Co-creating campaigns across the West of England

As part of their commitment to delivering cross-cutting impactful campaigns with all Local Authority partners, the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority booked a full day behaviour change training session. This was attended by communications and sustainability officers from across Combined and Local Authorities to bring a wealth of minds and points of view to the table to develop campaigns around energy, travel and nature.

The morning session was all about understanding core behaviour change principles:

• Running targeted campaigns to specific target audiences – avoiding blanket “one size fits all” messages and actions, and instead using targeting to increase cut-through and uptake, using the Britain Talks Climate segmentation tool.
• Starting with the barriers to change, not the solutions – understanding why people struggle to adopt sustainable behaviours, to tailor the solutions and messaging to them. One communications lead who attended commented that she thought the comms segment would be the most insightful to her, but in fact the morning spent on journey mapping the behavioural barriers to change was the most beneficial and useful.
• Using research and insights – to make it relevant and applicable for attendees, the workshop was full of learnings and case studies from other local authority research and campaigns.

Designing solutions that are Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely – using the EAST model and EAST initiatives to develop their intervention ideas.

The afternoon was focused on communications, and rather than the ‘post-lunch slump’ the room was buzzing with animated teams developing their content using two core models:

• The hero’s journey – Rather than telling impact stories of disaster and loss, the teams were tasked with using the persona they had been working with all day to tell their story of changing their behaviour, finding allies, overcoming obstacles, enjoying the benefits and rewards and inspiring others. The stories people came up with had the whole room full of smiles, laughter and a sense of ‘anything is possible’.
• The Campaigns That Work Wheel – To develop their comms campaign, attendees were reminded of all the principles of the day with this framework focusing on: customizing, using good social norms, specifying action, catalysing commitment, tapping positive emotions and showing it matters.

Outcomes:

The attendees went away with an understanding of behaviour change principles and how to apply them in a local authority setting, clear audience personas to target, and campaign ideas to develop further.

The attendees also shared what they would like to take forward from the day, including:

• Other opportunities to co-create campaigns with the climate and comms people in a room again
• Sharing case studies and learnings about different demographics and different messaging testing across different local authorities
• Using trusted messengers, positive social norming and the hero’s journey to develop their communications