Doug Invented CBSM

I highly recommend Doug’s workshops. As the guy who created CBSM, he is the foremost authority on it, and as a behavioural scientist, he can explain the concepts and why they work better than anyone else.

Milk Thistle Photo by J. Leekie

I am having a great time meeting a large group of people from all across the province who have gathered in Vancouver for the 2012 Invasive Species Council of British Columbia (ISCBC) Conference.

It was exciting to be one of two keynote speakers yesterday. I spoke on how Community-based Social Marketing can be used to curb the spread of invasive species. I will be working with ISCBC and 13 regional committees across the province on an exciting and innovative behaviour change program they are developing for a rollout this spring and summer. More details later.

In the meantime, if you want to read what I had to say yesterday, here is the presentation in pdf form. I am told that the ISCBC will have all of the presentations from the conference on their website later. There have been excellent presentations, I am learning a lot! Subscribe for updates to this blog to receive a notice of when they have been posted.

Community-Based Social Marketing 2.0 - Beyond Theory to Implementation

All you need for the webinar is access to a computer with sound, and a microphone if you want to speak. You can also call into a conference call number if you prefer.

Webinars will soon be announced that will be more time-friendly for people living in the western part of Canada, and in the UK.

Any questions, email me at ken@beyondattitude.com.

Thanks to NVCA for sharing their report.

Lura Consulting has conducted CBSM research on this topic in 4 areas over the last 3 years, for different clients. I previously posted the report for Rondeau Bay, which looked at near-shore nutrient reduction amongst residents, and you can download it by visiting this blog post. I am posting the Innisfil Creek report here, so people can download it as well. The Innisfil Creek project addressed agricultural sources, and gathered information from a focus group of phosphorous experts. Thanks to our client, the Nottawasaga Conservation Authority, for giving us permission to publish the report here so it could be shared with others.

I will seek permission from our other clients to share the two other reports that I have. The other two projects are related to these two, and both address residential issues and behaviours. Once they are available, I will post a note to cbsm.com. But I also suggest you subscribe for notifications on my blog so that you will be sure to know when I post them.

Any questions or thoughts, leave a comment below or send me an email.

Today I am happy to say that we have a guest blogger, author Chris Benjamin. Chris has just launched his new book, Eco-Innovators: Sustainability in Atlantic Canada, which tells the story of 35 people making a contribution to a more sustainable community.

Author/Journalist Chris Benjamin

At my most cynical I think “community-based” anything is a crock. Like the term “green” it’s been stretched beyond value or meaning.

We’ve got a community for everything: racial communities, religious communities; taxpayer communities; (oxymoronic) Diaspora communities; and (at times simply moronic) online communities. But those things are only bunches of people with things in common.

Real community is more united, as in they act as units, they work and play together – live and sometimes die together.

Like the Finnish beavers in Toronto. They’re an informal community within the already specific Finnish-Canadian church there. They’re a group of old handy guys who meet weekly to maintain and repair the church, their spiritual home. They also do occasional work on congregation members’ homes and stick around for pulla and coffee.

That kind of unity is rare in Canada, even in Atlantic Canada where we consider ourselves particularly community-oriented. The closest we come is in our workplaces and homes, but we like to keep those two things as separate as possible. We call that Work-Life Balance and it’s become a higher value than community.

So when I first heard the term “community-based social marketing” I thought, “Well there’s a mouthful of nothing.” Both my degrees focused on persuasion. And, sadly, community has little to do with it.

Those doing the persuading often carry abstract notions of the Greater Good, but the process does nothing to involve or build community in a broad sense. As much as political leaders love claiming to speak for Haligonians, or Nova Scotians or Canadians, building that kind of broad consensus isn’t an efficient way to make laws, or get people to buy whatever you’re selling.

But I was a young environmentalist and CBSM was hot, so I read Doug McKenzie-Mohr’s book and I attended a workshop. I practiced the steps in my programming: identify the things keeping people from changing their behaviour; remove the barriers; ask people to publicly commit to making the desired change; reward good behaviour. Start small and bring people along the continuum: first carpool, then take the bus, then ride the bike, for example.

In fact, I worked with Lura Consulting to implement the Greater Toronto Area anti-idling campaign in 2003. My volunteers spoke with thousands of drivers, offering token rewards in exchange for their commitment not to idle, their promise to “turn off my car when I pull over.” Almost every driver they spoke to made the commitment. The media loved it. It was a feel-good, can-do campaign.

But me, I still had my doubts. Somebody really smart, with an amazing spreadsheet, figured idling accounted for 3 percent of traffic-caused air pollution. What about the other 97 percent? What about the energy used making the vehicles? What about the damage caused by laying down roads – always more roads.

It wasn’t that we weren’t doing good – we were. But was it enough?

My standards are high. What I want to see happen – what I think should be our communal objective – is that humans should re-learn how to live on this earth in a healthy and fair way that can be sustained indefinitely. For that to happen, driving needs at the very least to be drastically cut – 90 percent fewer vehicles is a reasonable objective, keeping the survival goal in mind.

And still keeping that goal in mind, it’s hard not to despair at times, as I ride my little bike through ever-worsening traffic filled with ever-bigger cars to my little organic grocer or the market or a fair trade café.

These places make up yet another incomplete community – a bunch of folks working mostly independently to reform capitalism, change the way we do business so that people and other life forms are cared for and sustained, healthily. Their efforts are inspiring and hopeful, and keep me going in the face of a lot of scary evidence that we’re making ourselves unwelcome here, that, to put it bluntly, humanity will soon suffer a massive and bloody die-off. They are the guerilla subversives, sneakily pushing our capitalist machinery onto a happier course.

We need a whole lot more of them. That community needs to grow. And like other semi-communities, it needs to better work, love, laugh and live together.

Which is why I wrote Eco-Innovators, and why CBSM had to be part of the book. Like my alternative-economy semi-community in Halifax, what inspired me about our anti-idling CBSM campaign in ’03 was not the outcome so much as the process – the very existence of it. In the GTA we stopped thousands of harried drivers long enough to have serious conversations and say, “Yes, I care about the health of this community. No, I don’t want to be the guy polluting it. Yes, I will turn off my engine when I pull over for a coffee, or to pick up my kids, or wherever.”

I’ve since witnessed greater outcomes – further along the continuum of sustainable commitments – from CBSM, most notably province-wide composting and recycling programs with 90 percent+ participation rates.

Almost nobody wants to be The Guy who hurts the community – the One Person who won’t sort the recycling or take out the compost, or show up when the church has a broken banister. Once sustainable behaviour becomes normalized people don’t want to be left out.

Marshalling communities, even semi-communities, to commit to positive environmental change helps the world in two ways: 1) It makes the small positive change and, 2) (more importantly) it builds better, more unified communities who have stepped onto the sustainability continuum together.

The Power of One is nice and all. But this crisis was made by many. And if we’re going to get through it, we need the Power of Community.

Smoking is another issue that needs CBSM.

I like to include local and topical references in my presentations and seminars, so I was doing some research to show the gaps that exist between having the correct attitude and performing the correct behaviour. And I found 3 stunning examples in the health sector.

1. Although almost everyone agrees that giving blood is a good idea, only 5% of UK residents do so.
2. Although 90% of UK residents say they support organ donation, only 26% have signed up for organ donation.
3. In a recently released study from Victoria, BC, Canada, only 12% of health care professionals were found to follow guidance for hand washing. Nobody knows better than health professionals how important it is to wash their hands, but they are not meeting the requirements.

Those are 3 very stark examples of how we cannot assume that people will perform a behaviour simply because they know it is the correct thing to do.

I am in the airport in Halifax waiting to fly to Scotland to talk Community-Based Social Marketing for 5 days. While I have been sitting here waiting for my delayed flight, I created a Prezi to help answer the question: “Why CBSM?”

Check it out (hover over “More” and choose fullscreen) and please, tell me what you think in the comments.

Chris Benjamin's New Book is about Sustainability

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Chris Benjamin's New Book is about Sustainability

I am flattered to be in the company of 34 others profiled in author/journalist Chris Benjamin’s new book, Eco-Innovators: Sustainability in Atlantic Canada. The book describes very different initiatives and work that has contributed to making Atlantic Canada a more sustainable place. As Chris writes in his blog:

Eco-Innovators is a collection of stories about the region’s most forward-thinking leaders in sustainability. These entrepreneurs and educators, activists and agitators, farmers and fishers have all made measurable contributions in their respective fields of interest and in motivating others to make change.

Eco-innovators launches on October 11th with a celebration and panel discussion in Halifax (see details about the book and launch here). If you are in the area, please come out, I will be on the panel and would love to chat!

On a related note, I am about 75% through Chris’s novel Drive By Saviours, which has had rave reviews. It is a gripping story of two people of very different backgrounds, countries and experiences, who meet by chance on a Toronto subway car. The attention to detail in the story reflects Chris’s devotion to research and his experience of living in the countries profiled. I heartily recommend it!

If you are already on Google+, you will likely agree with me that it could be a very good forum for sharing CBSM information. If not, take my word for it! As an example, the photography community has really taken Google+ and run with it, and I think we can as well.

I am establishing a CBSM circle, through which I will be sharing information, reports, and setting up some hangouts (hangouts allow people to get together live online to discuss and collaborate).

Because at this time Google + is by invitation only, I am offering up my 150 invitations to the CBSM community. If you are want an invite and want to join the community, just do the following:

1. Join Google + by following this link, which is an invitation from me to you.
2. Search for Ken Donnelly and add me into one of your circles.

See you soon on Google+!