What motivates you to help the air?
When you think about air pollution, what gets your attention most? Is it the effects on your own health, the impact on the environment or what air pollution, and how you might be contributing to it, are costing you in dollars and cents?
Yup – air pollution is proving to be costly to our environment, our health and our pocketbooks.
Check out this air pollution website created by The School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong. This innovative calculator shows the various ‘costs’ air pollution has on individuals in that country and the cost of collective health.
But air pollution is a problem that impacts us all – 100 per cent of the time – no matter where we live or the state of our health. And in order to improve anything, we have to be willing to change. Starting with our own behaviour.
So we want to know – what makes you care most about the quality of the air we share? Is it a healthier body, bank account or community?
The question of personal motivators is one we think about a lot when we’re developing social marketing campaigns about the outdoor environment and its effects on health. Our goal of making people more aware of an issue, helping them understand it and see how it is relevant to them personally, is the precursor to motivating people to take action – to change their own behaviour.
Not unlike other social topics, people feel connected to issues in different ways – and these connections are what motivate them to do something.
When it comes to air quality, parents who have kids suffering from asthma are more likely to be motivated by health concerns. Others may be motivated by their passion for the earth and all its species. What about you? Maybe it’s only relevant when the day comes that you are asked not to drive to work because of high health risk from particulate matter in the air. Or the cost of gas is so high you realize it’s not worth it to idle your car unnecessarily. Will it be the financial considerations that are the kicker to making you care about the air?
Protecting our air for environmental and human health reasons is a continuous challenge. Behaviour change is a slow process. The more we know about what motivates people to think about air quality, the better able we are to shape these conversations about our most vital life sustaining resource – air — in a way that will get more people to sit up and listen.
Can you help? Leave a comment on what your top motivator is, and tell us what country or province/state you are from.
Your attention, please
As a conference presenter, I often speak on the important stages of behaviour-change communication. I’ve shared our approach on getting attention, increasing awareness, supporting engagement and encouraging action, to program and policy planners, health and environment scientists and other communication and outreach professionals in Canada and the US.
The message is basically this – too many social marketing programs start at the end and don’t include enough communication foreplay. And too many get way too detailed way too early.
My focus – especially to highly technical and scientific members of the audience – is a warning, really.
‘Don’t suffer from the curse of knowledge’ – a reference aptly used by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick.
The curse leads us to ask people to take action (share info, sign up for something or behave differently) when they haven’t also been given what they need to pay attention in the first place, and better yet, increase their understanding once they are interested.
Imagine a room full of delegates at the Congress of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. This was one of my speaking gigs earlier this year. They had been debating the future of our oceans and atmosphere. I make my entrance – the lone social science speaker who delivers a presentation on health social marketing with lots of simple visuals, compelling audio clips and illustrative examples. It’s my way of getting people’s attention so they are more interested in my story. I’m working to practice what I preach.
The intent is to compel others to reconsider how they share information – especially if they’re hoping laypeople will pay attention and perhaps someday do something different – like change their behaviour – in a way that protects our air, oceans, land and water.
Behaviour change communication is an approach that starts with the assumption that you have to gain people’s attention before you can ask them to learn or do something in support of a personal or universal benefit.
And it is one that’s entrenched in almost every communication program or initiative our firm leads. We’ve developed a webinar, which you can view above, that speaks to the important elements of behaviour change communication and uses recent examples from some of our social marketing work to illustrate the process.
Tell us about the strategies you’ve employed focusing on the stages of behaviour change communication – especially on that most important step — getting attention.