace A/B testing. If you really want to understand the value of your likes, you need to see if they are repeatable.  The key is to run two sets of posts—an A version and a B version. (You can also run multi-variant tests if you want to move more aggressively.) Then see how each performs with your community over time. You can set these up on social media, websites and e-newsletters. For e-newsletters, send the two variations to a random subset of your subscriber list a few days before you intend to send out the newsletter. Then send the one that does best to the rest of your list.
  1. Turn data into insights. Once you have some data to work with, you can look at the demographics of the people who engaged with your content as well as the content that got the best response. Facebook and Twitter insights and Google Analytics can tell you loads about your followers. Understanding the type of content that resonates with them will help you understand how to inspire them with behavior change messaging. This data allows you to paint a more robust picture of your audience, which you can incorporate into outreach both offline and online.
  1. Create a call to action. Find the route to engagement by asking your fans to do something. When determining your call to action, be sure it is something you can measure and start small. Ask fans to opt in to receive emails or post their own content showing actions they have taken. One of our projects for the Orange County Stormwater Program asked people to post photos of how they were saving water in their yards. By having residents show their actions, it verifies the behaviors taken and starts to build a social norm for the action—and engagement in general.

In 2016, we will see more and more emphasis on data as online marketing’s balance of art and science continues to demand more of the science. Business and commercial marketing has already shown this. With simple experiments, you can better understand your audience, their motivations and whether they’re buying your program’s message or merely window shopping.

A Surprising Obstacle to Recycling Paint

Posted on by SGA SGA

The questions were simple:

  • Do you know you can recycle paint?
  • Do you do it?
  • Why or why not?

But when we asked Leo, a middle-aged man who had just finished painting his house, the answers were more complicated.

Leo had heard he could recycle paint. He wasn’t doing it, though, because he had also heard that he would need to show identification and pay a fee — two things in short supply. So he stacked all the paint in his garage and stopped thinking about it.

Recently our friends at PaintCare, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing paint recycling, asked us to conduct a survey to figure out what Latinos thought about properly disposing of their unused paint. We sent a team of surveyors out to Latino communities in Santa Ana, Los Angeles, Riverside, Ontario, Chino, Riverside, San Francisco, San Jose and Westminster in California as well as Denver and Thornton in Colorado.

What we found surprised us. A whopping 77% of Latinos surveyed kept their leftover paint in storage. An even larger 79% were unaware of the many locations that accept unused paint. (Check out PaintCare’s location finder and see for yourself.) And nearly every person surveyed was just like Leo. They believed that an ID and fee would be required to recycle paint. For the record, dropping off unused paint at one of the PaintCare locations is both free and anonymous.

Armed with data on the attitudes and beliefs of the Latino community, we’re ready for action. Our next step? To create a pilot program to educate and inspire Latinos to get that paint out of their garages. Stay tuned…

Naming our Data: Bringing Data to Life through Characterization

Posted on by SGA SGA

It often began with the question, “Have you heard about IPM?”

You yourself may be wondering, What is IPM?

For the past year, we worked under a CalRecycle grant to promote Integrated Pest Management (IPM) to the City of Thousand Oaks and the neighboring cities of Camarillo and Moorpark. We got to work and surveyed a number of local residents to gauge their understanding of IPM, where they struggle in the IPM process, and to assess their willingness to try IPM practices.

***

A few months ago, we mentioned that data on its own doesn’t mean a whole lot. Often times, due to an overwhelming amount of data collected, not much is done with that data. We decided to take the extra step with our findings, and identified how our data might prove useful for the City of Thousand Oaks in improving its strategy.

Meet Diane, Wendy, Frank, and Oscar:

Don’t be fooled, these aren’t actually real people—they’re personas. Using our data, we constructed these personas to help us create an effective outreach strategy for Thousand Oaks.

Just as we did in the case of Downtown Long Beach, we segmented our collective of data and transformed our findings into an actionable strategy for IPM outreach. By transforming data into character profiles, we were able to see how it applied to different segments of the community’s population.

With Diane, Wendy, Frank, and Oscar as our guides, SGA and the City of Thousand Oaks were able to create strategies and decisions based upon which persona our audience was most comparable to:

For the Wendy Willings, we focused on simply asking them to try IPM.

For the Diane Do-Gooders, we created a way for them to share their positive experiences. We gave these Dianes the opportunity to be champions of IPM amongst their neighbors.

For the Franks On-the-Fence, we recruited the Wendy Willings and the Diane Do-Gooders to influence Frank to give IPM a try.

For the Oscar the Outsourcers, we made them aware that toxic pesticides can cause serious harm to the community’s water resources and health, and encouraged them to pursue less toxic pest control services.

Thanks to these characters, we were able to use our data to simplify our target community in a simple, concrete, and memorable way.

The Secret Weapon to Motivating Change

Posted on by Stephen Groner

In a sunny Southern California subdivision just outside of San Diego in 2003, a bunch of graduate students slipped into a quiet neighborhood and started reading electric meters. They were looking for an almost invisible force that was getting people to use less energy in their homes. And while they had a hypothesis, they needed hard facts, and what they were finding was surprising.

Like many of us who work with behavior change, the graduate students knew that figuring out how to get people to change is hard. It’s even harder when it comes to environmental issues. Why? Because the people who most need to change (i.e., non-environmentalists) are the ones least interested in making sacrifices for the planet.

In my previous blog Not All Motivators are Created Equal, I discussed the reasons environmental issues like climate change, water pollution and water conservation are such tough sells. Here, I’ll talk about a secret weapon to make those hard sells a bit easier.

Back to the graduate students lurking around people’s homes. The experiment actually began weeks earlier, when the grad students showed residents four versions of a brochure, each with a different motivation for saving energy and asked which one would motivate them most to use less electricity:

  1. Energy conservation helps protect the environment
  2. Saving energy saves you money
  3. Energy conservation is the socially responsible thing to do
  4. Your neighbors are already conserving energy

The most motivating message turned out to be protecting the environment, followed social responsibility, money and the neighbors. Great news, right?

Not so fast. The grad students then randomly placed door hangers with one of the four motivational messages at houses in a different part of the community. Every week for the next month, they returned to read the electric meters at each house to see how the door hanger may have influenced each resident’s energy consumption.

When the researchers tabulated the results, something strange happened. The results were almost exactly the opposite of what the residents had said in the first part of the experiment. Environmental protection and social responsibility had the least impact on energy use, and cost savings did only slightly better. The message about what their neighbors were doing (i.e., the social norm) had by far the best results. In fact, the households that had received the social norm message showed nearly a 10 percent reduction in energy use over the other three. Even more impressively, these savings continued after a month.

So what’s the moral of the story? First, we aren’t so great at predicting what actually influences our behavior. This is important to remember when conducting focus groups or market research. Second, while we like to think of ourselves as high minded and independent (especially in a culture where free-spiritedness is celebrated), much of what we actually do is influenced by the actions of those around us.

When putting together a program to motivate people about environmental issues, it is best to highlight the positive actions other people are already taking. Create materials that provide social proof or show an overall social norm. For most of us, real change isn’t about big ideas. It’s about the simple actions we are all taking. And as individuals, we don’t normally stray too far from the herd.

SGA Wins 2015 CASQA Award

Posted on by SGA SGA

Who would have thought that a garden gnome could have such a large impact in Orange County?

Meet Gnorman:

Most people would look at Gnorman and see just another gnome, but SGA saw more than that! We saw the face of Orange County’s Overwatering is Out campaign – a campaign recently honored by the California Stormwater Quality Association (CASQA) with the Outstanding Regional Stormwater News, Information, Outreach, and Media Award.

We sent out an army of Gnormans across 34 cities, reaching 3.1 million residents. The primary audience for the campaign is homeowners, but the program effectively engages residents of all types.

This stormwater public education campaign successfully uses data to facilitate engagement across a spectrum of individuals. The challenge, which also ended up giving flexibility to our campaign, was tailoring our approach to a particular individual. We know that behavior change takes a while and that everyone is at a different stage of the behavior spectrum.

On one end of the behavior spectrum we have those individuals who are just learning about small behavior changes they can make. On the other side of the spectrum we have individuals who are already practicing the behavior change – these are our champions! It was very important for us to identify our champions, as they are the ones who are practicing the behavior change, informing others about it, and ultimately creating the new Gnormal! We wanted to give individuals a challenge that they could meet and one that they were ready to tackle so that they would remain engaged with the campaign.

The success of the campaign came from tailoring our communication strategy to the individual depending on where they are on the behavior spectrum. Acknowledging that people are only going to be engaged to the extent that they are able to connect to what we are talking about, allowed us to ultimately reach and engage a broader audience!

For more information on the campaign and our dear friend Gnorman, make your way over to overwateringisout.org. Join the movement and Go Gnome Yourself!!