The Behaviour Change Collaborative will co-host Change 2024, in partnership with Social Marketing@Griffith.
Change is Australia’s premier social and behaviour change conference featuring a diverse range of speakers and participants from the health, social and environmental sectors.
It comprises two-days of ted-talk style presentations and workshops (included in the registration fee) at which attendees learn practical strategies and techniques to influence attitudes and behaviours that can be applied to real world challenges.
The BCC has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Social Marketing@Griffith.
“The decision to co-host Change 2024 marks a major step forward in our commitment to working collaboratively with the team at SM@G,” said The BCC’s Founder and Managing Director, Luke van der Beeke.
“We are aligned on values and a shared commitment to creating a space where people tackling some of the world’s most wicked problems can share their ideas, successes and failures,” he said.
Prof. Sharyn Rundle-Thiele, Director at SM@G added: “We are delighted to welcome The Behaviour Change Collaborative as co-hosts of Change 2024. We look forward to uniting our efforts and making Change 2024 the most impactful year yet.”
We hope to see you on 17-18 October 2024 in Brisbane or online and take advantage of this opportunity to be part of a growing community of change agents drawn from Australia and beyond.
Program overview:
Session 1: Navigating Impact, Metrics and Meaningful Change
Session 2: People for the People, Empowering Communities for Change
Session 3: Conservation Catalysts, Innovation for the Planet
Panel: Empathy and Inclusivity
Session 4: End Food Waste, Recipe for Success
Workshops:
Unpacking Behavioural Influence for Intervention Design
Crafting a Strategic Impact Narrative
Pocket Filmmaking 101: Unleashing Your Creativity with Mobile Phone Video Production
Beyond the Individual: Leveraging Behavioural Ecological Systems for Change
Rediscovering the Secret Sauce of Your Programme: 12 Principles of Successful Behaviour Change
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
New Year’s resolutions are a time-honored tradition, a chance to set goals and make changes. However, many of us struggle to stick to these resolutions. The key to success lies in understanding our habits and leveraging them to our advantage. Let’s delve into the world of behavioural science to understand how we can use habits to help achieve our New Year’s resolutions.
Understanding habits
Habits are automatic responses to specific cues in our environment. They consist of three parts: the cue, the routine, and the reward. This is known as the Habit Loop. The cue triggers the routine, and the reward reinforces the habit.
To form a new habit, we need to establish a clear cue, a routine, and a reward. For example, if your resolution is to exercise more, your cue could be putting on your workout clothes, your routine could be a 30-minute workout, and your reward could be a healthy post-workout snack.
Changing an existing habit involves identifying the cue and reward and changing the routine. For instance, if you have a habit of eating junk food when you’re stressed (cue), you could change the routine to taking a walk or meditating, while still satisfying the reward of stress relief.
Behavioural science teaches us that we’re more likely to stick to habits that are easy, attractive, immediate, and satisfying. This is known as the Four Laws of Behaviour Change. Make your new habit easy by starting small, make it attractive by linking it to something you enjoy, make the reward immediate, and ensure it’s satisfying.
Figure 1: Habit loop
A checklist for achieving your New Year’s Resolutions
Here’s a simple checklist for you to use to help achieve your goals.
Identify Your Resolution: Be clear about what you want to achieve.
Understand the Habit Loop: Identify the cue, routine, and reward.
Form a New Habit: Establish a clear cue, routine, and reward.
Change an Existing Habit: Identify the cue and reward and change the routine.
Apply the Four Laws of Behaviour Change: Make your habit easy, attractive, immediate, and satisfying.
Cues
Cues are triggers that initiate a habit. They can come in various forms and are often linked to our environment or our daily routines. Examples include:
Time: A specific time of day can serve as a cue. For example, brushing your teeth first thing in the morning or right before bed.
Location: A particular place can trigger a habit. For instance, sitting at your desk might cue you to check your emails.
Preceding Event: One action can lead to another. If you always have a cup of coffee after breakfast, the act of finishing breakfast is the cue for the coffee habit.
Emotional State: Feelings can also serve as cues. For example, stress might cue you to bite your nails or snack on junk food.
Other People: The presence of certain people can trigger habits. For instance, meeting a particular friend might cue you to gossip.
Routine
A routine is the behavior that you perform, usually automatically and in response to the cue. It’s the actual ‘habit’ that you’re trying to establish or change. For example, if your habit is to go for a run every morning, the routine is the act of running.
Reward
This is the positive reinforcement that follows the routine. It’s what your brain associates with the pleasure or benefit of completing the routine, which strengthens the habit loop. The reward could be anything that you find enjoyable or satisfying. In the running example, the reward might be the feeling of accomplishment after a good run, the endorphin rush, or even a healthy post-run snack.
By manipulating the routine and reward you can change or form new habits. For instance, if you want to establish a habit of studying every evening, you could set a routine (studying for an hour after dinner) and a reward (a small treat or relaxation time afterwards). Over time, your brain will start to associate the cue (finishing dinner) with the reward, making the routine easier to stick to.
Making new habits ‘stick’
Making a habit stick involves a combination of understanding the habit loop and applying the principles of behavioural science. Here are some strategies:
Consistency: The more consistently you perform your habit, the more ingrained it becomes. Try to perform your new habit at the same time and place every day to reinforce the cue and make the habit automatic.
Start Small: Begin with a habit that’s so easy you can’t say no to it. Once the habit is established, you can gradually increase the complexity or duration.
Immediate Rewards: Immediate rewards are more effective than delayed rewards. Find a way to make your habit immediately satisfying to help reinforce the behavior.
Accountability: Share your goal with others or find a habit buddy. Accountability can provide an extra layer of motivation to stick to your habit.
Patience: Remember, habits take time to form. Don’t be discouraged by setbacks. Persistence is key.
Positive Reinforcement: Celebrate your successes, no matter how small. Positive reinforcement can help motivate you to keep going.
The goal is to make the habit a part of your identity. You’re not just trying to exercise regularly; you’re becoming a person who values health and fitness. This shift in mindset can make your habits stick. Start small, be consistent, and soon, you’ll find yourself making progress towards your New Year’s resolutions. Good luck!
The Behaviour Change Collaborative (The BCC) and VicHealth have joined forces on a major research project to explore teen vaping across Australia.
The project builds on The BCC’s Healthway funded Being Gen Vape research which provided insights into existing vaping attitudes, motivations and behaviours, and a preliminary model for the segmentation of teen vaping behaviour.
The value of quantification is not solely in establishing vaping prevalence but in the ability to profile each segment by motivation (need) and attitudes, behavioural patterns, and trajectory to addiction. This will help to identify whether targeted interventions should be prevention based or cessation based, and for whom.
“We’re pleased to be partnering with VicHealth on such an important public health issue,” said The BCC’s founder and managing director, Luke van der Beeke.
The intent of the research is to provide outputs that help interested parties to set policy and intervention priorities, strategy directions, and intervention activities. We want to contribute to a coordinated, evidence-informed approach to addressing teen vaping. The findings of the research will be delivered in a user-friendly and fit-for-purpose format that can be shared widely across sectors.
“This piece of work is intended to augment existing research projects and activities. Our focus is on the delivery of behaviourally informed findings that can be picked up and used to inform future practice,” Mr van der Beeke said.
Our earlier research clearly indicates that mass reach single-theme messaging will have limited impact with respect to breadth and scale, because of the clear existence of different attitudinal and behavioural teen vaping segments.
This research will help to direct communications content, so that it focused on the right motivation and persuasive message and can be targeted at the right group.
“We’re looking forward to generating findings that can be picked up and used by governments, NGO’s, and other stakeholders to inform health communications campaigns, as well as multi-lever health promotion and social marketing strategies,” Mr van der Beeke said.
If you’re a high school teacher, or the parent of a child in high school and you would like to get involved with this research, please email hello@thebcc.org.au
An innovative greening project designed to reduce the urban heat island effect has positively influenced community attitudes toward urban greening in some of Perth’s most heat stressed suburbs.
The BCC’s Founder and Managing Director, Luke van der Beeke, said green space and canopy cover has declined in almost all major Australian cities over the past decade.
“Evidence has shown that this has resulted in urban heat islands, with daytime temperatures in affected areas being up to six degrees Celsius warmer than in surrounding areas.
“With lower socio-economic neighbourhoods most at risk, the costs are not just environmental. The urban heat island effect contributes to a range of socio-economic and public health issues that disproportionately impact low-income communities,” he said.
Mr van der Beeke said while revegetation to combat urban heat was the primary goal of the project, it also placed a significant emphasis on motivating and empowering people to take action in their own gardens, and on their front verges.
“First we looked to build awareness of urban heat and its impacts to motivate residents to act. Then, working with project partners, community members were offered skill building workshops so that those who wanted to make changes had the ability to do so.” Mr van der Beeke said.
Dr May Carter, Senior Research Associate at The BCC, said: “We engaged with the community and talked with them about what they would like to see in their local park and what improvements could be achieved through planting more vegetation.
“We looked at the benefits of increasing understory and plants that would attract wildlife, as well as nature play and discovery by young people.
“This helped to build interest and provided people with the knowledge and confidence needed to try things in their own homes,” Dr Carter said.
Mr van der Beeke added: “The parks were our catalyst for change, our focal point. Almost everything we did in the parks could be replicated in people’s gardens because we focused on households in the immediate surrounds. The soils and environs were much the same.”
At the conclusion of the two-year project, a comprehensive evaluation was undertaken evidencing a change in attitudes and behaviours towards urban greening.
Fifty-six per cent of people surveyed said they had been encouraged to plant trees and shrubs in their own garden, with a further 18 per cent saying that they would like to.
In local governments where verge planting was encouraged, almost one-third of respondents had planted trees or shrubs on their verge, as opposed to just 11 per cent where policy was more restrictive.
People who participated in Our Park Our Place were also encouraged to join an environment or community group. For example, in the City of Canning 15 per cent of respondents joined a local group after participating in the project, with a further 45 per cent indicating they were still considering joining one.
Following the conclusion of the project, participants were also more likely to agree that spending time outdoors was important, that green spaces contributed to their health and that they wanted to know more about their local environment.
Over 35,000 seedlings are 344 trees were planted by participating LGA’s and members of their local communities.
Video Credit: Greening Australia
Greening Australia’s Project Lead, Ruth Cripps, said: “These results are incredibly encouraging, because the whole aim of Our Park Our Place has been to inspire and equip residents in heat-affected suburbs with ways to cool their neighbourhoods and better connect with their local green spaces.
“As our climate changes, it is vital for the resilience of our communities that they feel better connected to each other and enabled to improve their environment. That has a profoundly positive effect on health and wellbeing. By encouraging people to plant more greenery and join local groups, the project has helped take these neighbourhoods a few steps further towards being cooler, greener, more climate-resilient places.”
Our Park Our Place was a Lotterywest funded project, managed by Greening Australia in partnership with The Behaviour Change Collaborative. Key partners included the City of Canning, City of Bayswater, Town of Bassendean, and Water Corporation.
Social marketing – the use of commercial marketing and communication techniques for social purposes – is a powerful tool for positively and voluntarily changing the behaviours of individuals and populations.
Social marketing is more than the use of just social media, or advertising, or any other single tool; it is the strategic choice and use of a combination of techniques, products and technologies to achieve voluntary behaviour change for social good.
Social marketing in New Zealand has a varied recent history. It has come in and out of fashion with different administrations, and the public sector’s institutional understanding of the evidence base and key tenets of good practice has waxed and waned. Achieving social behaviour change is complex and there are many traps for inexperienced or careless players: underinvestment, over-communication, and short-termism to name just a few.
But through this history New Zealand is blessed with a number of experts – within the public sector and in its partners in the private, academic and non-government sectors – with practical experience and theoretical insights to contribute.
The pandemic and the long term social-impacts it will create provide fresh challenges for social marketing and behaviour change practitioners in the public sector. Many of the social problems that social marketing sets out to address will be more difficult to solve; more complex and more entrenched. But these challenging times also bring an opportunity to reflect on lessons of the past and change how we work; to modernise our practice and make it more progressive.
Three enduring features of good practice
The success of the Government’s COVID-19 communication and marketing programme, causing nearly the entire population to change working, social and recreational habits almost over night, is evidence of just how powerful this tool can be, and how capable the public sector is of wielding it effectively, alongside strong policy and regulatory initiatives.
The actions of the New Zealand Government in March set out almost a case book for how to approach behaviour change. That’s not to say they’ve got everything right – and time will no doubt be the critic’s friend, as hindsight reveals flaws like no other kind of vision ever can. But the scale of public behaviour change relating to COVID-19, and the rapidity of it, is unlike anything we’ve seen before.
In part, we can attribute this to the clear and obvious need to act, that was playing out on the global stage. But in mid-March the Government was walking a tightrope: if it had moved too soon, it would have moved ahead of public willingness to respond and comply. If it had moved too slowly it would have risked panic, confusion and losing the trust that was so crucial in bringing people along. So the COVID-19 programme is a great case study for the enduring features of behaviour change best practice.
First, it took a multi-layered and integrated approach to communications, ensuring they were unmissable for the target audience (in this case – and perhaps for the only time in history justifiably – all New Zealanders). Rather than relying on one mechanism (for example, television advertising), the campaign is visible through news media, social media, advertising on a very wide range of channels; through partnerships and use of collateral; through word of mouth and aligned spokespeople from every agency of Government (and beyond). And it was repetitive and enduring — with briefings to media and the public happening daily and all other forms of marketing and commentary sustained throughout the lockdown phase and beyond.
The second key tenet of best practice, where the COVID-19 campaign is so strong, is its clear focus on behaviour (and a single, “non-divisible” behaviour [1] at that). The Government didn’t ask people to “be virus-wise” or promote a bundle of behaviours (eg “protect our community”). Instead, the simple catch cry that headlined every communication from the start of the COVID-19 response was “stay home”. Although there was debate about what we might be allowed to do if we didn’t stay home (can I surf? Can I go mountain-biking?) these were marginal to what was a very swift response at a mass level, that was enabled by the absolute clarity of the message.
The third tenet of best practice (and perhaps the most important) is a focus on the audience, or citizens. The UK’s National Social Marketing Centre’s Benchmark Criteria make this clear, placing Customer Orientation as their first criterion. Successful behaviour change programmes understand and respond to what will motivate people; and what will stop them from behaving the way you need them to. We have seen with the COVID-19 communications a powerful balance held between the policy changes required by the science and economics of the pandemic; and the emotional and practical needs of the citizens who would be asked to implement those changes.
Not every programme over the years has had the success of the COVID-19 communications, in part because not all programmes have been designed in a way that is consistent with good practice; but other difficulties have also been in play. Less perceived urgency, less investment, less combined expertise in the creation of the programme and less strength in leadership have all been a feature of our practice’s history – and will likely be so in the future, for we are all human, and human behaviour change is particularly complex and difficult.
And if it was complex in the past, in the immediate, post-COVID future we will have new challenges, as communities are harder pressed than ever before. Even at its evidence-based best, old social marketing practice might not be enough to see us through. This is a moment to test the State’s involvement in social marketing, and to find new ways to operate to meet these challenges.
An invitation to change
As we imagine the post-COVID-19 future, some features stand out more than others as potentially challenging for public sector behaviour change practice; and open the door to some interesting new ways to work.
These features were not absent in the past, but our practice has generally been slow to respond to them. My hope is that now it will be clear we must tackle them; and that now we will be able to find previously unreachable ways to do so.
First we have an opportunity to really examine how social marketing practice contributes to or reduces inequalities. Despite generally setting out to reduce inequality, in some cases social marketing practice has had the opposite impact; either by increasing inequality; or increasing the stigma that is associated with inequality. To a degree, it is in the very nature of social marketing, which targets communities perceived as being most in need of change; but this is exacerbated in the way many programmes are initiated, conceived and conducted; by reinforcing dependency and deficits, and taking an expert-led, rather than community-led approach.
With the very real risk of deepening health, social and economic inequality as a result of COVID-19, we have the opportunity and the obligation to ask ourselves, how can our practice contribute to reducing inequality? What can we do differently to shift the balance of power? How can we shift our practice from paternalism to partnership?
Community-based practice and true co-design are not new concepts, and they are in place in some programmes and some areas. But these days they are the domain of the brave and the patient; they are like the slow food of policy and behaviour change practice; they demand a degree of flexibility and openness that isn’t always easy to achieve. But what an opportunity we have now to find the time and the space to deeply and genuinely engage with communities, and to ensure our approaches are designed in ways that enable those communities to participate in engagement.
A second area for reflection for behaviour change practice lies in our response to the deepening complexity of social problems. The problems themselves do not arise from a single source; so the solutions should not arise from a single source either. And so another opportunity we can seize now is to act on what UK think tank Demos has called the public sector’s “moral obligation” to collaborate.
Collaboration has been an unresolved question for social marketing and behaviour change practice for many years. It’s an area where intention and action have been slow to connect, as the time needed to collaborate generally works against the sometimes urgent (and perhaps artificial) deadlines for many behaviour change programmes. COVID-19 has shown us that collaboration can happen, even in genuinely urgent circumstances, and that determined leadership can make it happen. The benefits of that collaboration are obvious, and enduring.
The third challenge and opportunity that the pandemic and its aftermath invite us to consider is an external one. Like the others it is not new; and like the others, the current environment makes it more urgent to confront than ever – and more possible.
How does the rapidly changing media environment change our ways of reaching people with our behaviour change programmes? What does the loss of orthodoxy mean for our ability to communicate with many people, from a single source? What opportunities and risks arise from the voice that social media has conferred on people previously invisible in a heavily mainstreamed media and entertainment context?
If good communications is “simple clear messages, repeated often, by a variety of trusted sources [2]”, how can we take advantage of the new environment to identify, empower and motivate a greater variety of trusted sources? And let us be careful not to transfer our old over-reliance on “above the line” communications (advertising) into the new paradigm, but find ways to elevate real and diverse community voices through a rich portfolio of channels.
The benefits of these approaches will be manifold: In a future of greater collaboration we may see fewer social marketing programmes initiating from Government, and at the same time, more that address root causes of harm. In a future of greater citizen-centricity, we may see greater shared ownership of problems and solutions; in a future of more diverse communication channels we may see a wider range of voices sharing social good messaging in more intimate and trusted ways.
Marketing and communication are powerful tools government can use to generate real and positive change for New Zealand citizens. Right now – when so much has changed; and we are rethinking what our future might look like – we have the opportunity to embed good behaviour change practice more consistently, and create new approaches that put communities and citizens at the centre. It’s a bright future, if we are patient and brave.
[1] Doug McKenzie-Mohr, Community Based Social Marketing www.cbsm.com
This article was first published under the title “The State and Social Marketing: Can We Embrace Change” by the New Zealand Public Service Association as part of its Progressive Thinking series. You can read other articles in the series here.
[2] Dr Edward Maibach, in conversation.
Featured Image Credit: “Covid-19 handmade facemask” by Flickr User Olgierd
