Campaign labs

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #1 Understanding the problem to solve’, ‘Anne Marie Gut and Ben Bishop Wallis’, ’23 February 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

Thank you very much. I would now like to introduce the first of our guest presenters, Anne-Marie Gut and Ben Bishop. They are both from a company called Wallis and Wallis specialises in campaign development and tracking research. And over time, their focus has really shifted into the government sector. They are sole supplier of campaign material, and research or research, really, for the Australian Electoral Commission. And since 2013 they have been developing the Victorian Transport Accident Commission's public education evaluation program, and you might be familiar with the TAC advertisements. This is what tracks those advertisements to help do the research, to monitor and evaluate those campaigns. They have done a lot of work with Sustainability Victoria, particularly the campaign development research for Get It Right On Bin Night. And that was a campaign way back in 2011. I certainly remember it. Many of you may not. And then there is many other projects they are working with SV on formative research, campaign evaluation and message testing for the upcoming curbside recycling changes and the Love Food Hate Waste program.

Susan Benedyka:

So, our speakers are Anne-Marie and Ben. Anne-Marie, I have her fuller bio in your workbook so that you can read that there, but she has over 15 years of experience in Market & Social Research, and she uses both quantitative and qualitative methods, and really it is about community attitudes and client experience research. So I'm really looking forward to hearing from you Anne-Marie. From Ben, who will be sharing the session, because he's got a background in Linguistics and Media. It is a really great start to communications, to understanding how language works to that formative research concept, testing and campaign evaluation. I mentioned the Transport Accident Commission work, and Ben has been leading that particular program. So, welcome to the both of you. And I am going to hand over to you now.

Ann-Marie Gut:

Thanks so much, Susan. So I will just get our presentation slides up on screen. If you bear with me for a moment, please.

Ann-Marie Gut:

So, hopefully that has got the right slides up. So, good morning everyone and thank you for inviting Wallis to present at this session. We hope you can take away some useful learnings from what we are going to cover in our presentation. So, obviously the focus of the session is on understanding the problem to solve. So, we are going to talk about how and where research activities fit into campaign development, planning, monitoring and evaluation. So, as Susan mentioned, I have been involved in delivering campaign research work for various projects for Sustainability Victoria over time. And my co-presenter Ben, is our resident expert on the subject as the project for the TAC's campaign, tracking and evaluation. So, I will just now give you a quick overview of what we are going to cover in this session. So, we are going to talk about firstly, what are some of the things to consider for a new campaign and where the research fits into that?

Ann-Marie Gut:

So, we need to look at what do we already know, what are our knowledge gaps and how we might use research to fill those gaps? Both things like desktop research and primary research, and research can also be a critical tool for campaign evaluation. So, we will cover how to set a framework for your campaign evaluation, which includes planning and timing research activities to align with your campaign activities. And I did see that some of the future sessions for this program of campaign labs will cover some of these things in more detail as well.

Ann-Marie Gut:

So, we will talk about what kind of metrics can be used to measure campaign success, and again, where primary research fits into this. And we will talk about the importance of quality sampling and questionnaire design, and then just a quick wrap up. So, while I was saying all of that, I was supposed to be building my slides, there they are. So, just a quick overview of some of those things to consider for campaigns. So, usually campaign objectives will be along the lines of trying to introduce a new behaviour change, behaviour or shift in attitudes. So, what are we trying to influence, what are the tactical objectives of that campaign and how are we going to measure the success of it?

Ann-Marie Gut:

So, we need to think about what we already know and where we can find out more information. Who are our stakeholders? So, it might be the creative agency and research agencies, what information do you need from them and what do you need to provide to them? And also who is your audience for the campaign? What are going to be the most effective channels to reach them ? And what kind of timeframes should you set? So, doing some research can fit into answering all of these considerations.

Ann-Marie Gut:

So, we are thinking about what we know and what we do not know at the time that we are planning our campaign. So, things we might be considering is what is currently working ? What do we know about campaigns running in other jurisdictions? Do we know anything about situational barriers to the desired behaviour ? And are there particular audiences who are doing better or not so well at the behaviour that we are trying to influence? So, you might already know some of these things from internal work that your organisation has been doing, or from speaking to other jurisdictions about what they have been doing. You can also search academic literature to look for things like, particularly in terms of behaviour change. You might want to follow an established behaviour change model if it is something that is suitable for your particular campaign.

Ann-Marie Gut:

So, in terms of addressing the knowledge gaps, there are fundamentally two types of research that you might want to consider with two different aims. And so you need to think about, what is going to be the most appropriate type of research to answer your information name at the time of planning your campaign. So, essentially we have qualitative research, which is used when you need to describe. So, what is the how and the why, it is to get rich detail on individual situations to find that context. And it is also really good for gauging reactions to creative concepts and messaging. So, we might run face to face interviews or focus groups where we run through the concepts and messages and people have a discussion and come to a consensus about which ones they think are more powerful or impactful, or would really get them to recognise that call to action. And so that is what qualitative work is really good for that kind of starting point.

Ann-Marie Gut:

And then there is also quantitative research, which is all about measuring the extent of the problem or baseline behaviour measures, baseline data on attitudes or the barriers to that behaviour change. And it is all about this is where the sampling comes in to make sure we have representative samples and we have reliable and robust research that we can trust to understand our target audience, who they are, how to reach them, how they are doing and what those baseline measures are, constraints and barriers, how to reach them.

Ann-Marie Gut:

And then to carry that through when we are doing campaign evaluation, if it is the goal of the campaign to have a shift in attitudes, you can measure those attitudes at the pre sometimes during and at particular points throughout the campaign and at the post campaign to see if there has been a shift. And of course it is particularly important to have that good quality research, good quality sampling to make sure that you can trust that reliability of that research. So, I am going to hand over to Ben now to take you through the process of developing a framework for evaluating your campaign, because it is really important to set things up properly from the outset so that you have everything in place to measure the success of your campaign.

Ben Bishop:

Thanks Anne-Marie, and ostensibly a lot of the stuff that I will talk about seems to come after you have worked out which problem you have to solve, but I think it is really important as you are identifying a topic for a campaign to consider how to frame that topic and how that flows on to the latest stages of the campaign. So, it is really good to have all this stuff in mind, as you are identifying a topic for a campaign and especially around goals and metrics and what success looks like for that campaign. Really important to have that done upfront in a way that is measurable and that will lead to much a much more successful evaluation.

Ben Bishop:

So, something that we find really helpful is having a model to understand the campaign environment. So, in this model we have inputs, activities, outcomes across the top and down the bottom we have measurement. So, this is based on a program logic model, which some of you may be familiar with. And this is just applying that same system to a campaign. So, further inputs we consider which agencies or people are contributing to the campaign. So, it might be people within your organisation. It could be external organisations or people providing expert advice, such as academics or people from other areas could be partners or sponsors who are supporting the campaign. Often you will have an agency, an advertising or creative agency, as well as a media buying-planning agency and a research agency we hope. And also, we find important to consider who is going to be assessing this campaign.

Ben Bishop:

So, who do you have to prove the success of the campaign to, and having all that in mind right upfront is really helpful. So, the sorts of activities that you will do in delivering the campaign formative research to understand the problem and campaign development like testing concepts and messages, and then also the activities will include the channels that you go through. So, above the line advertising and which channels you are going out to, and also PR or engagement below the line, advertising, working with local groups etc, that all constitutes the campaign activities. So, then it is really useful to break campaigns up into short and mid-term outcomes and long-term outcomes. So, your long-term outcome is really the key goal of where you want to get to. But in the short-term and mid-term, it is really good to have achievable targets. For instance, if we are looking at a behaviour change campaign, the first step might be to raise awareness of the issue.

Ben Bishop:

That is one that you can really see a result on in a campaign quite quickly. In terms of shifting attitudes and behaviours. So, a mid-term might be shifting behaviours that takes a little bit more time, a little bit more effort, shifting behaviours. The ultimate behaviour often takes some time it is rare that we see a campaign that just moves things overnight. But if you look at something like I work a lot in road safety, and we have seen behaviours change over a long time frame, but that has taken many campaigns over many years. And additionally, you might look at something like smoking, whereas a couple of decades of concerted campaign and regulation, which achieved absolutely sensational results. So, if you have a problem, it is probably not going to change overnight with a campaign, but if you plan out your objectives along the way and think about, what steps does it take to solve this problem?

Ben Bishop:

Then that is really helpful from the start in terms of campaign planning. Measurement, will deal with it a little bit later so we can talk about that as we go through the presentation. Next please Anne-Marie.

Ben Bishop:

Just to talk very briefly about timing or lining up your ducks again, really important, just to think about this at the start what is this campaign going to involve, in order to achieve, to solve this problem, to achieve our objectives. What are we going to do? And when are we going to do it? So, you might not need all of these phases for every single can campaign and different campaigns via different channels and approaches take a different approach. But certainly if it is a really, really new space, you don't know much about it, or you really need to understand community motivators and barriers etc. on this topic formative research is fantastic, often qualitative research is as well suited to that as Anne-Marie mentioned.

Ben Bishop:

And the other thing is because you have goals, a benchmark is really useful before any campaign activity occurs so that will give you some information about what goals you need to achieve. And then in terms of tracking and outcomes, there are really two important points to this. So, one is campaign tracking, which is quite tactical where we track it over time and the other one is the outcome. So, did the campaign actually achieve what it set out to achieve? And this varies a lot by campaign. Some campaigns are really slow burn, take a long time to build up and can be quite organic with key activities along the way, others, like a TVC campaign might run over four or of weeks. And that is really a sort of a rapid deployment that might occur in a series of flightings.

Ben Bishop:

So, thinking about how that might work is going to dictate how the measurement occurs, both of tracking the performance of your campaign activities. Is this activity really delivering? And also the outcomes, is it having the desired impact? Another thing it might be time to bust out the champagne at the end of the campaign, but it is also important to consider what happens down the track. So, has this campaign had a sustained impact? What does it look like six months later? Have we gone back to the benchmark levels or have we had a sustained impact over time? Do we need to do another campaign? What is the sequencing going forwards to continue to have an impact in this area?

Ben Bishop:

And questions for answers. So this is really about, okay, what is the information that we have in terms to track and monitor the campaign? So, often there are metrics provided by media agencies and advertising platforms. These are really useful if they are available to you, operational or administrative data. So, really helpful just to get a handle on all the data that are available to support the campaign as well, does not all come from surveys of course, and understanding this data and its limitations are really useful as well, as well as any seasonality, seasonality is a big thing in data and being aware of that, particularly if you have got a long campaign cycle with a benchmark at one point, and then your outcome is tracking another point, and there is a seasonal effect, you really do need to be aware of that. Operational data is really useful for identifying seasonal effects. And of course surveys of the target audience to measure change.

Ben Bishop:

So, surveys are good at doing things like establishing the effectiveness of communicating the message and for social marketing campaigns message is really important. We put a lot of time and energy into message recall and message reach across the community because that is our product we are selling, for commercial work we can look at sales. Sales is a wonderful way to assess commercial advertising, but for social marketing, we really want to see that the message got across and look at the impact of that message on our outcomes.

Ben Bishop:

We need to have outcome measures and it is really important to, to get these right. It is easy to not have a great outcome measure, so putting time, energy and drawing on the formative research and referring back to the original problem that was identified is really important. And if it does not go well, then it is also really important to understand why a campaign was not well received or what people liked about it. So, often for this, we use diagnostic measures in surveys. So, we have a series of statements about the campaign and they can provide a sort of segmentation of campaigns on the dimensions that are performed well or not. Some might be really attention grabbing, some might have a lot of emotive impact, others might be very informative. It is really nice to understand the type of campaign how it is received and whether it met those tactical objectives in terms of the construction of the campaign.

Ben Bishop:

In terms of asking the right questions. So, the questionnaire should map really well to the campaign approach and objectives, it seems like common sense, but it is really important through the process to keep referring back. And that is why the campaign logic model is really useful because it provides an overview that ensures compliance along the way. Development of concept testing, shaping questionnaire design, as I mentioned just before. So, the formative testing is really useful to have if you have it previous qualitative work, because that can improve questionnaire design by quite a lot. It is often the case that the audience perceive things quite differently to professionals working in the space and bridging that gap is really really helpful in asking the right questions that make sense and appropriate for respondents. The mode of delivering the survey is important to online is really useful because you can show people a rich display of the campaign materials over telephone and you need to describe those materials and that can be challenging if you are using multi-modes it is important to have consistency across the modes in so far as possible as well.

Ben Bishop:

This one is really important to us, and I think it is fairly boring to most people, but it is something that we really do love to talk about. And it is something that is often not done very well. So, it is sampling and sampling just seems like a step in the procedure, but really it dictates so much about the quality of what you get out of a survey. And I would just like to sort of briefly walk through a couple of concepts about sampling. So, this is a simple random sample or a probability sample. So, if we think of the population, which is the box on the left, that is everyone, then we have a sample frame, might be a list of telephone numbers, or it might be a customer list or something like that. And you can see nearly everyone is on it.

Ben Bishop:

So, we have got really good coverage and those little boxes that are missing out of the population, there are fairly randomly distributed. So I am going take our sample on the end. It has got really random coverage, so it is a proper random sample with no bias and that is going to give you very accurate results. If we look at the next one, so this is a non-probability sample. Examples are online panels, e-mail lists, and to an extent, recruitment from open links and you can see that the sample frame it is the second box is really skewed over there. So, and we do not know what domain it is skewed on. Often they have done to be representative for age and gender and location or something like that, but there are all these other dimensions that we are not measuring that are very skewed and that has been demonstrated time and time again.

Ben Bishop:

We just cannot be very confident of the results here, because as you can see, when we take our sample, it can only be of the people that are included in the original sample frame. So, we have this inherent bias, it means our results are not accurate. We might get away if we use the same methodology each time of at least being consistent. But there is also quite a lot of variability amongst every repeated sample from a lot of these sample sources. So, if possible a simple random sample is really good.

Ben Bishop:

And so one of the things that we often get embrace and people say, "Hey, we want to do a piece of research. We want 10,000 people because that's going to be really really accurate because we have got a huge sample size," and you might read in the paper, a survey, 15,000 people. But the problem is if you do not get this sampling right, it is actually not accurate. It might be very precise. You might be able to say has a margin of error of half a percent. But as you can see from that last box there on the bottom right, it could be the result is way off the center. Whereas in the one in the middle, the green box in the middle, the result is right on the center where we want it, but it might have a high margin of error.

Ben Bishop:

So, large sample sizes do not equal accuracy they just equal precision and it is important to be mindful of that and there are other factors which I would love to talk about in length, which I will not, which also go into this. But the big thing to remember is that the constraints here are cost, time and availability. You need to think about what is appropriate for your project. Not everyone can afford a large sample and sometimes those samples are not available or have a lot of caveats. So, in thinking about your problem, when you think about your problem and your audience, it is good to think about how we are going to get in touch with them? What is possible? And what is the scale of this campaign and project? And how can we combine perhaps with something else to get some of the results we want from a better method? Or when you are doing a primary research to look at how the information was collected, that is informing your identification or the problem is that reliable? Does it come from a reliable source?

Ben Bishop:

Another issue is surveys versus consultations, which is something we see all the time now. So, often we see a link put on a website and yet 20,000 people respond, which is fantastic, but that is really a response amongst engaged people. A lot of the time, there is a lot of bias in those consultations. They are really useful for listening to the voice of the community, the engaged voice of the community, and they are really helpful. And they are really important. And I think they play a really important role, but they are not so much surveys. So, one of the things that you might conceptualize this as is that the surveys giving you the silent majority whereas a consultation is giving you the vocal and engaged group, both have a really important role.

Ben Bishop:

And sometimes you need to make a trade-off between all these facets of research. So, when you are looking at a problem, decide early, so you can get the budget, see how you can access it. We love customer list. Customer lists or lists of people are really, really valuable. They make for much cheaper research with much higher quality. And we put a lot of time and effort into data security and privacy to ensure that those lists are handled appropriately. And that is if you can do that, that is fantastic for the whole development and evaluation of the campaign. Thanks.

Ann-Marie Gut:

Cool. Thanks for that, Ben. So, there are definitely a lot of things to consider in the planning, planning for the research and planning for how you are going to reach your target audiences there and hopefully you can engage with researchers early in that process to help figure some of that out. That is everything that we wanted to cover in this session. So I will just quickly give it a quick wrap up. So, what are the things we need for effective campaign development evaluation? So we need that framework and to ensure appropriate timing of activities, including your formative research, to establishing your benchmark and timing your tracking surveys with campaign activities. So, there is those early decisions that need to be made for the most effective evaluation, including your budget considerations and that the formative research can be used to understand who to target and how best to reach them for the campaign itself, as well as the research and evaluation.

Ann-Marie Gut:

So, those are those considerations to what you need to support that evaluation and how you are going to reach them. And so the overall objective is to set up the campaign evaluation to ensure you will understand if it worked, why it did or did not work and so that you have those learnings to take forward. If you need to do another campaign or shift your messaging or what the next steps are for ensuring the success of those objectives. So, that is everything that we wanted to cover. I will stop screen sharing now and come back to Susan.

Susan Benedyka:

Fantastic. Anne-Marie and Ben really appreciated. As I said, in the chat function, we will share these slides after the session so that you have got a capture of the slides and that information, but I am also open now for the next four minutes, if you have got any questions that come to mind from that presentation, throw them into the chat function and I will raise them with Ben and Anne-Marie so they can answer. So, if you have got any questions, anything you go, "Oh, how would you find out about, or where is the source of that primary research?" ask those questions while we have got the chance. Just to also let you know that Sarah Saunders will be presenting, we will have a small break after this session and she will be to talking about an actual campaign and how it runs and how it links back to this base research that needs to be done.

Susan Benedyka:

So we have got the two parts of it, the wonderful session that you have just had on how to, and then the practical session on how has it been applied and how did it work? Any questions coming? Well, thank you very much. Suggestions on the best way to reach target audiences, specifically target audiences like cold audiences. Can I just say to that person Abby, can you hang off till next campaign lab? And the whole of the campaign lab is about target audiences, but the really good one right now, going back to the logic model is how do you separate outcomes and objectives? Anne-Marie?

Ann-Marie Gut:

I might hand that one to Ben .

Susan Benedyka:

He is the logic man.

Ben Bishop:

So, the outcomes are really, the attitude or behaviour, your specific goals from the campaign, but your objectives might be broader than that. So, you might have tactical objectives in there as well. So, you might have a certain... to the campaign should perform within certain parametres. And so, whereas with your outcomes, then you are really just looking at have you observed a shift and look tying causality to the campaign can be challenging at times as well. So, you might observe a positive outcome, but it might be unclear as to whether the campaign was influential on that or demonstrate the campaign was not influential. It was some external factor that led to that.

Ann-Marie Gut:

Interestingly, when we did the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, obviously there was a social marketing campaign that went on, but it was also it coincided with the time that the ABC were doing that program. And it essentially, it all happened at the same time and it is possible that that was a completely separate program, but it really did raise the issue in people's minds. And I think that it had possibly had some kind of influence on those post-campaign measures.

Susan Benedyka:

Fantastic. So, separating outcomes from objectives, outcomes are quite measurable, very precise. They are the way in which you build your measures, the objectives can be broader and have some broader goals in there. Is that correct?

Ben Bishop:

Yes.

Susan Benedyka:

Fantastic. I would-

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #1 This Girl Can: A campaign in action, ‘Sarah Saunders, VicHealth, ’23 February 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

I have a presentation from Sarah Saunders. Sarah's the strategic communications manager at VicHealth. And she's got over 17 years of experience in public health emergency and international development experience. I love that she loves what she does, which is that real passion for marketing strategies, harnessing the talent and development of her team and addresses social problems to create impact. So with that background in behaviour change campaigns, brand management, research, and evaluation, Sarah's going to talk to us about one of, I think my most memorable campaigns that VicHealth has run and that's the, This Girl Can campaign. It really spoke to me quite directly. Obviously the market research, getting right into the target audiences meant that it spoke directly to the right audience. So Sarah, welcome along to this session. We're really looking forward to hearing from you. And over to you.

Sarah Saunders:

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for having me today, Susan. And just to confirm, is my audio okay? And you can hear me loud and clear. Wonderful. And also just to say that joining you via my phone, because I had some technical issues with my laptop, so I won't be able to see the questions if they pop up as I'm presenting. So perhaps Susan, you could share the questions with me as we go through and very happy to answer any questions or comments in real time as we go. So as I mentioned, it's a delight to be with you today. And I'm very pleased to be able to some of our learnings and experience with the This Girl Can campaign, which has really been a flagship investment for VicHealth in the social marketing space and something I hope you will have seen over the last few years as it's been out in market. In terms of my slides, are they being able to be shared now, Susan?

Susan Benedyka:

Yes. Kate's just putting them up now. She should be able to have them on screen.

Sarah Saunders:

Terrific. Thank you.

Susan Benedyka:

And I can tell you, I don't know if you can see them, but they're starting from the very start. So you just need...

Sarah Saunders:

No, I've got them. That's perfect. So a little bit about VicHealth before we go on, for those of you not familiar with our work, VicHealth is a pioneering health promotion agency and we're one of the first health promotion foundations in the world. And our goal is really to improve the health and wellbeing of all Victorians. We have a focus across five strategic imperatives. So that's increasing physical activity, ensuring Victorians are tobacco free, supporting healthy eating, preventing harm from alcohol and encouraging, sorry, I'm a bit out of order, improving mental wellbeing. So you can see those up on the screen. And they're the five domains we work across, but physical activity and the focus of the This Girl Can campaign is something that we've had a big commitment to. Okay, onto our campaign background. So we recognised before we embarked on this campaign, as we were doing our research in sort of around 2017, that more than half of Victorian women are not sufficiently active and one in 10 women doing no physical activity in a typical week.

Sarah Saunders:

And we were really concerned by these statistics because it's a real pillar of our work that we're encouraging physical activity. And for there to be this issue with women particularly, and also I guess the compounding factor of Victorian women feeling like they were being judged when they're exercising, we knew that we needed to take action. And we had seen the excellent This Girl Can campaign in the UK. And we decided that we would proceed with a licensing Sport England's successful campaign, but very much reinterpreting it based on the Australian evidence, the Victorian context and what we knew would work here. We didn't feel it could be a hundred percent cookie cutter approach.

Sarah Saunders:

In terms of the goals for our campaign, we had some overall goals in terms of course, increasing physical activity with women, but we also had a gender equality goal as well because we saw that this was an issue that was disproportionately affecting women, but also that there was some layers of complexity in terms of that fear of judgment that we really wanted to unpack and to challenge. So yes, we wanted to shift attitudes. We wanted to drive action, but we also wanted to shift norms. So we really wanted to increase women's positive attitudes towards physical activity and sport, we wanted to increase women's physical activity levels, and we wanted to increase positive attitudes of the idea of strong, powerful, and active women. So we really wanted to challenge those stereotypes and show that women could be active whenever and wherever they wanted in all sorts of spaces.

Sarah Saunders:

There was a huge amount of that went into this campaign. So there was pre-formative research, benchmarking, a couple of benchmarking waves, then an ongoing online panel and match sampling as well, which was really great because we knew we were surveying the same people at different points in time. So I can chat a bit more about the evaluation, but some of research that we did upfront showed that fear of judgment was a really big problem for women. And this fear of judgment was based on real judgment. So it wasn't an irrational fear. Women felt that they were judged for their appearance, for their ability levels, and for the priorities they put around exercise.

Sarah Saunders:

So the type of things that people would worry about in their appearance domain would be things like being perceived as being sweaty when they're exercising, having a red face, not looking good, or not being made up. Having to get changed in front of people if they're in sports clubs or facilities, the types of clothes they'd wear wearing the wrong clothes, showing their body, showing too much, not showing enough, how their body looks, not appearing feminine, developing too many muscles. So you can imagine there's so much to sort of unpack in that alone.

Sarah Saunders:

Then you get to the ability domain. "Am I fit enough? Am I good enough? Will I be competitive? Or will I be too competitive? I don't know the rules. What equipment should I bring? I don't want to hold the group back. You know, maybe I'm too good and this is just more casual. Might I be too competitive?" So the ability domain was something where we had a lot different areas raised as challenges for women. And then priorities. "So will people think that I shouldn't be out doing this because I should be spending time with my family, or should I be spending time with my friends? How can I take this time out from work and study?" So women found it very hard to prioritise exercise, and fear that they might be judged for their choices.

Kate:

Thanks Kate. Sorry, Susan. I think Sarah might have frozen. Has she?

Susan Benedyka:

She has. Okay. So we'll just keep talking this through. What is evident from the work that VicHealth has done is how much of the research showed what was going on for women and about these sort of images dictating to women how they should feel. We go on to the next slide. You can see that when they put together the VicHealth campaign that they particularly looked to mirror the community, they wanted real women from everyday walks of life. And those real women needed to be talking about their experiences, but they also needed to be able to be seen so that an individual could be seen in... When they were looking at these advertisements campaigns' campaign ambassador, they could see themselves in those images. Next slide.

Sarah Saunders:

Apologies for that, Susan, I'm back with you now. Can you hear me again?

Susan Benedyka:

Yes, we can. And I've just gone through two slides for you. And now we're up to social marketing mix.

Sarah Saunders:

Thank you so much. For some reason I got booted off the call, but I'm glad to be back with you. Hopefully that doesn't happen again. So in terms of the social marketing mix for the campaign, these are sort of the channels and the partnerships and investments we made to ensure that this campaign was both effective, integrated, and would reach women in different kind of contexts within their life. And I should actually say that this campaign also fit within a range of other VicHealth investments around physical activity in sport, because we know that social marketing initiatives that are integrated into structural changes such as increasing access and opportunities to sports and recreation policy changes, we know that the best interventions are the ones that are holistic and use both the social marketing and campaigning approach, but also policy and programmatically as well.

Sarah Saunders:

So in terms of the mix that we used for this campaign, advertising was a key component. That's paid advertising in TV, out of home radio, cinema, print, and social media, media relations. So that's really ensuring that we could engage and share our ambassador stories with the community.

Sarah Saunders:

And that was just so key. The storytelling component of this campaign cannot be underestimated because I think for every woman who this campaign resonated with, it might have been a particular story or a particular case study that really... Ambassador that really cut through. So there's so many, I think we've got up to, yeah, 42 ambassadors now. And so many stories that just resonate and each have a slightly different angle. And each ambassador really talks about how they overcame some of those fears of judgment themselves. So yeah, media is key to doing that. As with social media, we've got a really engaged and dynamic social media community behind this campaign. Now we've got a Campaign Supporter Program. So this enables our stakeholders like sports clubs, gyms, and community groups to get behind the campaign with co-branded resources and tools and resources that can allow them to take the campaign to tailor it for their purposes. We also had a huge digital presence. So that's our website, which showcases the women.

Susan Benedyka:

Oh goodness, we'll have to let Sarah back in again. You can see that there is not just one form of marketing here. There is an entire mix that really has to be coordinated and cohesive and share the same messages at the base platform. The storytelling combined with strategic partnerships combined with direct email communications. I know that I certainly noticed that This Girl Can week and when that This Girl Can week was running, it seemed to be that I was getting messages wherever I was looking about the This Girl Can. Fundamentally though, that all the way through the campaign, there's that monitoring and evaluation going on. And the monitoring and evaluation tells which part of the mix is working and which part put more emphasis on or less emphasis. And I was really pleased to hear Sarah just then saying how influential the stories of the ambassadors were. They would've known that because they were monitoring and evaluating during the whole process.

Sarah Saunders:

Apologies, Susan, back with you again.

Susan Benedyka:

I think I've finished this one off. And I was just saying how important the monitoring and evaluation was to understand what to ramp up in the mix, what to scale down in the mix. And you would've known the effectiveness of the stories of the ambassadors because of your monitoring and evaluation.

Sarah Saunders:

Absolutely. And I'll touch on that a little bit more in the next few slides. But before I do, I just wanted to share the original 2018 TVC with everyone, for those who may not have seen it. So you can get a feel for how creatively we addressed the barriers our research identified, and really wanted to show real Victorian women getting active and being empowered.

Kate:

I'll now share that for you, Sarah.

Sarah Saunders:

Thank you.

Kate:

Just bear with me. It's a little bit of a process.

Susan Benedyka:

Fantastic, Kate.

Speaker 4:

(video playing)

Sarah Saunders:

Fantastic. Thank you. And so that was the TVC that we had in market for the first two years of the campaign. And we really felt that we had the mix right in terms of the partnerships, the media spend, the creative delivery, and the ambassadors. And so our results for the first two years were fantastic. More than 400,000 Victorian women were more active after seeing the campaign. And so the campaign inspired one in five women between 18 and 65 across the state to get active. So really strong results and something that we felt we could build on over time as well. But certainly that sort of exceeded our expectations. So in terms of the insights and learnings that we've had along the way and how we sort of evolved and iterated the campaign our research showed us that weight loss as a motivator is damaging.

Sarah Saunders:

And that's not a angle we ever, ever wanted to focus on or intended to focus on, but that's something that has really come out from our research women's physical activity journeys, and the way they approach it are inconsistent. So there'll be periods in their life where they commence being active and do that for a long time, but then they might have breaks and pauses. And we know that it's not... The journey, isn't a continuous path. There will be fits and spurts along the way. And that's just something we need to understand about women and how they approach it with different stages of life and things like having children and different routines with family caring and as they age. So that's something we've factored into the campaign. It's really important that we can provide activities that feel achievable so we can take small steps and microsteps on that journey to becoming more physically active and developing fitness as well.

Susan Benedyka:

Oh, I feel for her. I'm very sorry, Sarah. I think the other ones are becoming self evident that sense of belonging. 'I belong to a greater group of people who are doing physical things'. I can see myself in that, that a sense of 'I'm part of something that's bigger than me', again, that diversity. And you can even see in that selection of images that Sarah has on the right hand side of this slide, that they're very different people and you can go, "I can see myself in there". Again, the emphasis on diverse everyday women, not actors, not something that's out of reach, but real people. And then that stakeholder engagement. And I'd love to hear Sarah talk a little bit more about that. We might get her to do that, but the felt benefits of being active was the message was the real evaluation findings when people were doing the research. So you can see again, in these images to pick up felt benefits. There's the question. Can you feel it? Can you feel it? Can you feel it?

Sarah Saunders:

Thank you, Susan. I feel like this is just a perfect tag team and you could be doing these slides without me. My apologies. I'm on Zoom all the time and I'm not sure why I'm getting kicked off today. It's very peculiar, but thank you for bearing with me, everyone. So in terms of the way we evolved the campaign in year three, we took those learnings that I just mentioned, and that Susan kindly just mentioned before, and we added some new ambassadors. So we actually had 21 new ambassadors across a range of different life stages, physical activity types, backgrounds, and we added new activities. So low entry kind of activities like dog walking and park run, and bush walking, and yoga at home with kids and some fun activities like Bollywood and lacrosse, water aerobics, and even circuit skills. And so now across years one to three, we now have 46 ambassadors with just this depth of stories to tell.

Sarah Saunders:

Of course, adding to the evolution, it was the kind of complicating factor of COVID last year. And the pivot that I know we all have done in our work in various different ways. So I won't go into a huge amount of detail about how we pivoted the campaign. Although of course, happy to talk about that later, but really we made sure that in 2020, the campaign better communicated the felt benefits. So how women feel after exercise and the fact that we, that Fitspo, as I mentioned before, is uninspiring. That's not what our audience want to hear about. And in fact, that's just a big turnoff for them. Women want to see a range of body shapes and sorry, I'm seeing a question pop up, which I'll come to in one moment. And we also did the Get Active @ Home content, which is all the video series you see up there on the screen. So we had a wonderful range of sources and the campaign kind of came a bit more involved with those online videos and a greater, greater number of ambassadors.

Sarah Saunders:

So, sorry, I think one of those questions was how did we recruit the ambassadors? And that's a really good question. The initial ambassador recruitment was done via a call out on social media and one of the agencies that we work with sort of supported us to manage that process. And I think women submitted videos initially, and then we sort of refined down those more demand.

Susan Benedyka:

Dear, once again, I think we are managing this quite nicely though, but I'm really very interested to hear about how that pivot occurred, particularly because that answers the question that was raised in previous sessions in the previous session about that difficulty about getting out to people when you've got COVID restrictions and other restrictions on there. You can see that the pivot has been around the point of felt benefit it's and that there's accompanying material now. So not just to change the attitude about our need and want to get more involved, but here is how to get more involved and here's how to build on things. Okay, we'll move on to the next slide. And this was the next iteration, the 2020 campaign. So remember the campaigns been evolving over a period of time. And once again, Kate, if I could ask you to share the video.

Kate:

No problems.

Susan Benedyka:

Thank you.

Speaker 4:

(singing)

Susan Benedyka:

Thanks Kate. And back to you, Sarah.

Sarah Saunders:

Fantastic. Yes. I'm back online. So you can see with this latest creative that we really... Sorry. Can you hear me?

Susan Benedyka:

Yes, we can.

Sarah Saunders:

Hello?

Susan Benedyka:

Yes, we can hear you.

Sarah Saunders:

Oh, great. Just a bit of a delay. So yeah, we really highlighted the felt benefits. So the fear of judgment message was still there, but we wanted to focus on that energy and that sort of great sense of wellbeing that we know our audience experienced as a result of physical activity. And so again, the results for the campaign were fantastic for 2020 and exceeded our expectations. So as a result from that one year of activity, one in seven women aged between 18 and 65 were encouraged to get active as a result of the campaign. And yeah, a lot of women started sport or physical activity for the first time and others were motivated to get back to physical activity after a break. So yeah, we've really seen as the campaign has evolved over the years that we are able to sort of, as we evolve our messaging, continue to have an impact behaviourally as well as on attitudes and shifting social norms.

Sarah Saunders:

So in terms of what's next for This Girl Can we are going to be in market again in 2021 building on the insights to date and our ongoing evaluation. We've got integrated paid media activity across the state and that's that full marketing mix. As I sort of highlighted when I talked about the campaign initially. One of the things we've done is to create a This Girl Can week, which is the 22nd to 28th of March this year, which is an opportunity to showcase events and activities for our ambassadors to run a program of activities as well. And really just give a focal point to the campaign when it's in market. And as mentioned, we've got this ongoing monitoring evaluation framework, which allows us to adapt the campaign while it's live in market, but also to iterate it and evolve it over time.

Sarah Saunders:

So, yeah, it's a longitudinal study in terms of our evaluations. So that's giving us really rich insights that we then share via our This Girl Can website where we've got campaign evaluations, but also at various social market conferences and public health forums as well. Because we think it's really important to share our experience with the broader kind of social marketing community and those interested in campaign work. Okay. So I saw some questions popping up. So before I finish, I thought I'd try and respond to those and take any other questions that we might have as well. And I do apologise for the in and out. Cutting in and out. It's very frustrating. So, yeah. I'm sorry about that. So one of

Susan Benedyka:

I think there's two really good questions, the first one, and I think I saw it a lot in the images, but how you go about using inclusive language. So non-binary, transgender, so really making sure that everyone feels represented.

Sarah Saunders:

Yeah. Look, that's a great question. And I think part of using the language from the research and speaking to real women has helped us shape the language and the tone of voice. I would say that that's probably an area where we could do more in and just make sure we are continually doing the best we can in that space. But yeah, I think we've thought through the tone of voice of the campaign and the language we choose and I guess we take on feedback as well on an ongoing basis. So if there's anything that we're doing that can be tweaked, we absolutely will. So that's really important to us. Yeah.

Susan Benedyka:

Another question which really relates to before you came online, Sarah, when we asked people about campaign lessons, they said it was quite difficult working out how to pivot for COVID and the restrictions. And so this question runs off the back of that. Well, when did the campaign run in 2020? Was it prior to lockdowns or what was the relationship with lockdowns and restrictions?

Sarah Saunders:

Yeah, it's all a bit of a blur now, but basically we had our ad ready to go and then we started to head into lockdowns and we needed to re-edit our creative to take out some physical activity options that wouldn't be possible during lockdown. So we had versions of the creative that were basically adapted for depending on what the lockdown and parameters were. So there'd be activities that team sports that we pulled out and we focused more on the sort of solitary walking and bike riding and that kind of thing, the things that people could do. And similarly, we boosted up the online content because we knew that people were at home and wanting to exercise at home. So we added more and more resources there as a kind of home workout piece.

Sarah Saunders:

So despite us feeling that it was such a challenging time to be in market, it didn't actually have an adverse impact on our results because we were able to pivot. And I guess, because as well, lockdown meant for some people physical activity was a way to get out and about, and it was something that we could support people because they wanted to do that for their own, I guess, mental health and wellbeing.

Susan Benedyka:

Fantastic. So two more questions. Yes. One is about the Campaign Supporter Program. How did that work? And the second one is how long did you spend researching and getting the baseline data before you actually started the campaign?

Sarah Saunders:

Excellent question. So with the Supporter Program, that's a sort of email based system where you can sign up to be a supporter and then you can access a portal of resources. And that's something that has evolved over time as well. So at the start because it's a licensed campaign, there are some parameters around what we can and can't do with the brand. So it was really important that we were providing tools and templates that we knew would ensure we were com complying with our licensing agreements. So yes, that was resources that could be accessed once you were approved to be a supporter and making sure that we just had that oversight of who we were providing this access to. So that's that program. And of course there's a related email program that goes with that, where we'll ensure that we're updating what's happening in the campaign, how people can become involved.

Sarah Saunders:

And then as and when new tools and resources are updated, those are shared. So that's a supporter dimension. As to the research that underpinned this campaign, I guess being big health and our focus on physical activity, we're doing a lot of research in this space all the time, but particularly for this campaign, we had two waves of baseline research that we did, I believe in 2017, although I'd have to go back and hundred percent check my notes, but we engaged LaTrobe and their centre for sport and social impact to support us on this campaign journey. And they've developed the research program for us. It's also, at time's included in depth interviews with women as well. So we've really sort of honed in on different areas over time to finesse and shape the campaign and messaging, and also process evaluation for us campaign wise as well, looking at the actual delivery machinery of the campaign and what can can be improved.

Sarah Saunders:

And I should mention if I didn't already that this campaign is underpinned by program logic, we've drawn on the flow proof protocols as well, which is a sort of social marketing checklist if you like of best practice approaches. And also the theory of plan behaviour sort of sits well with this campaign. And it's the sort of behavioural theory that we've drawn upon mostly. So there is quite a lot of yeah, structural foundations that sit under this campaign.

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #2 Defining success’, ‘Luke Rogers, Sustainability Victoria, ’16 March 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

First of these two presenters is Luke Rogers. And Luke is going to talk to us about defining campaign success. So, really beginning with the end in mind, in defining success. Luke is part of the campaigns team at Sustainability Victoria. Over the past six months, he's been conducting formative research along with the campaign creative testing to guide the RV education and behavioural change campaign, RV Recycling Victoria. Luke's academic background is in behavioural science and marketing, and he's been also professionally working conducting research and evaluation for a number of government clients before he ended up working with SV. Luke, thank you very much and we can see your screen beautifully. Off you go.

Luke Rogers:

Great. Thank you very much, Susan. And thank you everybody for your time this morning hopefully... I think I saw in that poll that 38% have been interested in looking at how to set campaign objectives, so hopefully I can give you some hints and tips on that today and you'll find the content useful. So I know we're quite tight for time, so I might just jump straight in.

Luke Rogers:

So in thinking about defining success, I find myself preaching this mantra that success starts early. I think too often evaluation and thinking about how we're going to evaluate a campaign is considered in a retrospective approach. We actually should be setting up our evaluation as a starting point to help guide... First of all, it's going to help guide more effective evaluation, but secondly, having our end in mind, having our actual outcomes, our actual goals for the campaign in our mind throughout the entire campaign process, can actually keep us focused, can keep us on the straight and narrow with our directional blinders on towards exactly what we're trying to achieve. So it can actually help both in evaluation, but in delivering a better campaign as well.

Luke Rogers:

And so when you think about obviously a lot going on throughout a full campaign life cycle, and even a lot going on with monitoring and evaluation so you can see why this retrospective approach happens. You consider right at that start of that campaign, the planning phase, we get lost in a sea of development, creative testing, creative refinement. There's just so much going on. And so, in preaching this mantra planning for success starts early, we really want to define those metrics for success as early as possible. And as I said, keeping those in mind throughout our entire campaign period.

Luke Rogers:

So as a little practical demonstration, I'd like to do a little activity to help show this, and I'm going to need a volunteer for this. So if anybody is feeling brave, turn your microphone off and we're going to do a little fun memory activity.

Luke Rogers:

Come on, I promise it's not scary.

Jennifer:

All right. I'm really bad at this though.

Luke Rogers:

Cool. We've got Jennifer.

Jennifer:

Yeah.

Luke Rogers:

Okay. Thank you very much, Jennifer. Now it's nothing too difficult, I promise. So on the next slide, there's going to be 14 random words. You're going to have 30 seconds to memorise as many of those words as you can. Obviously don't write them down, now that would be cheating. Just try to keep them in your mind and you can play along as well everybody else. Just play along see how many you can remember in the 30 seconds.

Luke Rogers:

So I'm going to go next slide now. Go.

Luke Rogers:

And time. So Jennifer, what have you got for me?

Jennifer:

Biscuit, favour, bond, poison, flow, real, unlike.

Luke Rogers:

That's pretty good.

Jennifer:

That's about it, I think.

Luke Rogers:

Okay, so we've got seven there. That's pretty impressive, Jennifer, to get seven so well done on that. Good start.

Luke Rogers:

So, now we're going to do the same exercise, but this time we're going to do a little bit differently. So this time, remember that you got seven in your first attempt. This time, I want you to focus on remembering eight words. Now this might sound like a difficult challenge, but I want you to just focus on those eight words. Specifically just eight word that's all you're focusing on. I think you can do it, Jennifer. Are you ready?

Susan Benedyka:

Yes.

Luke Rogers:

Go.

Luke Rogers:

And that's time Jennifer. How'd you go?

Susan Benedyka:

Dribble, camp, sunrise, defeat, sketch. I think that's all I got.

Luke Rogers:

Okay, we got six there.

Jennifer:

Six? Yeah.

Luke Rogers:

That's okay. So you might have disproven my hypothesis, but that's okay Jennifer, it happens when we do live experimentation.

Luke Rogers:

So what's the point of this little experiment? You might have guessed already, but what I'm trying to get at here essentially is that when we undertake this challenge with a goal in mind, so setting that goal I set for Jennifer of remembering eight specific words, generally we find when this experiment's conducted across a much broader sample, we find that those who have that specific goal in mind are more likely to remember that amount of words compared to if they're just told to remember as many as they can.

Luke Rogers:

So what does this tell us about goal setting? Well, first of all, it tells us you perform better if you've set a goal, but secondly, there's some specific parametres that need to be met in order for a goal to be effective. And specifically, the literature told us that goals need to be specific and well defined and they need to be difficult, but they also need to achievable. So that's the method behind, first of all, asking Jennifer to do a baseline where she got eight words and then upping it by one extra word. So it's a difficult challenge, but it's within the realms of achievability for the person undertaking the test. So those are the two critical aspects that we need to have for setting goals is specific, but well defined and difficult and achievable.

Luke Rogers:

Now, I guess this really... this goes against the age old advice that I think teachers, coaches and parents have been dishing out for years is just do your best, try your hardest. It turns out the literature tells us that's not fantastic advice. We should instead, perhaps be saying, "Well, set yourself a target. It should be difficult, it should be specific, but it should be something that you feel you can achieve." So maybe next time your kids or nephew or nieces are nervous about an exam that could be some better advice than just start, do your best.

Luke Rogers:

So what does this mean for us when we are looking at setting our campaign objectives? Now we need to ensure that our goals are clearly defined and that they're difficult, but achievable and a framework that helps us to implement this when writing objectives is the SMART Framework. Now I'm sure most of you are probably familiar with this, it's a very widely known framework, but essentially it just keeps this in mind when we're writing objectives that they need to be specific, measurable, achievable, and as I mentioned, also difficult, realistic and time-based.

Luke Rogers:

So let's take a look at an example. Some of you may be familiar with this campaign Towards Zero was from Transport for New South Wales. And I think that Victorian THC actually also did this campaign as well. So I'll just... Can you hear and see this video?

Speaker 4:

We can see it but can't hear it at the moment.

Luke Rogers:

Okay. I think I just need to go back into...

Luke Rogers:

Okay, I didn't click the sound button, so I've clicked that now. So I'll just quickly press play and let know if you can here.

Speaker 5:

On our roads, what would be a more-

Speaker 4:

Yes.

Luke Rogers:

Yeah, okay. I'll just go full screen.

Luke Rogers:

Okay. There we go. Ready?

[Video plays]

Speaker 5:

In 2019, 352 people died on our roads. What would be a more acceptable number?

Speaker 6:

Acceptable? 70 maybe?

Speaker 5:

Actually, this is what 70 people looks like.

Speaker 6:

That's my family.

Speaker 5:

So now what do you think would be a more acceptable number?

Speaker 6:

Zero. Zero.

Speaker 7:

Dad.

[Video ends]

Luke Rogers:

Okay. Now that's a very... obviously a very emotional campaign with that goal of working towards a zero road toll on the roads in New South Wales. And the aims of this campaign is we shouldn't accept that people die on our roads, we should aim for zero road deaths. And secondly, all road users have a part to play in aiming to achieve zero road toll. Safety is a shared responsibility and we all need to be more aware of the risks and how to avoid them.

Luke Rogers:

So imagine you're in the campaign team and you've just... You are in the development stages for this campaign. You've just had a look at the concept and you're thinking about what would be our objectives to help define success for this campaign. And the CEO says to you, "Okay, our objective for this campaign is to record zero road deaths in New South Wales in 2021." What do we think of this as a campaign objective for that campaign?

Speaker 8:

It's unrealistic.

Luke Rogers:

Unrealistic. Yeah. So is it specific? Yes, it's specific. It's talking about the exact number of zero in New South Wales. Is it measurable? Yes, we can look at road statistics obviously to tell us this. Is it achievable? Well that comes back to the realisticness. I'm not so sure that this is realistic and this is achievable. What happens to this campaign goal on say January 10th, when there's tragically a road incident and somebody loses their life? What does that mean for our campaign objective then? Do we just say, "Okay. Well, we've had one fatality, but let's just aim now for two, because that's still really good if we achieve two." Well, no, that really defeats the purpose of setting the objective in the first place. So how do we make this goal more achievable? What if we drew the line further down?

Luke Rogers:

So there was 352 road deaths in New South Wales in 2019 so let's aim to reduce this to 250 in 2021. Again, not a practical campaign objective is it? Because we cannot say we're aiming to have over 200 people die on our roads in New South Wales this year. It's just not an acceptable message to come from a government organisation. So really to craft a realistic campaign objective for this campaign, we need to reshift our focus. And while obviously the aim of this campaign, it is to reduce the road toll in New South Wales, that's more of a secondary aim. Really the first objective for this campaign is around shifting attitudes towards the road toll. You can see from that video, it's about making it more than just a number, it's about personifying what was previously just been a statistic. So behaviourally, the campaign aims to increase New South Wales road users shared responsibility. It's building social norms to help people subscribe to that reference group around doing everything that they can to avoid the road toll and to minimise risk.

Luke Rogers:

So with this revised scope in mind, let's have a look at how we could craft a campaign objective. So, see a statistically significant shift in New South Wales road user's agreement that they can play a role in reducing the road toll between pre and post campaign research. So this example, it's specific. Yes, it's very specific where we want to see a statistically significant shift. If you don't know what that means, come talk to me afterwards. Is it measurable? Yes, it's measurable because we are doing pre and post campaign research to define this. Is it achievable? Yes, ideally if we're able to implement an effective campaign, this is achievable. Is it realistic? Yes. And is it difficult? Yes, it will be difficult. And is it time-based? Yes, through linking it to the campaign period and the pre and post campaign research, it is time-based.

Luke Rogers:

And now this behaviour change theory tells us that through influencing attitudes, we'll be working towards shifting behaviours as well. So although this objective is not directly linked to the road toll, to the number of road toll in New South Wales, it's going to have a positive effect on moving that toll towards zero at the end of the campaign.

Luke Rogers:

Now, because this is obviously has ethical considerations, there's political considerations, this is quite a complex example. So let's take a look at something that might be a little bit more straightforward.

Luke Rogers:

So the Healthy at Home campaign from Queensland Health, aims to encourage Queenslanders is to live a healthy and balanced lifestyle during COVID-19 pandemic. One of the key points of this campaign is a downloadable guide for free from the Queensland Health website, which is full of great tips and tricks around mental health, cooking healthy recipes and activities that you can do at home with family, with friends and whatnot, to help ease that transition that people have had to experience in the COVID-19 environment. So this campaign guide that's available for free, that this downloadable guide that's available for free, is a great indicator that we can use around whether there's engagement with this campaign.

Luke Rogers:

Now, if there's no guide available for another campaign, obviously engagement statistics could be things around unique website hits, reduced bounce rates on websites, increased click-through through socials, et cetera, et cetera. There's lots of options for engagement. So let's have a look at a campaign objective statement that we could craft around increasing our engagement.

Luke Rogers:

So achieve 20,000 download of the Healthy at Home guide from the Queensland Health website before July 2021. So again, we run through our metrics. Is it specific? Yes, very specific around the exact number that we want to achieve and the target behaviour of downloading the materials. Is it measurable? Yes, we'll have the website metrics to track this. Is it achievable? Again, yes, as long as our campaign has good engagement. Is it realistic? Yes. And is it time-based? Yes, by linking it to the end of the campaign in July 2021.

Luke Rogers:

Now you might be thinking, a high level of engagement with the campaign doesn't always mean that a campaign will be effective in changing behaviour. And you're exactly right. And that's why we need to consider multiple elements to set as our campaign objectives. We need to be casting a net as wide as we can to ensure that we're collecting excellent amount of data, in terms of actual concrete behavioural data. So engagement is one thing, we also need to look at as best as we can, measuring behaviour change.

Luke Rogers:

So for a campaign like this, that could be things like obesity or mental health statistics at the population level. So to help, I guess illustrate this point, say for example, we are able to measure engagement through our campaign objectives, but we didn't look at measuring behaviour change. What can we say about our campaign impact? Well, we can't really say anything definitively. And by the same token, if we didn't focus on engagement and we only looked at the population level and we saw really good behaviour change levels, can we actually attribute this to the campaign?

Luke Rogers:

No, we can't really because there's so many players in this space. There's different organisations offering health advice, but there's also McDonald's and Coca-Cola who are delivering negative health related messages during this time, so really we can't attribute anything to the campaign. So what we should be trying to do is, as I said, cast that net as wide as we can, measure as many metrics as we can that are related to our campaign to ensure that we can cross reference against our behavioural data. We know that we've got engagement, we know we've got awareness, we know we've got behavioural intention, and from that, we're able to draw as best we can, some more effectiveness of the campaign impact.

Luke Rogers:

So, that's all. Just a quick recap from me as well on the key points from today. So first of all, keep that mantra in mind that success starts early in terms of evaluating a campaign, but also keeping those objectives in our mind throughout the whole campaign period. Secondly, remember our goals, our objectives, they need to be... To be effective, they need to be specific and they need to be difficult, but achievable and try and utilise the SMART Framework to help set those objectives. And lastly, it's about casting that net as wide as we can, to ensure we're able to cross reference different data points around what our campaign effectiveness and what the behaviour change level has been.

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #2 Defining target audiences, ‘David Spice, Kantar’,’16 March 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

... change strategy and the communications needed to encourage Victorians to adopt recycling waste minimisation and the avoidance of waste creation. And it's that research that David's going to very quickly walk us through so that we understand how to know your demographics, what those key messages were specifically in relation to recycling and waste minimisation behaviour. David, welcome to our session today.

David Spicer:

Thank you very much. And I must apologise. I have works going on behind me. So if people can hear drills and saws and that sort of thing, I apologise in advance. Yeah, today's presentation is very much around that behaviour change, but also campaign tracking research that we've done recently. You'll probably recognise Wayne here from the Sustainability Victoria work that was done.

David Spicer:

This presentation, what I'll be going through is looking at recycling practice, recycling knowledge, recycling attitudes, but specifically in relation to the groups that we know are quite hard to reach. Firstly, quite hard to reach, quite hard to influence, but also demonstrate lower levels of, practice lower levels of knowledge, lower levels of recycling attitudes.

David Spicer:

And that tends to be by age, the younger people tend to perform more poorly overall for all of those measures. Those metropolitan areas, men, people who live in multi-unit dwellings or MUDs, those who speak languages other than English. Culturally and linguistically diverse or LOTE audiences.

David Spicer:

All of these have been shown time and time again to come up in the research as showing lower levels of practice, knowledge, attitudes. Some of you would've seen these findings before, but I will go over them again very quickly, as Susan says, just to form the basis of ongoing discussions as to, "All right, how do we think about talking to these groups?" These are our target groups. How do we conceptualise them? How do we talk to them?

David Spicer:

The methodology very briefly, it was a fairly long series of surveys. So the most recent iteration was tracking the Know Your Recycling campaign. So that was focusing in on the last three, May, July and October to coincide the different parts of the campaign. But the survey itself has been running since June, 2019. So we have a fair number of data points that we can look at, both over time and then looking at those groups at each time point.

Susan Benedyka:

Sorry, David, just to interrupt. Are you sharing your screen or hoping to share your screen with us?

David Spicer:

I thought I was sharing my screen.

Susan Benedyka:

No, you're not at the moment.

David Spicer:

Okay. Let's try that again, shall we?

Susan Benedyka:

Yep. Great.

David Spicer:

There we go. Can people see my screen now?

Susan Benedyka:

We can indeed. Thank you.

David Spicer:

I spent so long on this presentation I forgot to share my screen. You missed all the really good bits. Yeah, apologies for that. Starting up again. Yeah, going back to 2019. A number of different implementations of the survey itself with a good sample size.

David Spicer:

In each, we had 1,000 people that was split by male and female, roughly 50/50. 3 different age bands at about a third each and then metro and regional at about 70/30. So it's nice and representative. It's a good, big sample. We've got a lot of data points over time.

David Spicer:

Now I'm sharing my screen, it won't let me go to the next slide. Sorry about this. Now, there we go. All right. I'll talk you through this chart, because there's a fair amount going on. The first one is 'rates of incorrect recycling practice'. This is asking people, "Okay, what have you put in your recycling bin over the last I think it was three months timeframe?"

David Spicer:

If you ask all Victorians there, our data point at the top here, now it's going back a slide. All right. At the top here is all Victorians. If you ask all Victorians, "Have you put X, Y, and Z in your recycling bin?" 53% will say, "I've put something in my recycling bin that shouldn't have been in there." It's a test of knowledge. Essentially, rate of incorrect recycling is around about half. That's not the end of the world. It's not great, but it just means that for at least 50% of the population, they're putting something in, contamination in their bin.

David Spicer:

Looking down at the different groups that I mentioned before, metropolitan and regional. For this way, there wasn't actually a difference, although in other ways there is. Sometimes it comes out worse for metropolitan. The bar indicates rates of incorrect recycling. Males always, without fail, come out worse than females. We're not sure why there is, but men always perform worse than females in terms of knowledge, practice and so forth.

David Spicer:

Younger people, and particularly younger men, they tend to have much higher rates of incorrect recycling. Those who speak languages other than English at home, tend to have worse rates of recycling practice. And those who live in multi-unit dwellings also have worse rates of incorrect recycling practice.

David Spicer:

Looking at it over time, what this shows is that it tends to bump up and down, but consistently since June 2018, all the way back there, here's our orange bar here. This is all Victorians. And you can see that within that population consistently over time, that males, younger, multi-unit dwellers, they have higher rates of incorrect recycling practice. Even though it's not always significant year on year, it's always higher. Very, very consistent finding.

David Spicer:

Knowledge. This is a slightly different question, though the outputs look very similar. We ask, "Is it okay to put X, Y, and Z in your recycling bin?" It's things that are correct. So cardboard that can go in the bin, that's fine. And things that are incorrect. For example, broken glass or thin plastics like plastic bags and so forth. So again, test of knowledge here.

David Spicer:

So this shows that if you ask all Victorians, "Can you put X, Y, and Z in your recycling bin?" As opposed to have you done it, 73% will get at least one of them wrong. That sounds high but in fact, the test is quite hard in that you need to get all of them absolutely correct. This is an indicator of knowledge, but it is actually quite a hard test.

David Spicer:

Just to run through those groups again, metropolitan higher than regional. They have lower knowledge of what can and can't go in their business. Males perform worse than females. Age, this time around did not show a significant difference. Though, if you look at 18 to 35 versus 56 or more, it's probably significantly different. Those who speak languages other than English at home, higher than those who speak English only at home. And for knowledge, there wasn't a difference for this wave for our multi-unit dwellers.

David Spicer:

Again, not all these are significant this time round, but the same pattern just keeps coming up again and again, as you'll see here. Here is our Victorians, ticking along there. And once again, you see the same thing that metropolitan dwellers, males, culturally and linguistically diverse. They're always higher. They're not always significantly so, but they're always above that orange line.

David Spicer:

All right. Attitudes towards recycling. So there's a big attitudinal bank in the questionnaire, which asks for positive and negative attitudes towards recycling. Things like 'it is the responsibility of every individual to put the right items in the bin'. 'Recycling is important to protect the environment in Victoria and so forth'. So what we find again, very consistently year on year, is that if you ask all Victorians, they're very, very positive generally about recycling. They see it as a shared responsibility. It's an important thing to do. It's important for the environment.

David Spicer:

This green bars here showed agreements, the orange showed disagreement. With all of these very positive attitudes towards recycling, they seemed to be very, very strong in terms of their agreement and weak in their disagreement. Until you get to the part where it says, "I know exactly what goes in my recycling bin," then you start to get more people disagreeing with that. So there's some acknowledgement that people are a bit confused about what goes in the bin. But in terms of recycling is an important and a good thing to do, people generally agree.

David Spicer:

What this table does is to take those positive statements I showed you before, it's the responsibility of every individual to put the right things in the bin. And it compares it by gender, men and women, age, young and old, language. And so what you see here, not a lot of difference. These arrows indicate significantly higher or significantly lower.

David Spicer:

If you look at the positive statements, you don't really see much by men. You don't really see much by language, but you do see a little bit by age in terms of difference. Younger Victorians tend to have a more negative attitude towards recycling, but not a lot of difference by other groups. Apart from this younger Victorian difference here, positive attitudes towards recycling, fairly, fairly consistent across the population.

David Spicer:

To the negative. Deliberately, the bank of statements is mixed up with positive and negative together. Things like, it's really hard to know what you're supposed to put in your bin and what you shouldn't. My recycling bin is too small. It's the recycling company's responsibility to remove non-recyclable items.

David Spicer:

When you start getting into the negative type comments here, what you see is that people tend to disagree. The reverse of what we saw before. Again, it's just showing that overall positive attitude towards recycling in Victoria. But when you start looking at these negative attitudes by the demographics that I mentioned before, you start to see a lot more differences. There's a lot more up and down areas here, showing you the higher or lower for different groups.

David Spicer:

Men, for example, tend to hold a lot more negative attitudes towards recycling. They are more likely than women to perceive that recycling is not worth it. It ends up the landfill. That it's the recycling company's responsibility to remove non-recyclable items. It's too hard to know to get the bin out on recycling night. Just generally more negative overall.

David Spicer:

Same with younger people, same difference that we had before. More negative attitudes. And some smaller differences here for English and CALD performances. Fairly consistent for positive attitudes, but you get those differences by those key demographic groups for negative attitudes.

David Spicer:

And my presentation is really short because I get to hand over to other people to talk more specifically about younger and older Victorians, regional versus metro, men and women, multi-unit dwellers, CALD and LOTE. And I think the idea behind this is that, to create an avatar, which is a phrase I learned just the other day. In that, okay, how do we think about these groups?

David Spicer:

If we're going to talk to them, if we're going to talk specifically to men or to younger men, what do the attitudes of this group look like? How do we talk to them to influence knowledge? Which in turn, influences behaviour, which in turn influences the outcomes that we're looking for, a reduction in contamination of recycling bins. I'm not sure how we are for time. Were there any questions on my presentation before I hand over and other people can go into the detail?

Susan Benedyka:

That would be fantastic. I'd really love to encourage questions into the chat function. Particularly of David while we've got him in the room. David's only going to be with us for another few minutes. Do you have any questions for David about what the data is showing and what it means for you and the target audiences you'll be going for? Please use the chat function. We would love to see some questions coming up. And David, I might ask if you could stop sharing your screen.

David Spicer:

Stop sharing the this point? Yep. No worries. Hang on. I'll have it.

Susan Benedyka:

Thank you. Anything that you have that you really, while we've got David in the room and while we've got that research in the room. Some of you may have seen that research. Oh yes. Ian, really good question. When was this data collected, David?

David Spicer:

Sure. Yep. The most recent one was towards the end of last year. So this was in October '20.

Susan Benedyka:

Great. So that people have come out of lockdowns, they're still really being a bit more aware of what's going on around them, but it's in that late 2020. Abby has also said, "Thank you, David. That was really clear and good evidence." Some of you may have seen this in early December. Karen says, "Do you have any advice for individual councils about how to get their data out of the statewide data, especially if they can't afford their own research?"

David Spicer:

Yeah. Yes, we can do that. We are however, limited by sample science. It's 1,000 overall. And if you start carving that up by smaller councils, for example, you're not going to get a lot of people. If you do have a request, we could pull the data out because we know which councils from the survey data.

David Spicer:

If you have a particular thing that you are interested in, perhaps get in touch via Sustainability Victoria, we can see if we can answer your question. But just with the caveat that whatever sample size we pull, unless you're say City of Melbourne, obviously not, it will be a relatively small number of people.

David Spicer:

And we have done ad hoc projects for some councils. Moreland, for example, I'm not sure if they're on the call, but some have been able to afford their own surveys. And I understand not every council can. Yeah, it is possible relatively inexpensively to do a survey within a council area if you did want to commission it outside of what's done by Sustainability Victoria.

Susan Benedyka:

Thank you. Any other questions for David? Karen?

Karen Cosson:

Oh, well, if anyone else has got a question. But David, would you say that the data is applicable to all of the state? Would councils in regional Victoria, and particularly rural councils, have any confidence that they could say we have got the same target audiences or the specific challenge groups?

David Spicer:

I would imagine so. Yeah. And the reason I say that is just, it is so consistent. It doesn't really matter. I mentioned Moreland before, for example. We found the same findings there. And that's obviously Morgan's going to be different from small regional council. But in more recent work for Sustainability Victoria, where there's another larger survey that's been done, that's still in progress, we found the same thing over and over again. Unless you had a very unusual demographic profile in your council area, I would imagine it would be the same.

Susan Benedyka:

Actually, Brian asked quite a good question. Could it be split metro versus rural because they seem to have very different characteristics?

David Spicer:

They do. Yeah. And that's one of the findings that we keep finding that regional dwellers generally do better. Yeah, that was one of the findings throughout, that regional dwellers do tend to do better. That could be to do with the characteristics of regional Victoria. There are fewer multi-unit dwellings, for example. A different age profile as well. All these things start to tie in together. But yeah, certainly, that metro, regional or rural split is apparent.

Susan Benedyka:

Well, David, I wonder, if you've got anything on that rural data versus metro data, just as a capture, that would be so useful for the audience that we have today.

David Spicer:

Yep. Yep. Most definitely. I mean, yeah. You saw some of this in the presentation from before. Yeah. I mean, I can tell you there's a difference and I can tell you where there's a difference. I can't necessarily tell you why there's a difference. I'm not sure what it is about regional or rural Victoria that makes a difference. But they just, they perform better, but I can certainly call out some numbers if people are interested.

Susan Benedyka:

I'm incredibly biased. It's just because we're better people I think.

David Spicer:

Oh, that's right. We're a much better class of people. Yeah.

Susan Benedyka:

David, I want to thank you very much for that presentation. I know that you are particularly busy. And I'm really pleased that you were able to recap for us and set the scene. And we are now going to go on a choose your own adventure. So people will actually be able to say what of this information matters to me and how can I go to a workshop that's really going to give me more information for the campaigns I run? My particular thanks to you, David. And thank you very much-

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #3 Behaviour change’, ‘Emily Dunstan, Sustainability Victoria, ’13 April 2021’]

Susan:

... but in social research at Sustainability Victoria. And she's got a very good name for herself, she calls herself "The Advocate for Irrationality". And she is trying to help her colleagues understand why people do what they do, and why change is not always as simple as just providing information. So she's really had a decade of work in education, science, communication and behaviour change. And that work's actually taken her from zoos, to schools, to humanitarian organisations, and finally to government.

Susan:

She absolutely loves devising strategies to use, to engage audiences across a broad spectrum, and help program practitioners, you, to come up with interventions that mean greatest success at achieving change. I'd like to warmly welcome you, Emily, and we're looking forward to your presentation.

Emily:

Thanks, Susan. And thanks everyone for having me. I'm just going to... This is the... always glitch a bit is when you share the screen and hope for the best. I was on leave last week and my computer decided to stay on leave yesterday. So I've been doing my best to try and make things work, but I'm hoping that everyone can see that screen. All right.

Susan:

We can see the screen. Everything's great. Thank you very much.

Emily Dunstan:

Fabulous. So my role today is to talk through some of the basics around why we use behaviour in government programs and how we've used particularly a behavioural approach in Sustainability Victoria's work, for the Recycling Victoria policy, which I know is a great interest in many of you. So I'm going to go through today and set the scene a little bit about why behaviour is so critical in policies and government and campaigning and a little about what it looks like to use behaviour change in government and the approach we use and why.

Emily:

Government really does need to understand behaviour. The success of a policy or legislative intervention is going to always rely on it. And government's historically been pretty good at producing good technical solutions or even policies which outline the rules and the regulations. However, as we've all just explained in some of our examples, just because we have rules doesn't mean we follow them all the time in all instances.

Emily:

So, government has generally seen, I think in the last couple of decades, the value of behaviour change and really planning at the outset to increase the uptake of the policy and the rules and the interventions that we put forward. Just because you give someone a new bin doesn't mean that they're going to use it correctly. And so, we've had to do this more and more because people are ultimately very critical to the success of a policy, whether it be people in government drafting it or people that are served by government.

Emily:

And humans are really a fun species. We don't always do what we think we should be doing or what we think would be logical to be doing. And to illustrate this point, I know we just went through an example, but if you could pop down maybe in the chat, some examples of things where you've done something that you didn't intend to do, or perhaps you had full intentions to do something, but didn't go through with it. And I think I was going to say Stan's probably a very good example of actually having the intention and going through all of it so well done. But if you've got any of those little quirky kind of anecdotes, please pop them in the chat window.

Emily:

My classic, which I share is over-eating at family functions. The social occasion is just so strong for me, the effort that went into the preparing of the meals, not wanting to upset the important people in my world. And I know about food waste. I know that I probably shouldn't be waste in particular food, but whether in eating or preparing those things, there are lots of factors at play.

Emily:

And despite thinking of myself as a rational being as well, and listening to even the immediate and physical sensory feedback in my own body, telling me that I've had enough and I should put the cake down. I'm still someone that actually doesn't go through necessarily what I intend to in that moment. And if you can't see it in yourself, then I'm sure you can see that kind of irrationality in the funny quirk of humans in others.

Emily:

So these are some examples that I use just to highlight that how we do lots of really bizarre and risky things as humans. We do things for emotional reasons. We do things because others did it. Things like food eating competitions, or rock climbing without ropes in the bottom left hand corner. Even the idea of a stretch Hummer, you wouldn't probably say that that's the most rational thing to be pursuing in the world.

Emily:

So humans are very interesting and it's certainly given me a lot of cause for interest over the many years, because we aren't rational. And it's this irrationality in our quirks that makes it really vital for government at all levels to be considering the people that are at the heart of all of our policies and programs. And rationality is not bad. So our brains and, the other two speakers will talk a little bit more about the System one and System two thinking, but our brains have really led us to be an incredibly successful species in so many ways. But it also means we don't always do things that are at our best interest when you consider everything.

Emily:

And this is a key thing to grasp because it means we need to look at different ways to change behaviour and go beyond the tools that perhaps you tended to default towards. And one of those tools, and many of us who work in pro-environmental work will be familiar with this. We've really relied heavily on providing lots of information as a key tactic. If we tell them what will happen, they'll change. And I wish it was that simple. But information intensive approaches are not always successful. I'm sure you've got examples in your experiences as well.

Emily:

I get why we used them though, and credit to Jenni and the BehaviourWorks team for this quote for sharing with me many years ago. We're often limited and we can feel like information is the only tool we have in our toolbox. And some of us rely heavily on information too, because it's what worked for us, knowing the stats, the facts, the figures that convinced us to act, or at least it felt like it convinced us to act.

Emily:

And using lots of info will certainly work for a few people, but we could also argue that we're in an era now where there's more information available than ever at our fingertips, but we are still not seeing the changes in the behaviours that we would need and want. So producing more of that isn't necessarily going to help us widen our circle outside that green bubble either. And this is really part of reason why information only gets us so far. Too much of it can really start to overwhelm.

Emily:

Humans love the idea of information. We also love the idea of choice, don't you force something on me, but the reality actually is, we're not that great when presented with lots of it. And for something totally new to us, a little bit of information tailored to us can certainly help us make better decisions. But there's a point at which we get too much, becomes hard to process it all at once and to compare all of those options. And so we tune out and essentially cognitively run away.

Emily:

Some examples of where this might be happening. Certainly, you can see there's a real theme with cake and me, but the Brunetti's counter is somewhere where I've really struggled to make a decision. And certainly Netflix and streaming, which many of us have probably experienced last year with the many, many lockdowns.

Emily:

So we have so many more tools we can use. And the most successful change programs, essentially have used many tools, many times, over many, many years. And to illustrate this point, here is an example of a major social change and the number and variety of interventions that have been required. This is a graph showing some of the major things around tackling tobacco use, and you can see there are many levers being pulled here. And there's lots of work that has been done to consider what drives smoking and then what can block it over a long, long period of time to get those results.

Emily:

So having more tools and having more targeted tools will always help. And there's an important caveat to note here, every intervention we put forward will inevitably work for someone. We're all pretty diverse in many ways as well, even knowing those commonalities of barriers that we experience, but not every intervention will work for everyone. And it's tricky when we're to plan campaigns and interventions that are trying to get to as many people as possible.

Emily:

We can get some positive results from some audiences with one tool. And so we often cling to that and then we can have a tendency to ignore some of the other gains that we can make through other tools. But I really encourage you to try as many different tools as you're able to. And the best way to choose which ones to learn more about your audiences and the customers that are at the heart of all of these programs.

Emily:

And we need to look at other drivers of behaviour and find ways to put them into play. So, there'll be a little bit more about this, and Donna's got some great stuff to share a little bit later on about the different drivers. But considering things like emotions and habits and structures, the nudge default stuff. And we talked about in our breakout room, actually sometimes the best way is to not to have to convince 6 million Victorians to voluntarily do something. Sometimes you do need some regulation and legislation.

Emily:

Sometimes it's just about providing and building the infrastructure and the tools that they need right there, like the kitchen caddy, which we talked about in our group. But ideally, you would want a mix of interventions that cover more than one of these drivers, and that will set you up for greater success. And the more you know about the behaviour in the audience, the more confidence you'll have in knowing which drivers to include.

Emily:

There we go, which brings me to my fourth major thing today. So, know your target audience because you are probably not them. The more we know the better off our interventions are going to be. And Donna and Jenni today are going to be talking you through today some of the frameworks use and why using them will set you up for success on this front. But in many cases, whilst you might have some overlaps from some of the segments that you're talking to, you can already probably tell just based from the line of work, that you're in, the types of jobs that you're doing, the types of causes that you are seeking out to change. You're probably not a big part of your target audience.

Emily:

So how do we find out at about our audiences? This is a diagram I love from a collective impact project that was in Logan in Queensland. And essentially they set up to seek out evidence from three sources of knowledge to help understand the problem in the system. And we're pretty good in this group at practitioner knowledge. This is the stuff we know through our experiences and our work so far, but I strongly encourage you to have a look at sources of knowledge from the other areas.

Emily:

So looking at your academic and your expert peer reviewed stuff, looking at what the universities are testing and trialing. And then of course, going to the audience themselves. Going and observing where you can, speaking to them, focus groups, surveys, all of those things are really, really helpful. Because if you can get sources from all three points, you're going to be much better off in understanding the whole problem. The other major thing, oh, is it going to work? Oh, it had a bit of a brain fart. There we go.

Emily:

The other major thing to note is that when we talk about behaviour changes as the goal, we mean visible behaviours. So many things drive visible behaviours but I really encourage you to keep setting that visible behaviour as your end goal. And Jenny will talk a little bit more about this as well. But I'm sure you all understand too, that sometimes we'll change our attitudes and that will lead to changing your behaviour. But sometimes we also just adopt behaviours without much thought. And then we might go back and change our attitudes later, once we've given things to go. So it isn't always a beautiful linear format.

Emily:

So if you only set your goal posts being about changing minds, you're actually leaving a bit of your planning short. So behaviours are visible, and you really want to make sure that you use them also because they're measurable. And even though there's lots of invisible stuff that drives them, it is much easier to see when you've actually succeeded in this instance too.

Emily:

At Sustainability Victoria, we use this overarching process and you'll see from others as they present today, there are similarities in many of these frameworks. And they'll be able to share some more specific ones and theories to use. And we have different behavioural theories and frameworks that we use here at SV at different stages of our process. But overall, essentially, we have five major steps. We want to understand the problem in the system. We want to identify and prioritise the types of target behaviours we want to achieve.

Emily:

We want to gather insights to learn as much about what's going to work and what's not going to work, use those insights to develop out our interventions and then eventually plan trial, roll it out. And for Recycling Victoria, and the campaign work we've been doing on that front, understanding the problem of course has come first. And we've had a couple of years of looking at this, the challenges that we have around waste disposal and recycling, and I'm sure this group here don't need to go into much detail about all the things that you've all seen in your communities as well.

Emily:

This is a very short summary of the problem by the way, but it gives you a bit of an idea of what are the things that you're having to overcome. And we've actually used three different behavioural models to inform our approach for our Recycling Victoria work. Some are more about outlining the process in establishing the behaviours we want. Some are more about identifying what drives the current behaviours now as well.

Emily:

So, I won't go into heaps of detail about those, but just so you get a sense of, there's not always just one that we go for, we have a bit of a look at different things and say, all right, this one might help us diagnose stuff whereas, other ones might help us plan out what we can actually do in terms of tactics. It's going to... There we go.

Emily:

And as I said, with those three bubbles, we've been using knowledge from three different sources. The practitioners like ourselves, going to councils, going to others who've been trying these things. Going to the audiences directly, looking at what worked previously, and then that wider academic base as well. And working with groups like BehaviourWorks with Jenni and the waste collaboration research that we've been doing with them too.

Emily:

And doing all of this, means that we get some key insights that we can start to use and leverage in our tactics and the design of our campaign. I won't go through all of these in detail, you can see them there, but we've been able to pull out some things to really guide the interventions and the materials that we're designing and using. And there'll be some similar concepts I'm sure that you will resonate with you as well with simplicity, making things as easy as possible with finding that making things really personally relevant and telling this story like when it comes to recycling, what happens when we get this right? That's been a real motivating factor for a lot of other people.

Emily:

And then it helps us also to identify their key segments or audiences that actually could do a little bit more support. So culturally, linguistically, diverse communities, they've got the struggle of having to try and understand as well, lots of things that we've present in English and so there's even more challenges for those sorts of segments as well. And ultimately, as I'm sure all of you know recycling and disposing of waste is a fairly low engagement behaviour, once we've kind of done it a few times, we tend to go into habit mode. So it is a hard one to try and intervene and make some changes on.

Emily:

And how this all feeds into actually what we are designing and how we communicate about this issue. These sorts of points then become our blueprint or a checklist when we're creating materials or designing interventions. Are we doing these things well? And so these have been some really core principles for us as we've gone through Recycling Victoria, really demonstrating the right behaviours as clearly and simply and visually as we can. Telling that story and seeing the bigger impacts, the positive ones where we can, but also, that sometimes a small contaminant can cause a big kerfuffle in that processing as well.

Emily:

And being that consistency as well in terms of what we're presenting, but still being able to adapt to different contexts and the different systems that are out there currently within Victoria. So ultimately, hopefully you've got an understanding that behaviour is key to policy design and implementation. And the earlier we start to consider it the better off we will be and the more success we're going to be having down the track.

Emily:

So it's not just about that technical solution, it's about making sure that people are well set up to adopt those solutions and make it really super simple for them. But I think I'll leave it there because I think there's going to be some other good stuff to come, but happy to take questions if you've got time as well.

Susan:

Thanks very much Emily. So, questions as usual, if you could type them into the chat function and we can do a quick Q and A now. We will be going into some breakout rooms so you can make some sense of that material, but if you've got any questions directly now for Emily, that would be fantastic. Couple of reminders, there has been a workbook sent to you. It's a writeable PDF, and you can take notes into that workbook. And the PowerPoints are always sent straight after the session so that you get that information for you.

Susan:

Alice has asked a really good question here, Emily, about, well, how did you choose those behaviour models, those three, of all of many behaviour models out there?

Emily:

Part of it's simplicity, Alice, part of it's a bit of practice and what's worked before as well. So at SV and having worked with BehaviourWorks for a long time, looking at those different eight drivers that's been a really good schemer for us to just keep checking in and seeing what do we think is driving that stuff. So that seems to be a pretty cool part of what we do a lot. And then Susan Michie's work with behaviour change wheel, COM-B, it's called Capability Opportunity Motivation, is also a quite a simple way to kind of check and come up with different intervention.

Emily:

So, part of it's about experience and those sorts of things have worked quite well for us. And also, for groups like yourselves too, if we're going to be communicating this and giving some schemas for people to use, those ones I've found are readily adopted. You can easily use them and without too much background, academic deep stuff that you need, you don't have to read a thesis on the whole thing. It's pretty easy to pick up and run with.

Emily:

And this stages of change model is something that through our creative agency as well that they've used quite a bit. And that's been very much a part of mapping out which communications or which tactics as well we need at different points. So if you're thinking about rolling out a campaign in your council area, you might need some preparation stuff up the front, that precontemplation materials that helps target, why is this important? And what's coming versus stuff down the end. There's a slightly different tactic you might use to try and maintain the habits that you're trying to set up as well.

Emily:

So that's helped that agency think about what are the different tools at different times to be able to roll that out.

Susan:

I think two key messages that you had Emily was that, no one intervention suits all participants. And the second one is, people are very different parts of their own journey, so that you might have a group of people in pre-contemplation, when you've got a group of people who are highly motivated, doing what they think is the right thing but they might have a small change that needs to be made.

Emily:

Exactly.

Susan:

Very interesting situation.

Emily:

Yeah.

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #3 Selecting behaviours, ‘Jenni Downes, BehaviourWorks Australia, ’13 April 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

...is experienced in applied social research for impact. She specialises in behaviour change, program design evaluation, alongside systems led research. To develop effective policies, programs, and campaigns. And the campaigns can be on all sorts of levels, household level, organisational level, and society wide changes. And with a particular focus on a sustainable and circular future. She has particular passion for resource efficiency, unique and unmatched expertise and understanding the application of behavioural insights to waste avoidance and recycling behaviours. Particularly for municipal waste and resource recovery in Australia. So really the perfect speaker for us right now. Welcome along, Jenni. I'm really looking forward to your presentation.

Jenni Downes:

Thanks, Susan. It's really great to be here and to be able to share a little bit of what I've been able to learn over the last 10 years and particularly the way that BehaviourWorks approaches it. So what I really want to start with is actually, how do you know what behaviours that you actually want to target? And how can you think about those behaviours and define them in ways that will really increase the success of your campaign? So, as Susan says, I work at BehaviourWorks. We're a university based research centre, but we partner with all levels of government. With private and public organisations to really do on the ground practical research.

Jenni Downes:

And we invest a lot of time in understanding about why behaviour happens and how to change it. But even with all of the expertise that our Institute has gathered together and all of our experience, behaviour change is hard. There are no magic pills or silver bullets to it. But what we have developed over, I guess the time working with all of our partners, is an approach to behaviour change that we think really increases the odds of those campaigns being successful. And we do that through a method that goes through three main stages. And while our method is quite complicated, and this is not a model that I'm necessarily proposing to you guys, because there's a huge amount involved in this.

Jenni Downes:

What it does is have a focus on, as Em said, really understanding our target behaviours and our audiences. Before, jumping into what we're going to do in our campaigns and try to change it. So our first stage is the problem stage. Where we really actually understand, what is the problem you're trying to change? And what's the goal? What do you want to see at the end, that has changed? And then the second stage is kind of deep diving into those behaviours and the audience is timeless at understand them. And only at the third stage, do we actually look at what we're going to do and how we're going to do. So if you can remember the SV process, they kind of had five steps in their process. And the first one was really around defining the problem and understanding the behaviours. And that's for us what I'm going to look at. But to really keep it simple for you guys, what we're going to do in the next 20 minutes is go through three steps around selecting behaviours.

Jenni Downes:

Each of these three steps is in the workbook that Susan mentioned, which you may or may not have open. But we're going to look at how to brainstorm a long list of behaviours to define them in ways that actually improve the chances of the campaign, really getting that change that you want to see. And then prioritising them because often there are so many things that we need to change. But we know from experience that getting down to just one or two changes that you want to see at any particular time really makes a big difference to how broad this change that you can achieve in your community. So starting with brainstorming, I guess if we think about the Recycling Victoria campaign, there might kind of be three, sorry, four components to this overall policy that your council might be interested in right now. And over these next 10 years and beyond.

Jenni Downes:

So, obviously the continued focus on commingled recycling and particularly reducing the contamination, the separating of the glass stream, introduction of some sort of FOGO and of food waste collection. And obviously still, always getting back to that really important aspect of reducing the overall waste. So what I want to do is just start by thinking. I going to ask you to type into the chat a number of times through this process. But if you are thinking about commingled recycling, if you are really focusing on that yellow. If you do have a yellow lid, what are some of the behaviours that you are interested in for your campaign? Type them into the chat, put in some ideas that you have around that. What you want people to be doing?

Jenni Downes:

We've got 'not bagging recycling', 'correctly separating out plastics', 'removing the glass', 'generally reducing contamination'. I think that's caring... Yeah. 'Getting the right things in'. I think that's pretty clear for the commingled overall. What we really want is we want the right stuff in. And we want them to keep the wrong stuff out. Right? It's a lot more complicated than that, but at a simple level, they're the two things that we're really trying to achieve. If we are thinking about a glass stream. And some of you may actually have already piloted or even begun a separate glass service. Some of you may be still considering this. But if thinking about how to separate out that glass stream, what do you think some of those behaviours might be in terms of rolling out. Whether it's a bin or a crate or a drop-off thing?

Jenni Downes:

Yep. So we've got 'understanding the new service', 'moving the glass from the yellow bin to the purple bin', 'putting the new bin out on the right day', 'making sure it's only the right glass'. So here's some of those that I came up with. Which we've got some of those from the chat. One of the behaviours that often comes up with a new service is just don't complain about it. Setting up the internal system. As we heard getting the right containers in, putting the bin out on the correct day. There's a number of behaviours, if we were doing this. I'm thinking about FOGO again. If you are either adding food into your green bin, or perhaps you're rolling out a new bin, perhaps you're changing your red bin service to go with your FOGO service, some of the behaviours that might be involved in that?

Jenni Downes:

Yep. So again, 'getting the food into the right bin into the green bin, not the red bin', 'don't complain'. Yeah, right? Balancing your FOGO with your compost, if you already have a compost, that's an interesting one. 'Not using plastic bags', 'using the right liners or not using liners'. So again, there's a whole range of behaviours that are involved if your campaign is focused around FOGO. And obviously reducing waste is a massive one. We won't look at it today in our short period of time. You can see that one of the things that it's really good to do to start off with is actually to think about what is it you're doing. And what are some of the behaviours that need to change in order for this to work. And you can see just from the chat today, the couple of minutes you've had to think about this.

Jenni Downes:

We're already getting some really long lists. Like I said, that's what happens. You get long lists of behaviours that you want to change. So I guess doing that off the top of your head. Maybe with your team, getting a really long list is a really good place to start. So we really recommend going broad, going big, getting down as many things as you can as the first step. And you'll see that we've even put a table in the workbook for you to be able to do that. Just the top of mind list the things that you might want to change. But our second step is actually then thinking through what do we mean by behaviour when we're talking about behaviour change? So when we think about behaviour, and Em alluded to this before, behaviour is different to attitudes, beliefs, our emotions about things.

Jenni Downes:

So we try to define behaviour using a few criteria to make sure that we really are targeting behaviour and not some of these other things. So our first thing is that behaviour is 'observable'. You should be able to imagine someone doing the thing that you said. So if it's putting out the right bin on the day, you can picture someone picking their bin up, dragging it down to the driveway and putting it on the street. The next thing is actually about being really specific. So we use the word 'indivisible', but this just means being as specific as possible. Really breaking it down to an individual thing that someone can do. So, when I talked about contamination, I talked about putting the right stuff in. That's a really a big category of behaviours, right? Because there's a whole lot of right stuff that should be going in.

Jenni Downes:

So when we want to really start defining our behaviours, we need to be going down and breaking them up into each of the individual actions that are actually involved. The next one is quite interesting. And this is sometimes a bit counterintuitive, is actually focusing on the 'desirable' behaviour. So what you want them to do, rather than what you don't want them to do. So I put up before one of the behaviours you might want is not complaining. And that might be a goal that you have, but it's not really a behaviour, right? You can't actually see someone not complaining. So what you might want to do is think about what is it you actually want them to do when they get the service. I say, I want them to, get the flyer about the new bin and accept it. And be ready, and actually start using the bin when they get it rather than complaining.

Jenni Downes:

So trying to flip things around. And the final one is the 'end-state'. So thinking about the final behaviour that you want them to do, which can then actually impact the problem. And you'll see, even if, in the behaviours that I listed on the slides before, some of those were actually not the end-state behaviour. And I talked about for glass actually setting up a new system to collect glass. So that's actually a pre step in order to be putting glass into a bin. But when we start to narrow it down this long list, so the long list, the brainstorm, everything we can think of. We now want to start narrowing it down. We use these criteria to actually start playing with those different ideas that we had before. And trying to rewrite them, using these different criteria.

Jenni Downes:

And so what I'd like you to do is in the chat. I want you to think of either one of the ones you suggested before or something someone else suggested before. And I want you to write the original idea and then try and rephrase it using one of these criteria. So I might have, set up a separate collection system is not the end-state. So then I would follow with actually putting the glass containers into the bin is the final behaviour. So try and think, look through the chat, look back through any of those behaviours and see if you can find one that doesn't meet one of these criteria. And can you rewrite it to actually meet one of these criteria?

Jenni Downes:

Yeah. So we had one which was plastic bags. So we've changed it to putting materials in the bin loose. That's a really good one. Because we often think about don't bag your recycling, but what's the alternative? And that's a really interesting one, just as an example, because the opposite to not bagging your recycling could be placing it in loose. Or it could be carrying it out in a plastic bag and pouring the bag into the bin, right? So if we start to think about what we want people to do, we realise that they actually opens up, and the number of things that they could be doing. And this actually helps us to understand why sometimes it can be challenging when we think it's really simple. We just want people not to do this. Or we just want people to do this, that when we start to apply these criteria, we realise that it can be quite difficult working out what exactly we want people to do.

Jenni Downes:

So in the workbook, we take you through this process to actually take your brainstorm, listen, and start applying these criteria to it. So that we can actually get to behaviours that are observable, indivisible, desirable, and end-state. Once we've done that, this is a kind of getting to the behaviours that we want. The next step that we like to go through is actually defining those behaviours very clearly. And the way we do that is to think about the different elements that are actually involved in a behaviour. And we is this kind of idea of who do you want to do what? With what? When and where? So we break our behaviours down into these five elements to actually think through who is it that we want to do the behaviour? What do we want them to do? To what particular item? Particularly in waste, it's usually in a item. When do we want to do it? And where are they doing that?

Jenni Downes:

So, as an example we might have... Oh, and the reason we go to this level of detail is because we find that when we specify or define our behaviours. This specifically, that it actually, again, really helps us focus our interventions to be of much greater chance of being successful and getting that behaviour change. As Em said, just about anything you try, will work for some people. But what you really are hoping for is that you can use a efficient amount of resources to get a really broad scale change across your community. And so when you go to this date of this step of breaking down your behaviours and defining them like this, you're really increasing the chance that you're actually going to get this change.

Jenni Downes:

So as an example, you might have your behaviour. You might say, "Okay, we've got individuals, avoid single use plastic whenever they're out of home." That might be one of our waste reduction behaviours if we were focusing on waste reduction. And so again, take one of those behaviours that we've talked about and see, can you write it out using each of these five actions? Can you put it into a sentence where you have, who is doing what? With what? When and where. Have a go pop something into the chat, see if you can get each of these five things into your behaviour.

Jenni Downes:

Okay. So we've got 'individuals use a reusable coffee cup whenever they buy a takeaway coffee'. Yep. 'Residents correctly, sorting food waste whenever they're at home' b. So you can see now we're getting a little bit more specific. So these sound quite similar to the behaviours that we had above. But if we look at these sentences, we can actually break them down and say, "Okay, we want individuals." That's our target audience, they might be residents. You can be as specific as you like. "We want them to use a reusable coffee cup specifically, whenever they're getting takeaway coffee." So we know that's out of home. So actually starting to break our behaviours down. If we had one of the examples that we had before was putting recycling in the bit loose. So we could do that similarly. We can say residents, put the recycling into the bin loose when they're taking the recycling from the home to the kerbside bin. Or we could say residents collect their recycling loose inside the house before they take it to the kerbside bin.

Jenni Downes:

So you can see how, when we do these, we are getting to very specific actions that we want people to do. Again, the workbook takes you through a process. So getting used to using all of these elements when you're defining your behaviour can be really helpful. But I want to take you through an example of how you can really take this to the next level. And this is kind of going quite deep into this stage. And as you work through the workbook, I think you'll find that it is easy to start at this level and then to start thinking about it even further. This is great, we've got young people, Grace has suggested. So we're really honing that audience in. So as an example, if we take this one and we think about it a little bit more, and we think about some of those criteria that I had before, about things being observable, being desirable and being very specific and indivisible.

Jenni Downes:

So we could think about, let's be specific. So we said out of home, but really maybe we're thinking about standard re-usable and single use plastic is generally focused around food. So maybe we're thinking at when they're at food service outlets. And if we look at our action, we've got the void, which is actually the negative, right? You can't... Avoiding is not doing something, so what do we actually want them to do? Maybe we want them to refuse single use plastic. And then we can be more specific with the time and say when they're offered at food service outlets. So that's really specific for the timing, but actually our target is still pretty generic. So let's be really specific. Let's say we use single use plastic straws. And just as an example, the reason that it's quite helpful to go to this level, one of my colleagues did some research around people's habits around avoiding different single use plastics.

Jenni Downes:

And they found some quite different trends depending on the type of items. So people are much more likely to refuse or avoid straws than they are to avoid coffee cups or take away containers. So there's different things going on for these different targets. And so if we want to really achieve good impact for straws, we need to cheat them differently from coffee cups. And then finally thinking that through. So let's look at that in a bit more detail. Why might they be different? If we think about refusing straws and coffee cups, if you want to refuse a straw when offered. Generally speaking and taking the important but smaller proportion of community aside, who do need straws for various reasons. But for the majority of people that if you don't use a straw, you're just drinking out of the glass, generally speaking, or the bottle.

Jenni Downes:

So there's not any sort of preparation that you need to do. But if you think about coffee cups in order for some them on to refuse a single use coffee cup, when they're buying a coffee, well, they actually need to do two things. They first need to obtain their own reusable coffee cup, and they need to actually have it with them in order to be able to refuse a single use coffee cup at the food service outlet. So you can see that breaking down our target into really specific things actually helps us understand that every single one of these is different from each other.

Jenni Downes:

And that was one of the things that, that Em mentioned in her presentation, that the drivers of behaviour the influences on behaviour are different for every single behaviour. So going to this level and being really clear about what you want people to do, helps to actually see what's involved in each one of those behaviours. And then means that the interventions that you develop, the campaign, the messages, the approaches that you use are going to have much more greater chance to success of getting that specific change that you want.

Jenni Downes:

So if you are choosing between these two, you can see that they're quite different. So the first step, as I said, brainstorming a really long list of behaviours, making sure that they are behaviours. So they're things that you can see people doing. They're actual behaviours, things that you want them to do, not behaviours that you don't want them to do. Thinking about your behaviours in term of those criteria that we laid out. And then defining them using this framework to make sure that you're clear about, who you want to do it. What you want them to do. With what? When and where? Means that you're going to get into a level of detail, that you can focus your approaches to be much more effective at getting a change. But one of the things that you'll notice, if you get a chance to go back and do this with a list of behaviours for your campaign, is that as you start to break them down into this level of detail, your list of behaviours will start to increase quite significantly.

Jenni Downes:

So if we were thinking about a campaign to avoid single use plastics, even if you were just focusing on the main ones that often their own campaigns, which are the ones we saw before that, plastic bags, straws, coffee cups, and take away containers. We've already split that into four behaviours. And then we realise that even if we're just looking at the end-state behaviours. So we're focusing on the end-state because we know that previous behaviours are implicit in this end-state behaviour. So we don't actually need to spell these out at this stage because when we get to looking at any particular behaviour in detail, we'll go back and look at all those chains. But even if just listing the end-state behaviours, we realise that they're going to start multiplying. So the final step is then actually to start prioritising the behaviours.

Jenni Downes:

And the reason as I said before, is that we know that campaigns and other programs change behaviour are much more effective when you can focus on just a very small number of behaviours at any one time. So in any particular campaign or message, getting down to just one, maybe two specific things that you want people to do. Is going to drastically increase the likelihood that more of your community will start doing that behaviour. So the reason that we focus on this, is because quite often the problems that we are dealing with when we're looking at behaviour change are not simple problems. They can be difficult, complex, or even wicked problems. Often because they involve a large number of people who think about things differently. If you think about any of the demographic research, we often find young people are different to old people. And sometimes women are different to men and households with children are at, or are motivated differently to households without children.

Jenni Downes:

So our audience, even if we're just thinking about residents of your community, forget about workers and tourists and everybody else who might be in there, but just your residents who live there. There's all these sub-groups within that community that are actually individual audiences. Young men who live in share houses are a different audience to a couple with children. So the number of audiences involved and the number of things that we want them to do, can sometimes explode when we start going down to this very specific level of who we want to do what, when and where. So if you think about the Recycling Victoria problems that we were looking, very loosely, I'm not suggesting that glass is easy. But, simple in terms of the number of things that we need people to do. We might look at those different goals of the Recycling Victoria, the things that your campaigns might be working on as being at different levels of challenge.

Jenni Downes:

So commingle contamination is really challenging. We haven't worked it out, even though there's been so much time effort, passion, that's gone into trying to educate the community. But when we compare recycling like yellow lid recycling to FOGO, we realise that FOGO has even more challenges. Because not just looking at waste and waste of items, but we've got to go into things like food preparation habits and hospitality, and the culture that's attached to food. And similarly going to waste prevention, whether that's food waste prevention or other consumables and disposables. Waste prevention has huge cultural things around consumerism and the systems that we're embedded in. So really starting to think about the behaviours and how difficult they are, and then deciding when and how you're going to use behaviour change. So behaviour change campaigns work best when you can focus on one audience to do one or maybe two behaviours.

Jenni Downes:

If you've got a lot of audiences doing one behaviour, or maybe one audience doing a lot of behaviours, you generally need to break them up and then prioritise them so that you can pick a couple to start with. And then sequentially, perhaps pick up the other ones. If you're in this space, you either need to break it down a lot more and prioritise it, or think about big tools that you can use. What we're really trying to do with our prioritisation is we're trying to break them down into simpler problems. That should probably say not simple but simpler problems. So that we can get down to a point where we just have one person, oh, sorry, one audience, just doing one or two behaviours that we want to do. And there's a whole range of ways that we can do this.

Jenni Downes:

One of the ways that you can do quite quickly, even though it might sound a bit technical, is what we call Multi-Criteria Analysis. And that's really just taking your list of behaviours that you've specified. You've defined them using those elements and you've got them all written down, and your list might be quite long. And you're actually just going to compare them against a bunch of criteria. So some of those criteria could be things like how much of an impact that behaviour might have on the problem. Some of those criteria could be the behaviours that your manager or your strategy sets out that you're going to change. Some of them can be very analytical. Some of them can be very pragmatic, but knowing the criteria.

Jenni Downes:

So thinking about some of those, if you were trying to prioritise. If you had your long list of behaviours and you were trying to pick just a couple of those behaviours to prioritise, if you've got any ideas, pop them in the chat. What do you think some of those criteria you might use to select some of those behaviours over other behaviours if you had to get that down to a shorter list. Like I said, some of them can be incredibly pragmatic criteria. Some of them can be more kind of thinking things logically and analytically. Any ideas about some of the ways you might decide to filter your list?

Jenni Downes:

You might have some. Here's some that I came up with, and some of the ones that we use. So you might think about, how much impact is the particular behaviour likely to have on your overall problem? You might think about how easy is the behaviour to pick up? So if you've got a lot of behaviours, do you start on the easy behaviours and get people to do the ones that don't have too many barriers? While you then build up to a bigger behaviour change? Do you think about how many people are already doing the behaviour, whether they're listed in your strategy, whether your community would expect you to focus on them. So you're thinking about all the different criteria, coming up with the things that make sense to you guys, to compare your behaviours against, and then you actually take your behaviours.

Jenni Downes:

And, there's an example table in the workbook where you put your criteria down and just give them a score out of three. High, medium, low. Is this behaviour likely to have a big impact, a medium impact, or a small impact on the behaviour? You score them all, and you come up with, an overall score that can help you then go. We're going to use all the top. The top three scoring are going to be the ones that we focus on for example. Another way that we do it is... And we're working with DELWP, for example, to do this for the behaviours as part of the overall Recycling Victoria strategy. Is actually just taking a couple of these, what we call impact and likelihood and plotting them on a graph. And this helps us actually work out which behaviours we want to target.

Jenni Downes:

So we'd say which behaviours have a higher likelihood of being adopted by residents and have a much greater impact on the behaviour? So these are behaviours that are easier and more impactful on the problem, but if they're easy, you've probably already, attempted them in your community. Then we think about ones that do have a big impact on a problem, but might be harder. So these are harder behaviours, but also more impactful. So these are the ones that you probably will want to target, because they're harder they're going to need more resources. There's also behaviours that are easier, but not as impactful on the problem. But these can be ones that if you can get households doing them, sometimes you can leverage them to get people to do more. And then finally, you find that there are some behaviours that aren't particularly impactful on the problem, and it's very hard for people to get them.

Jenni Downes:

So thinking this through. The whole point of this is, how do you think about your behaviours in order to take some of them off the list and work out which ones you're going to focus on? So what I won't do is I won't go through that in any more detail. Oops, sorry. Wow. That was quick. But really the three... That wasn't meant to finish. The three things that we think is really important. One is start, with a blank page, brainstorm all of the possible behaviours that you think you might need to change as part of your campaign. Then start to make sure that you are really focusing on behaviours. So use those criteria, rewrite your behaviours, to make sure that they're observable and really specific. Then start to break them down into those individual components. Who do you need to do it, to what particular item do you want them to do it with?

Jenni Downes:

In what context do they need to do it? When do you want them to do it? And you'll find that your list is growing as you do this. And then once you've got your really long list, coming up with any sort of process that works for you to take that long list, and either order them so that you say, "Okay, we're going to start here and then move our way down this list over time." Or say, "Actually, the ones that are most important for us to do are these. These are the ones that we're going to focus on, and we're going to put these to the side and really invest all of our efforts in getting these behaviours to change."

Jenni Downes:

And our experience of doing behaviour change research and programs and trials with a lot of partners is that if you take the time upfront to do this step, to get really specific, clearly defined behaviours, and just a few of them that you're going to focus on. The likelihood that your campaign is going to achieve that change is so much greater than when you, I guess, sort of progress with just a vague thing. "Oh, we want to reduce single use plastics." So getting down to that level of detail, being really specific, means that the interventions you come up with are going to have such a greater chance of getting that change that you want to see.

Susan Benedyka:

Thank you so much, Jenni lots and lots of incredibly valuable information in there. And you've already had the interactivity to start getting you thinking about the behaviours that you want to see changed. The more specificity, the better, and being able to prioritise them is really, really important. So once again, you're going out into breakout rooms. This time only 10 minutes, you'll have two to three people in your room. So you need to go through the questions quite quickly. What did you hear or observe? So what does this mean for your campaign? And now what are you going to do about it? I'll open up the rooms now, Emma, and I don't need to be coming around this time, but just reminder you only have 10. So 10 minutes to really focus on that. Thank you.

Susan Benedyka:

You're all blinging back in, it's really good to see. Once again, if you've got any comments, any ahas, any insights, please share them in the chat. We really like seeing it and it helps other people embed the information as well. So any comments in the chat would be really useful. And I think, we're close to being all back in. Thank you very much again. And the reason we do the breakout rooms is so that you can really make this practical and applicable to you in your work. As you go through what we are doing, great presentation.

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #3 Behaviour change models’, ‘Donna van Bueren, The Behaviour Change Collaborative, ’13 April 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

...for us. Donna's the director of behavioural insight at the Behaviour Change Collaborative. She's acquired over 30 years of experience in strategic social marketing and behaviour research roles. Prior to joining BCC, Donna was with Kantar and we've had Kantar present to us several times and she led Kantar's public sector consulting practice globally and communications capability, citizen engagement, and behaviour change consulting, and particularly across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the Middle East. She's a very highly skilled qualitative and quantitative researcher and a particular expertise in designing ethnographic methods for communications, engagement, and capacity-building programs for change. We certainly have had just an outstanding case today. Donna, you add to that team. Thank you very much and welcome to the screen and welcome to this particular session.

Donna van Bueren:

Thanks, Susan. And hi, everyone. I'm going to try now share my screen and hope that that is going to work. Is it working?

Susan Benedyka:

That's perfect. Absolutely brilliant. Thank you very much, Donna.

Donna van Bueren:

Okay. Hi, everyone. Well, I've got 20 minutes with you and I'm going to really now narrow in and focus on some of the areas that both Em spoke about earlier in the morning. And Jen has just been talking about in terms of drilling down now into being able to diagnose the influence on behaviour. And I think that the content that we go through in the next few minutes is going to help when you are trying to answer some of those big questions Jen mentioned about the who, the what, the where, and the how. So really being able to drill at that quite granular level to understand what is going on in an individual's world that is going to influence and drive behaviour change. And in order to do that, we really think that there is great value in having a framework or a model to guide that process. But the problem and we all face as behaviour change practitioners is "how do you choose the right one?" So that's what I'm going to talk to you about and share with you a model that I hope will help you in that decision process.

Donna van Bueren:

So there are a plethora of behavioural frameworks or models out there, and we're not going to go through each of these and you don't even need to worry that the type is quite small. Really what I just tried to get down on a page is some of the leading behavioural theories that where academics for the last three or four decades have tried to explain human behaviour through different frameworks and models and theories and the problem that we all face. And the problem that I faced and I was midway through my career was how on earth do you make a decision with what to choose? And what we often found was the wrong model was being applied to the wrong behaviour and therefore opportunities for change were being missed. So there is no one model that is right for every behaviour.

Donna van Bueren:

But what wanted to share with you is a framework that I think is more generic and might help you as a pragmatic and practical tool. But I guess in considerations, it's the right framework really helped you have a process or a road map for deconstructing behavioural influence, because really that's what we're trying to understand is what is it that is influencing a behaviour at that granular level that Jen talked about, for what audience, in what context? So a framework that is underpinned by the leading theories and applied models from the behavioural sciences and from behavioural economics is really important and a model like the one I'm going to share with you that's assembled so that it supports what we call dual-process theory of how the mind works often talked about in terms of System 1 or System 2 or automatic and reflective behaviours. Coined by the very famous academic theorists, Daniel Kahneman when he talks about thinking fast and thinking slow. And I'm going to come back to that shortly.

Donna van Bueren:

And what we also want is that model for unpacking or deconstructing behaviour, that is going to lead you not just to understanding what drives behaviours, but what are the levers or what should you be putting into your behaviour change methods mix or lever mix that are going to be more likely to bring about change? So we want the deconstruction process to be linked to outcomes in terms of making decisions around what levers to pull.

Donna van Bueren:

So I'm just going to share with you the model that we've worked on for a long time and have stuck with. We've adapted it a bit over time, but have stuck with because it really is something that encompasses all of those different theoretical models and frameworks that I shared with you in that really complicated page at the top of the deck. If we were to drill them all down and look at what do they have in common and capture that and what makes them unique and capture that we've pulled it into this, hopefully, easy-to-use framework that we have in front of you. So I'm just going to walk you through that now. It really, in terms of as a practitioner, how I use it when I'm working on behaviour-change projects. So that outer grey ring is the first part of the model.

Donna van Bueren:

And this is where we actually make sure that it's a model that captures the System 1 and System 2 thinking around how humans make decisions. And I guess again, Emily and Jen have referred to how important this is. So when we want to really understand that as humans, we don't always make rational decisions. We don't always make decisions that are in our best interests, let alone the planet's best interests. And we really want to understand at that granular behavioural, how much of decision making for this particular behaviour is actually very unconscious. And that's what we call System 1 thinking. System 1 thinking is done fast without a lot of deliberation. That's often what we call the things that we do automatically without giving it much thought. It helps us to make everyday decisions because if we actually had to go into a cost-benefit analysis for every decision that our brain makes all through the day we would fall over.

Donna van Bueren:

So System 1 start of thinking is important for us as humans to help us cope through the day with all of the decisions and to actually filter all of the information that is thrown at us from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed. But if we just relied on System 1 thinking, it could make us very error-prone, and it could lead us to make decisions that are not good for us. So thankfully we also have System 2 thinking. The other way that our human brain makes decisions, which is very much about conscious decision making. It's informed by our values, by the people around us, and by information. So this decision-making is very effortful. It's labour-intensive. It's when we often get brain fatigue because we've been wrestling with decisions and the consequences of them, but we often make more reliable decisions when we weigh up the pros and cons if you like.

Donna van Bueren:

So the model that I'm sharing with you, that you have in your workbooks, and you'll be able to work with if you want to, starts from that perspective of capturing the processes of conscious and unconscious decision-making, and then it has eight components of influence in it. And these very much overlap with the model that Emily put forward at the very beginning. They're very, very similar because they're both grounded in the most highly regarded behavioural theories that are out there. So, we first of all look at the more conscious, or System 2 types of decision making. The first one is really understanding the cost-benefit exchange, the what's in it for me.

Donna van Bueren:

So at that granular behaviour level and with a particular audience, we would do this audience by audience at a very sub-audience level when necessary. We want to understand for that particular individual who sits in that audience subgroup, what is in it for them to change? Why should they bother? And really understand from their perspective from their world view, what do they have to stop doing or what do they have to give up to change? What are they going to have to start doing or do differently? And often we talk about swaps. So we're actually wanting a behavioural exchange to happen. We want you to stop doing it that way and start doing it this way. Stop actually using the unrecyclable coffee cup in the takeaway shop, start bringing your own. So we have to understand, as Jen was saying, what are all the mini behaviours that lead to that and the decisions that need to happen both at the conscious and unconscious level. And also really understand for them what will happen if they don't do it? Is there a consequence that is threatening to them or not?

Donna van Bueren:

The next part of the model talks about efficacy, and we talk about both self-efficacy and response efficacy. So when we are thinking about self-efficacy, does the individual really believe that they can do it? Do they think they have the skills, the capability? Do they have the knowledge to change? But also having that knowledge as we've been hearing through the morning is not enough. It's really, do they have the confidence to change? Do they think that change is within them and what is going to make change easier or difficult? And you really want to be able to unpack this at a really detailed level through the process of qualitative research. And then also we talk about response efficacy. So do people believe that if I change the way that you are calling me too, is that going to deliver the sustainability benefit, the climate benefit, the efficiency benefit that you're promising me?

Donna van Bueren:

If my doctor tells me I need to cut out salt in my diet to avoid having a heart attack, do I really believe I'm going to have that heart attack if I don't cut out my salt in my diet. Just going around, now, the umbrella. Social license and trust is becoming increasingly important, particularly in Western democratic countries, where there's been an erosion of trust amongst the public, in the state, in governments, and in what is good for us. Once upon a time, we trusted our governments to tell us what was the best diets we should be eating, what was best for our health, what was best for our society, what was best for our planet? Do they have that level of trust? And do they think that you, as the message deliverer should be playing in this space and have your authority to tell us what is right or wrong? Do they believe that you have their best interests at heart?

Donna van Bueren:

And do they believe that any penalties or sanctions that are applied here really are fair and equitably designed and also enforced? And do they get a say, because this is really important when we want to bring about community change, is do they feel like they actually have had a say in what you're asking them to do? Social norms will not be new to you. I won't labour this one except to say that as humans, so much of what we do is shaped by the people around us, the people that care about, or the people who may shame us, or the people who may get us in trouble. And so we really want to understand for the micro-level audiences that we want to change, who are the people that gate-keep their behaviour. If they're going to talk about this idea of change, of doing things a little bit differently, who are they going to talk to? Who are the people that matter? And do we need to build those audiences as secondary audiences into our campaign or our behaviour change program?

Donna van Bueren:

And also particularly at community level, we want to understand the role that culture plays, the role that religion might play in shaping some of these community behaviours. Values, of course, are also really important, and wanting to be able to dig in to understand do people actually... Are they driven more by their value-set when it comes to sustainability, or is it other things that drive a likelihood to change over and above those values? So how much can you message or give information about the notion of right versus wrong and core values or impact on others or impact on the planet? We now get into the realm of what we call the System 1 thinking or unconscious behaviour.

Donna van Bueren:

The things that we do that we are not aware of, or that we do that are triggered by other things around us. So we want to understand for the behaviour that you want to change, to what extent is that behaviour habitual, or is it based about a routine? So how much are you trying to change the things that trigger the habit versus the actual habit itself? You need to understand how these things chain or link together and how in a habit, actually, I do this when something else cues or triggers me that might be in my external environment, or it might be actually upfront based on the people around me. So to what extent are people doing these things without thinking, and if habit or routine is really dominant in influencing the behaviour, what that tells us that we need to raise the consciousness of these particular behaviours before we can seek to change them because at the moment they're too embedded into a habit or a routine and to change the routine, we need to raise the consciousness of that habit.

Donna van Bueren:

And similarly, we need to work in the space of heuristics and understand the extent to which heuristical influences are actually happening and influencing and driving the behaviour. This is a whole profession in its own. And I can't spend time going through all the different heuristical influences that are at play. But what we want to understand when we're in the space of understanding unconscious behaviour and habits, is are there particular mental shortcuts or rules of thumb or unconscious biases or particular unconscious defaults that people rely on when it comes to the behaviours that we want to change? And we often uncover this, you can't really get to this just through the process of a focus group. We have to do a lot of ethnographic in-situ research to journey with a particular person to understand to what extent are they behaving unconsciously and it being based on mental shortcuts, but perhaps then we can actually start to tweak in our lever mix when we design the strategy.

Donna van Bueren:

And finally, context and settings often account for a lot of the stimulus for behaviour and create a lot of opportunities where we can actually start to look for opportunities for change. So to what extent is the behaviour that you want to change triggered or shaped by the physical environment around us or the setting as opposed to those internal values or cost and benefit analysis. So that's a really quick kind of whizz around the model, but I know you're going to get the opportunity to apply it down the track. Just a couple of tips when you're working with a model like this, that I find from practitioners who work with it and get caught up. So again, as we've said several times, and Jen said, really think about whether these influences are going to vary by audience and audiences are going to be triggered by different particular parts of the model. It's not an either-or, but we do want to apply it at sub-audience level.

Donna van Bueren:

Also, don't get caught up trying to feel like you've got to fill each part of the framework. You've got to find something that sits absolutely everywhere. The point of a model like this is that you apply it as a road map and you are trying to eliminate influence as you go. And you're trying to understand the relative weight of the different parts of the model, the different sets of influences to be able to develop your intervention strategy, your behaviour-change strategy. So you're not going to find something necessarily in every part of the framework, go with what the data or your evidence is telling you. And don't get too bogged down trying to make something fit. This is a framework because it captures a whole range of the behavioural theories and behavioural economics, that these influences overlap. So it doesn't really matter. I've seen researchers spend too much time trying to decide, is it self-efficacy or is it a cost-benefit? If you've captured it, you've captured it and that's really the insight. You've found that insight. It doesn't matter too much then where you put it.

Donna van Bueren:

I just wanted to spend a moment also talking about the stages of change model because, I think, sometimes what I see in my work is people get really confused when to use this and when to not use it. And it's a really great model for segmenting an audience in terms of how ready they are for change and being able to tailor interventions, messaging communications policy to their readiness for change. But it's not a model that explains the behaviour. It can't tell us why people are motivated or driven to behave in the way that they do. And so this is a model that you would use more at your intervention design stage of the process. Not trying to use it to explain behaviour and understand the drivers of behaviour. So I just wanted to make that point.

Donna van Bueren:

So just to finish up. We've got a couple more minutes. I said to you at the top-end that there's not really much point understanding the behaviour and doing all of this granular diagnostic work through the process of qualitative research and sometimes quantitative research as well. If it doesn't lead you to the what to do next so that you can actually, I guess, go back to the process that Jen spoke about in terms of being able to get to that granular who, what, when, how, where. And the levers that you would all have at your disposal would probably fit into one of these five categories. So you've got your control strategies, which is your legislation, your regulation design strategies. You can incentivise, you can enable, and you can communicate and engage. And your intervention would be based on one or a mix of these five core levers.

Donna van Bueren:

And I just wanted to in the last minute that we have, if you can all type into the chat, just to think about which of the levers are you most familiar with, or what are the kinds of examples that you so far feel... Which of those spaces do you feel like you are working in? Really just to see if there's anything that we are not working in, in the moment. So I just give you a moment to have... So we're just seeing... 'Communicate' is coming up in the chat. Anyone else working in one of these leader areas other than in the communicate and design, communicate. Okay. Alison says 'incentivise'. Fantastic.

Donna van Bueren:

Anyone working in the design space, I'll let you reveal yourself in your own time. Often it's the design space that we find is actually the one that gets missed when researchers are actually doing some of the qualitative research to understand influence. So again, I'm going to just put up to leave you with... I guess, this is what I would call your toolbox that you might think about when you have gone through that process of deconstructing behaviour influence, and you are looking for the opportunities, the activities that you might want to design into a behaviour-change strategy. You actually have a really great toolbox at your disposal, and this is just almost a checklist and it's not exhaustive.

Donna van Bueren:

I won't go through each of them one by one, but really I wanted to leave this with you to think about. Well, in my space, what role does legislation regulation and taxation play? What are the sanctions that are available? And do we actually just need to dial up the threat of a sanction or do we actually need to remove the sanction because we've learned in our diagnostic research that that's actually a barrier to change? And what are the role for restrictions and for enforcement? Design is really understanding... When you understand if context and settings in that behavioural model are highly influential over the behaviour, that's a real known to tell you that your intervention is going to need to actually be involved, not just communications, but also addressing physical environment triggers, cues. It might be about changing defaults that people make in terms of their decision-makings. It might be the product placed and it might be labelling. So that's your design toolbox. Incentivising and enabling are really about how can we actually prime people for change?

Donna van Bueren:

How can we actually produce relevant, targeted inducements? And that's really what we're looking for when benefits and costs have come out of that model in the analysis as being highly influential. We're looking, how do we flip the benefits as being stronger than the cost of actually having to change because those costs won't necessarily be financial? They might be time. They might be about the things that I give up that I love. And what is the benefit that you are actually offering me in exchange for that change? Enabling is when we really have to deal with people's, not just knowledge, but capacity. So if we find that people are saying, "I'm not confident about change." How do we build confidence? So that might be about education. It might be about skills. It might be practical assistance and support, and also really addressing those issues of inequity and a lack of access to change, particularly across vulnerable populations.

Donna van Bueren:

And communications, I think, from what you said in the chat, a lot of you are working in that space. I don't need to really go on about that except to say that usually, a behaviour change solution will not be successful if it is only relying on communications and engagement, you will need to usually bring in several other parts of the toolbox when you're actually designing your strategy for change. So I think I'm at my time limit and I might wrap up there, just leave you with the final thank you and hand back to Susan.

Susan Benedyka:

Thanks so much, Donna really appreciate that. And I'm already applying it to something that I'm doing. So, I now can take myself quite neatly through the model and go, "Okay, what am I doing here? What am I doing there? What am I doing there?" So I find that really, really useful.

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #4 Communications and engagement planning’, ‘Karen Cosson, Sustainability Victoria,’ ’11 May 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

... Very interesting that Karen's worn so many hats in this particular process. She's been our project manager. She's been the campaign stakeholder lead for Sustainability Victoria, and today she's a presenter. Karen has worked for over 25 years in local government and state government, and worked on large and small scale behaviour change programs and strategic planning to prevent litter, avoid and minimise waste and increase recycling. It's also helped build her expertise in program development and delivery, and stakeholder and community engagement.

Susan Benedyka:

She draws on her experience across small enterprises, human resources, retail and health, as well as local and state government. And she's passionate about collaborating with stakeholders for sound program design and delivery, and adding value wherever possible. The hint that I was given to people before, if you want to see just the speaker and the screen, you can go up to the box on the right hand side in the top of your corner, it says view, you can click side by 'side speaker' or 'side by side gallery' or 'standard' to get different views. That's totally up to you. Karen, I'd like to welcome you and hand over to you as you talk about communications and engagement planning, the overview and the how-to. Thank you.

Karen Cosson:

Great. Thanks Susan. Thanks for that introduction. Hello again, everyone. And one thing to remember, because in the small group I was in, someone hadn't been to any of the campaign labs before. They are recorded, so they are available to look at again. Just setting my timer. So today, I'm here to talk to you about developing a campaign comms and engagement plan. This is an overview of what I will be talking about and to bring the importance of the need to plan your campaign to life, I'm going to use an example which is relevant for all councils and alpine resort management boards from now and into coming years, which is the introduction of one of the new household recycling services. So whether that's glass or FOGO - food and garden organics. But first of all, I'm going to talk about general comms and engagement planning.

Karen Cosson:

So we'll be looking at: the journey; success starts early; the importance of planning; how to develop a comms and engagement plan; monitoring and evaluation - developing that plan as well; and as I said, practical examples talking about the RV campaign, so that's the Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change program, which is a lot of words so I'll just call it the RV campaign; the campaign cycle and; also the campaign guide. So the purpose of the labs was to take people through the steps involved in planning and delivering a campaign to build on your existing skills and expertise. Because we do know that there's a lot of skills and expertise out there. And in the first three labs that are greyed out in the grey font, we have conducted our research to identify the behavioural insights. So, what was the problem that we need to solve and what is the best way to solve it?

Karen Cosson:

Identified our target audience and also defining success, so talking about monitoring and evaluation. And then in the last one, we looked at behaviour change models to develop a campaign, so we've chosen that the behaviour change model. So that's all been really exciting. And sometimes people say, "Oh, now I have got to write the plan." That's the boring or the hard bit, but we do need to plan the campaign. And if you're not familiar with a comms and engagement plan, I'm sure that you are all very, very familiar with project planning, and really a comms and engagement plan is mapping out the same sorts of activities, pretty much in a familiar format. So much of this, what I'm talking about, should be validating what you know, or adapting what you're used to into a campaign comms and engagement plan. Before I just launch into the structure of that plan, let's look at the labs coming after today.

Karen Cosson:

The next two sessions are delving into the range of paid and unpaid campaign tools and tactics with the first one in June, Part 1, focused on the unpaid tools and tactics and Part 2 in July on paid advertising, which is way more than print, TV and radio in our modern digital world. In the small group exercise today, you'll identify some of these tools when you're mapping out a plan, but don't spend too much time focusing on them, because we'll be spending our time in the next two sessions on that. And then, the final lab will help us identify helpful actions to create a local movement to support our campaign goals and spread the message. That's an overview of today.

Karen Cosson:

So comms and engagement, are they the same or are they different? Just spend a minute or two thinking, how would you define each of them, and what are the key differences? And do you always, if do you think there are differences, do you always need to do both? And what sort of things would straight communications be suited to? And if you'd like to share your thoughts in the chat, please feel free to do that. I'll just give you a minute to think about that. And, I do know it can be quite controversial because I think different fields have different definitions of comms and engagement, but we won't be getting into an argument today. If we were in real life, it could be possible [laughs].

Karen Cosson:

If anyone's keen to share anything in the chat, that would be great. Nothing coming through for me, so far ... Oh excellent, thank you Emily Quinn Smith. "Comms tends to be more information-based than engagement, and it's important to do both in every campaign." I think they are good points. And building on that, I think in comms, we are sending out information and creating awareness, whereas in engagement, we are not sending out information, but we are wanting to involve people, so that they will engage with us and understand.

Karen Cosson:

So Stan, "Comms, key messages, distribution, engagement aligns to IAP2, in terms of how and why we are relating." Hold that thought about IAP2. And Jill, "Communication, one-way information giving is useful, if there are no negotiables." So yes, so comms more one directional, engagement in both ways. Thank you all for that. I'll just move on to the next slide, which is not moving for some reason. There we are. So thanks for all of your input and sorry I didn't get to all of them, and great to see so many of you really switched on to comms and engagement.

Karen Cosson:

So many of you are clearly aware of and have probably done training in the International Association for Public Participation or IAP2's work and their spectrum on public participation. This is often used in consultation and I think councils are required by the government to use it in consultation. So you're probably familiar with it and it's helpful to think of this when we deliver campaigns. So for SV, the IAP2 spectrum has been highly relevant for stakeholder engagement to develop the RV campaign and it helps us understand the limitations of just informing alone.

Karen Cosson:

So with the RV campaign, we've developed that by consulting, involving and collaborating with councils, alpine resorts, industry and the community. And we want to empower councils, alpine resorts and industry to use the materials once it's out there in the world. And in the longer-term, we also want to empower the community to use the campaign materials to spread the message. So there, I'm using the IAP2 spectrum to talk about campaign development and how we've used that, and then also when we're out there delivering the campaign. And for SV to achieve the campaign targets, we need to do more than simply inform the community, as we know that information alone doesn't have much of an impact on behaviour change, unless people are highly motivated and already engaged and looking for that behaviour, but sadly, that's not often the case.

Karen Cosson:

And in terms of delivering the campaign, we want to engage the community, so they'll be receptive to our message, understand what they need to do, and do it. Also sometimes people do things and they don't really care about why they need to do it, so that's important to remember as well. In the last campaign lab, we talked about behaviour change and the specific behaviours the RV campaign is designed to achieve are correct recycling and minimising waste. So for those of you who have attended the previous workshops, you'd recall that there are many different types of behaviour change models. And while there's a vast number of them, they all have commonalities. And the models look at how we can engage the community. For example, what is their capability, opportunity and motivation? Have they even thought about the behaviour before. Or is our challenge that they are in this precontemplation stage? Or are they contemplating it?

Karen Cosson:

Are they saying, "Am I recycling correctly?" "Hey, council said I was getting a new bin for glass. What does that mean?" So, and then the other thing is what sort of things drive behaviour? Attitudes, social norms, habits. And for us, who've worked in this area for a long time or even a short time, we understand a major challenge for us is an ingrained habit. If it's incorrect, it's very hard to change. So the RV campaign is using the three models, shown here, to engage households to change or achieve specific behaviours. In our campaigns, we often need to inform the community at a mass level and we also to do a whole range of other activities to engage them in other contexts, so the message gets in. This might include direct mail, face-to-face activities, info sessions, pop-up stores at the shops or prompts for bins at the kerb, or in the home or using social norms - "9 out of 10 people in your neighbourhood do this".

Karen Cosson:

So when thinking about planning a campaign and measuring its success, success starts early and Luke Rogers from SV talked to you about this at the March lab and I borrowed his slide. Actually, it might have been the Feb lab. No, detail not important at this moment. But success starts early. Planning is all about mapping where we need to go, how are we going to get there, and how will we know when and if we have got there? So as I said, you'd all be very familiar with project planning, so it's very similar. First of all, this template's in the workbook and we'll be looking at this format in the small group. But first of all, we need to name the campaign. Oh sorry, in the RV campaign guide, which I'll talk about a bit more later, we'll include a comms and engagement template, as well as a monitoring and evaluation plan template.

Karen Cosson:

And at this stage for the fund, that's just opened the campaign guide has been developed to help those councils that want to apply for a grant. And I'm giving you a high level overview of the structure of a plan just for today's purpose. So we're going to have a name of the campaign, we'll define its purpose. We're going to summarise the research for the need, for the campaign and the behavioural insights of how we're going to address that need to solve the problem. We need to know our budget. Many of us work on the smell of an oily rag. So you need to confirm your budget, so that you can work out what's possible.

Karen Cosson:

And then, you need to establish your goals, objectives, targets. For example, it might be reduce the commingled recyclables bin contamination rate from 15% down to 9%, for example. Introduce a food and garden organics recycling collection and achieve less than 3% contamination or even under 1%. Reduce the food and garden organics recycling contamination rate from 4%, to say under 2%. So you would be able to get that information from your processors, but you need to have a target of where you're going. And of course, you need to have a timeline. So, when will it start? So, this one might start in June and go through until December. Then we would identify our target audiences. So for the RV campaign, we know the groups that are more likely to have higher rates of incorrect recycling knowledge or behaviours are: males; those aged 18 to 35 years; people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and; people that live in multi-unit dwellings. So, that's who we target in our plan.

Karen Cosson:

Other components in the plan would be identifying any risks and issues that need to be mitigated or managed. Resources who'll be working on the project, is it just me or have I got a team of other people and are they from different areas of my organisation, like customer service or wherever it might be. Monitoring and evaluation, very important as I said, to develop the monitoring and evaluation plan as part of your comms and engagement plan, all at the start, because you need to also determine how you'll establish the baseline for the project, how you'll measure that and the timeline for that. And also the targets, the measurement indicators and the timeline for that throughout the project.

Karen Cosson:

And if you're doing that monitoring during the project, when you might make refinements along the way. So then, you would map it all out. So, this is not so attractive [laughs], I'm sorry. But at the top, you'd have your target audience, what you're going to use and when you're going to do that. The cost, so the dollar signs I've included, sort of $1, one symbol is low, three is high and two is medium. And who's doing it. And then the status, which is very important. So, when we map out the ... so we map them into the project plan, and the asterisks there just mean that when you do the small group work in the Google Doc, those things have drop down menus to save you time. So here, this example that I was working through, how am I going to reach my CALD communities?

Karen Cosson:

I'm going to use established Facebook groups. And I'm going to, that I found out some of you might have been to the CALD session when LOTE agency presented. So I might use them, I might use someone else, but what are the Facebook groups that those communities engage with? I'll do a weekly post and I'll rotate that through the different tiles and messages. Cost, that's a fairly low cost. I'm doing that and I haven't started that yet, because it's May an the campaign started in June. And then I'm going to try and reach males 18 to 35 year olds by YouTube ads on the sorts of things that they watch. And I would use the media booking company to help guide or tell me what 18 to 35 year old males are watching on YouTube. I'll do that weekly, also rotating through messaging. That's also fairly moderate cost, low cost. Again, that's me and I haven't started.

Karen Cosson:

So we just follow through. Households, I want to reach everyone. Renters and, important to remember if you're a council, don't just go to your rate payers. It also needs to go to the people that rent. I'll do that by direct mail in June. And as we know, that's a very high cost activity. That's me again and it's underway. And another different one is 18 to 35s, all of them, males and females. And I'm going to go to an event to have some sort of pop-up activity, to do some face-to-face engagement in July. And I'll be engaging contractors to do that at a cost and that's not started. So then you would work through your program. And then we map out the activities into a project plan. Sorry, then we're going to ...

Karen Cosson:

So we map that out into the project plan, and then to recap on monitoring and evaluation planning and to use another of Luke's slides, thanks Luke. It'll be in the presentation that will be sent to you. I'm not going to go into it in detail, but I think it's a really good visual of when you need to work out which things to do. So don't make the mistake, especially if you have to report to a funding body, to not do a monitoring and evaluation plan at the start. And also, it's really useful to, or it's important to do that, because if you're reporting to your organisation, we need to build support and a business case for further work. Because we all know that behaviour change is something that's an ongoing requirement. We need to be telling people over time, exactly how to do the right thing and to continue to refine their behaviours.

Karen Cosson:

So, it's very important to build that support in your organisation and report back. Establishing the type of evaluation as a starting point, does lead to much better outcomes. And preaching Luke's mantra of "Planning for success starts early", we want to define our metrics, our measures for success as early as possible. And we should be aiming to keep these measures, these metrics in our mind throughout the entire campaign period. So it really isn't an afterthought. The RV campaign has developed a campaign cycle, focused on introducing a new recycling service, like a FOGO or a glass service. And this is it here, and it highlights that unlike many campaigns where you develop a campaign, and then you go out and you just deliver it for a certain period of time, and then you do your measurement before and after, and possibly during, and then it's finished.

Karen Cosson:

When we introduce a new service, we're communicating with people a long time before that a change is coming. So that's in this minus six to minus three months. So three to six months out, sending a letter or whatever it might be, saying, "Hey, you're getting a new service, it's coming in a few months". You're trying to engage them at that precontemplation period, if they haven't heard about it. The campaign guide will outline the types of activities and campaign materials that support each of these stages. And as I said earlier, the guide is available to those councils who are considering applying for a grant under Round one of the Fund, and that guide will be updated as we go along with the campaign materials. And, why would a campaign guide need to be updated?

Karen Cosson:

Well, one of the RV policy initiatives is to develop standard contents lists for each of the recycling streams. So, what will be accepted in the glass bin will be ... When I say bin, please know that I understand it doesn't have to be a bin, it might be a drop-off or alternative system, but I'll just use bin for shorthand. So, what will accepted in the glass bin? What would be accepted in food and garden organics, the FOGO bin, and what would be accepted in the recycling bin? So in April DELWP, now they're leading on developing the ... they are developing those standard lists. They confirmed the revised timelines for the finalisation of the lists is November this year. So for the campaign, we need to know what is accepted in each stream or bin to make sure the campaign creatives are accurate. Worst case scenario would be showing something in the campaign, an item going into a bin that isn't accepted in that bin. And that confirmation of their timing has meant that we've had to review the messaging, creatives and timing for the RV campaign.

Karen Cosson:

So, that's been a big thing. However, there will be materials available for those councils making the changes in the next financial year, like the rest of this calendar year and into next year. So again, just a reminder, please contact me if you are one of them and haven't already. And for everyone, we'll keep you posted when the lists are finalised and approved. So, that's that there and has changed our timing. You would've heard me earlier say we would have materials available much earlier than that. So, that's been a bit of a hiccup in our campaign. So, and that just shows the complexity of the RV policy, which has got a lot of things going on and all the bits and pieces don't necessarily fit together neatly, but we're all, DELWP and us and everyone else is working very hard to make those things happen under the policy.

Karen Cosson:

So the campaign guide and campaign resources, these are the sorts of things that are being developed for the campaign. It's not the entire list, but you'll see here under the campaign materials, many things you would be familiar with and have used in the past. Bin stickers, tags. You would've seen these things in the Know Your Recycling campaign. The social media tiles and text, translated materials, calendars, a whole range of materials for advertising will be in the RV campaign. The guide itself will summarise the research, audience insights and it's really how-to guide. How-to deliver your plan and deliver your campaign. And I said, there are the templates for comms and engagement plan and also monitoring and evaluation. And then, there's letters and media releases, like the letter to send out saying a change is coming, and also written texts for website and newsletters.

Karen Cosson:

So I hope that's given you, one, an overview of a comms and engagement plan and two, reassurance that if you haven't done one before, that it's a very familiar process, like a project plan. It's not something really difficult and out of reach, and that three, there will be resources to help you with particularly the RV campaign. And in the next small group exercise, you'll be working through completing a comms and engagement plan at a high level. And as I said earlier, I've included some dropdown lists for target audiences, campaign materials, and then the status to save you time typing. So, thank you for that and I'll back to Susan now.

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #4 Planning your campaign, ‘Georgina Murphy’, ’11 May 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

And as has previously been forecast, we have Georgina Murphy with us right now. Georgina is the campaign manager for the Department of Education and Training. She has a public facing role, including statewide advertising campaigns. And has been part of the nation leading Three-Year-Old Kinder campaign. And it's an initiative that's offered nearly $5 billion of investment for funded kindergarten for all three-year-olds across the state.

Susan Benedyka:

Prior to working with DET, Georgina has covered and delivered communications for major events, racing, property development, big brands, traveling to all corners of the world, even the smallest countries. She once wrote a weekly column for the infamous NT News. So for those of you are aware of crocodile headlines, behind the crocodile headlines, Georgina was up there writing those columns. Thank you so much Georgina, it's been a delight working with you in the lead up to this session, and I'm really looking forward to hearing it go well.

Georgina Murphy:

Thank you Susan. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having me. Susan, that intro made me sound much more exciting than I am. So I hope I live of up to the entree. I'm delighted to be here with you today, and I'm really excited to be part of one of these labs. I think it's a really cool concept. And I've already been telling anyone at the Department of Education and Training who will listen that I'm keen to see how we can perhaps look at this concept in our world, as well.

Georgina Murphy:

As Susan said, I am the campaign manager for Three-Year-Old Kindergarten at the department. And for those of you who are not familiar, Three-Year-Old Kinder is a near $5 billion investment over the decade by the state to see that every three-year-old child has access to 15 hours a week of a government funded Three-Year-Old Kinder program. Some of you will probably be familiar with the concept if you have children or grandchildren. Most children in Victoria currently attend a four year old kinder program in the year before school. So it means that children will actually go two years of kinder before school.

Georgina Murphy:

Research across the world has shown that that brings significant education, social, and developmental benefits for all kids. And at the moment, I will acknowledge that Three-Year-Old Kinder is not a new concept, but in the current climate parents and carers pay for children to go to have that two years. So that's changing it up, and Victoria is indeed leading the nation in that we are the first state or territory to offer this initiative. So it's a huge investment, it's a huge commitment and it brings with it some pretty significant communications, we'll go with opportunities! But also challenges as well. Now, Kate is going to be the star of my technology today, so I might just get her to bring up a presentation if that's okay, please.

Georgina Murphy:

Thank you. Now one thing I would like to acknowledge from the outset is that as I've said, this is a $5 billion investment or almost $5 billion over 10 years. So that brings with it some pretty significant communications resources and pretty significant communications need as well. That said, the framework and the planning that we have used to underpin this campaign that I will take you through is the exact same framework that I've used on campaigns with, as my dad would say, that "ran on the smell of an oily rag".

Georgina Murphy:

So I would like you to keep that in mind as I talk to some of the things that we've done, because the framework doesn't change. It's also worth mentioning, and Susan and I touched on this a couple of weeks ago in that, in my experience, sometimes the communications activity that has the least resources actually is the most effective in meeting its objectives, because it's better planned out, much more resource-conscious, efficient, and really takes advantage of every opportunity along the way.

Georgina Murphy:

So, as I said, I very much acknowledge that this is a large-scale, public-facing campaign, but the planning that's gone into it is underpinned and very similar to what you would do for something at a shorter term or a smaller scale as well. Now, Kate, if I could just get you to hit play on my video, please, I'm going to show you our 30-second television commercial that's currently in market. So you may have seen it on your screens"

Narrator:

"To dream big, our kids need the best start in life. So the Victorian government is investing almost $5 billion to deliver Three-Year-Old Kinder across the state from 2022. That means an extra year of learning, playing and making friends for Victorian children. Go to vic.gov.au/kinder. Three-Year-Old Kinder, best start, best life. Authorised by the Victorian government, Melbourne."

Georgina Murphy:

Thank you. Okay, so to kick us off, excuse me, I'm just going to move my head from my slides there, there we go. So the five-step framework of a communications plan, and as I said, this doesn't matter whether you're investing millions of dollars or you've got negative $5 to spend from a communications perspective. First of all, is the 'what'. What are we trying to do, and what do we need to say? Who do we need to talk to? When should we communicate? How should we say it? Where is our audience? And how are we going to measure, pivot, the word of 2020, and evaluate our work. Now, acknowledging you've had three labs ahead of today, my session this morning will primarily concentrate on steps three, four, and five. But if we just move on to the next slide, I'm going to quickly take you through the 'what' and 'who' from our campaign's perspective.

Georgina Murphy:

So far left column, we talk about what we're trying to do. So what are the broader objectives that communications will assist with? And they're things like building awareness of universal, funded Three-Year-Old Kinder. Now, I appreciate that sounds incredibly bureaucratic and I'm willing to admit it does, but universal funded simply means it'll be statewide and it'll be funded by the Victorian government. So we've got a number of points there that are at a high level that our objectives are. The what we need to say, which sits in the middle is a quick overview of some of our key messages. Because of the big story we need to tell in relation to Three-Year-Old Kinder, we've got a two-phased approach in communications, and I'm going to take you through that in future slides. But in short, the first two are building awareness.

Georgina Murphy:

So we're telling parents and carers and our target audiences that Three-Year-Old Kinder is coming. And we talk about the benefits and what it means for their children and the broader community by attending. Sorry, messages three and four are much more action focused. And they're asking our target audiences to speak to their local services, enroll and visit our website. Sounds incredibly simple, but it took us some time to agree to those messages, as I'm sure you can appreciate. And then the who on the far right there is a quick overview of our audiences. Target audiences, again, it sounds incredibly obvious, parents and carers of children, children predominantly zero to two years old. So we're reaching them before kindergarten age. And then I've specifically called out two of our minority audiences, multicultural Victorians, and career families.

Georgina Murphy:

And it's really, really important that in our communications planning, we think about those audiences. And if there's a different story or a different respectful way we need to communicate with, or in addition to, to ensure that it's clear and fair and respectful, and that they too feel part of what we're trying to create. Because so sometimes the message is different. There might be different entitlements or different programs, or they might know of kindergarten in a different concept. So we need to think about that as well. I've also listed some influencers there. Sorry, the influencers I listed, I will speak to later in relation to resources and really squeezing that limit of all campaigns. Some people refer to influencers as a secondary audience, and we sometimes do at the department too. Again, they sound really obvious, but they're really important advocates when we're selling such a big initiative. Okay, thanks Kate.

Georgina Murphy:

So onto step three is in relation to timing. When should we communicate? So this is on our five-step program. This is number three of our framework. We need to think about, is there an end goal we need to work to? Are there milestone dates or timelines we need to consider? And we need to think about how influential they are. Is there something we can capitalise on to really push our communications, or promote a little bit further, or take an opportunity? And should we consider phasing our approach? Now in a nutshell, the Three-Year-Old-Kinder parent and carer facing campaign, which I'm talking to you about today, is very much geared up to enrolment. So enrolments opening and enrolments closing.

Georgina Murphy:

Of course, those dates and timings change across the state, so we need to be really conscious in our planning as to that targeting from a local level as to when those enrolments open and close,. And be having those conversations, for want of a better phrase, with Victorian families and their influencers ahead of that stage. So that is our key end goal, for want of a better phrase, but there's other dates we can think of as we step back and we think about other launches or announcements or activities that we can capitalise on to continue that conversation and continue to build that awareness. The timing is really important. Again, sounds really obvious.

Georgina Murphy:

I think it's also worth thinking about in the planning, if there's a special milestone or special annual day that you can build on as well. So in your line of work, I was thinking about things like Global Recycling Day, or World Earth Day or Earth Hour, that you might like to consider trying to essentially capitalise on. How can you build that into your plan? How can you launch your new campaign on those days or as part of that? Or can you do some form of localised media opportunity as part of that day's celebrations to build that awareness within the community?

Georgina Murphy:

It's also about thinking whether we need to plan our activity around those announcements or milestones, or whether we can shift those milestones to suit our activity and our agenda of communications. I've put up here a really simple table that we use at the department for our communications planning. It covers a milestone, details, date, and then timing. And in relation to timing, we need to think about whether it's critical, important, relevant, or flexible. So again, sounds really simple, but it's a really incredibly helpful tool as you step out any kind of either conflicting or complementary activity you can build on. And if you do it at the planning stage, everyone knows from the get-go what it all looks like. Okay, thank you, Kate.

Georgina Murphy:

Now, if we think about step number four, it's a how should we say it, which doesn't sound particularly grammatically correct. But essentially what I mean by this is, where is our audience and where do they get information? Now I've listed here some things that probably sound quite instinctive or almost obvious, but these five points, and I won't read them out, really help us shape our tools and our tactics and therefore our timings and our communications activity. So we think about other families as influencers. We think about providing resources to third parties, be it councils or community groups to use on their own facilities or their own communications channels. And we also think about the tools we can provide health professionals, such as maternal and child health nurses, which I had on the influencer list in previous slides, to really promote and advocate our messages as well.

Georgina Murphy:

Now I've put a map of Victoria there, as I'm sure you are all aware, and the map is divided into local government areas. And there's three colours. What I didn't mention at the start when I was introducing Three-Year-Old Kinder was the fact that it's being rolled out in stages, which is both a communications challenge, but also a really great opportunity. So the pink colour of the map is the first six local government areas rolled out, where families were eligible for 15 hours of funded kindergarten from last year, so in 2020. So that's places like South Gippsland, Hindmarsh and Buloke Shire. The purple colour are a further 15 local government areas that were offered the program from this year. So we've now got a total of 21, 6 plus 15.

Georgina Murphy:

And then from 2022, so next year, the program will go statewide. The reason I've specifically called this bit of information out here is because it really talks to the need for targeting, for honing in resources, for having messages that resonate with audiences, and for localised messages and content. This was really important because the last thing we wanted to do was be telling a family in Meton or Ballarat or downtown Mildura about funded Three-Year-Old Kinder in 2019, when they're not going to be eligible until 2021 or 2022. So our communications in those initial six local government areas were really, really targeted.

Georgina Murphy:

We also needed to think about how audiences differed as we moved through those rollout stages. So in 2019, we started talking to those six local government areas and in 2020, we started talking to the 15, and it goes on and on. And now we're at the point that we can advertise on TV because we're talking to a statewide audience. One of the things that, again, might sound a little bit instinctive, one of the things we needed to be conscious of was things like internet access. And some communities fed back through their local department representatives that social media advertising was fantastic, but a lot of families didn't have access to really strong internet connection. So they still read the local paper, which was lucky, because we're advertising there as well. Thank you, Kate.

Georgina Murphy:

I've put up here a couple of examples of localised content. On the left-hand side is a print advertisement that was produced to promote Three-Year-Old Kinder last year, ahead of this year. So East Gippsland was one of the 15 local government areas that offered Three-Year-Old Kinder this year. So as I'm sure you're all aware, the people who read newspapers aren't only locals from that area. So we specifically wanted to make sure that even though we were advertising in local newspapers, that it was very clear that we were managing expectations that this offering was for families in this local government area. An example I've put up there and I've highlighted with the red circle was East Gippsland. And this was something we did for the 2020 and 2021 rollout areas, so the six local government areas, and then the 15.

Georgina Murphy:

We did something very similar online as well with social advertising and to the right there, you can see the example we used for West Wimmera and with social media, we were then able to target to see that that fell in with geo-targeting that fell to the West Wimmera cohort in the state, and also fantastic to see that West Wimmera Shire council shared that one as well, which was great. And that talks to my next point in relation to using those influencer audiences. If you'd like to move ... Yep. Fantastic. Thanks Kate.

Georgina Murphy:

So up here, I've put some real-time examples of different things we did that, with the exception of the translation on the far right, didn't cost money. They did take time. They did use human resources, but they didn't cost money. They weren't advertisements. So as I mentioned earlier, we know that we needed to target families. And we know that our advertising drives broad awareness about the program amongst Victorian families. But the families have told us in our research, both informally and formally, that they then go to the kindergarten and have conversations with the educators and teachers. So with that in mind, we wanted to make sure that our educators and teachers on the ground across the state had the information they needed to answer families' questions.

Georgina Murphy:

So we put together the Fast Facts, which you can see on the top left. Now the Fast Facts are essentially key messages that we've just re-appropriated to really turn them into speaking points. We presented these as what we are calling a communications resource pack, and the cover sheet for that is on the left-hand side there, the little yellow square, bottom left. And that included things like the Fast Facts talking points, some imagery and social media tiles, some translated content like the Vietnamese to the right-hand side, some Facebook posts and special content where you could localise to your area or to your service name, and some website template text. The example to the right is an infographic we had developed and shared with industry peak bodies, so our workforce unions and sector representatives, including the Early Learning Association of Australia. And that's just a little screenshot of something that they'd shared of our content on their Facebook page.

Georgina Murphy:

Again, it not only helps us further promote our messages, it helps our third parties to best explain the reform, because this is really big news for the early childhood sector as well, as well as being an exciting thing for Victorian families. So it's a really big story to tell, and there's a lot of jigsaw pieces as we move around. That said... can we just move on to the next slide. Thank you.

Georgina Murphy:

Last but not least is measurement and evaluation. Ironically, it is my end slide, but I have said it's not just at the end. And when we think about measurement and evaluation at the department, we split it into three sections, a pre, a during, and a post. And all of these need to be considered in the planning. And I know that you'll be stepping through this in future sessions as well. So for example, drawing on previous learnings, thinking about things like what have I learned from previous communications we've done that I can apply to this activity. Can we set a baseline to measure post activity?

Georgina Murphy:

And that sounds all a bit fancy, but when I say baseline, it can be as anecdotal or as simple as thinking about current website hits and if you're expecting them to increase, or Facebook engagement, or sentiment of media coverage that you might have in your local newspapers, or commentary or engagement on newsletter articles, or eDMs that you might send out, so email groups. So just have a think about how that can shape or set up measurement for the campaign that you're planning.

Georgina Murphy:

In campaign monitoring, I typically mean real-time. So do we need to consider providing updates and reporting and how are we going to do that? What tools will we draw on? Will it be website edit, website visits, will it be engagement, will it be queries on our customer service 1800 number, will it be pamphlets dropped off or filled out, or complaints, or whatever it may be. And then is there opportunities to pivot and update our activity based on what we're learning in real time. Now, as I'm sure you're familiar, especially with social media, people will tell you pretty quick smart if they don't like something, and that can be used in a really good way. For example, if you're using different photographs for your communications, is there a photo that even anecdotally seems to be resonating better? Can you use more of that or is there a message that's resonating or really not hitting the mark that you can mix up? So it's important to where possible, think about a plan that is fluid and flexible, within reason, that you can then take learnings as they happen and shape future activity.

Georgina Murphy:

And again, this doesn't have to be in a long term communications plan. It can apply for something that's only a month or two long as well. And then, the post. So we've got pre, during, and post. Post measurement in relation to ahead of starting, we need to think about what success looks like, what are we trying to achieve, and how we going to measure and evaluate. So again, thinking about those tools, thinking about what resources we have just at our fingertips to draw on, and it doesn't have to be formalised. It doesn't have to include expensive evaluation plans. This day and age, there are so many different options that we can draw on to both set that baseline data and use from both qualitative and a quantitative perspective to do your reporting. Thank you.

Susan Benedyka:

Fabulous. Thank you very much Georgina. And I've just put into the chats, let me know if there's any questions that you have for Georgina and I'll go straight to you. So let me know if you've got any questions. Now's your chance. Drum roll.

Georgina Murphy:

Please put me on the spot. I love a question.

Susan Benedyka:

One of the things that we've found in previous sessions, Georgina, is the practicality of being able to have not just the how this is done, but then being able to hear someone who's actually put it in place. And you did that really well. It was a great complement to Karen's presentation. Emily is asking, "Are there any tips for software use and using Excel spreadsheets, is that the best way to go or is there other ways to use tools for tracking campaign progress"?

Georgina Murphy:

Okay, so I'll answer that one in two parts. And what I should have acknowledged from the outset, my apologies, I was saying campaign. And when I was saying campaign, I meant all communications, not just advertising. So with campaigns that have advertising, we typically have some additional tools on hand to be drawing data down on that from a social media and a digital advertising perspective, as well as from our website analytics and that type of thing. But to be honest, most of the time that then goes into a good old-fashioned Excel spreadsheet, and then it's tracked week on week. So we basically set up knowing what data we will have access to and the period in which we'll be tracking. We set those templates up ahead of time, and then we input week on week and report up, down, and across.

Georgina Murphy:

But we not only look at the numbers, so to speak, but any interesting anecdotes and then where possible, look to shape up. And we just use a little bit of a text like "the blue background", It's very technical, "The blue background ad seems to be resonating better". We would A/B test that further and push that one up the line or the social media post last week. So an organic post, for example, the social media post is drawing a lot of questions from families about cost. We need to put some more content on our website about what this will cost families.

Susan Benedyka:

Great. And the ultimate is the take up. So you're rolling out, you're into 21 local government areas now. What's the take up been like compared to expectations?

Georgina Murphy:

So the take up has been really strong. Look, I haven't got the numbers in front of me, but from memory we've got about 90 plus percent of children are enrolled, engaged and attending. Always challenging to know exactly how many children are eligible on which to base that data, especially given the challenges of 2020 and what that meant for participation. But take up has been really strong and from a localised perspective, in talking with those regions and the biggest stakeholders in each, including the councils, the communications has really assisted to either lead or complement what's happening at a local level as well. So they tell me, anyway.

Susan Benedyka:

Jacqueline, I might ask Georgina to stay online and perhaps do an answer for you on that, because we do need to get into the actual workshop.

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #5 Maximising media impact’, ‘Honi Rosenwax, Arize’, ’8 June 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

Honi Rosenwax. And Honi is the founder of Arize Communications. It's a medium-sized specialist communication agency, but she has an international presence as well, through that agency. Honi's been working for over 20 years creating corporate communications, brand messaging and positioning, stakeholder engagement, and works on crisis and issues management. In fact, I noticed on her website (very brave soul) that there's a 24-hour crisis line. So it's there for people who really need it.

Susan Benedyka:

It's about lasting relationships, is that absolute key to this sort of work. And with two decades of that experience, Honi creates clever and considered campaigns using her network and knowledge in strategic communications and publicity. It's been a delight, Honi, working with you, as we've prepared for this session, and I'm really looking forward to it. Thank you.

Honi Rosenwax:

Thank you, Susan. Hi, everyone. It's great to be on this session and I really hope that I can provide some interesting insight and answer some questions and help you walk away with a little bit more of a clear understanding of how to wrap up or package up a really great campaign with the budget you have. I'm going to share some slides. Can everyone see this?

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Honi Rosenwax:

Beautiful. Great. As you can see, on this table, there's multiple devices and multiple publications. So this is what we're going to talk about. What we use and how we use it. So the session is on ... So it's paid media versus earned media. You'll see here just a whole lot of background images of trams with advertising on it, outdoor media being the big outdoor sign as you drop down to the freeway, television, and then on the right, you'll see newspapers and LinkedIn, and Instagram. So that on the right, you're seeing the predominant earned media, and on the left, you're seeing that paid advertising, as you would say, or media.

Honi Rosenwax:

In there is a little bit of a crossover of LinkedIn, and Financial Review, because you can also pay to boost some great earned media. As you go through your campaign, you might say, "This post is going to really cut through, even though we've written it ourselves, we think it's really strong. Let's boost it a little bit." Same goes, you might couple a editorial article, and make it stronger with an advert in the paper that goes hand in hand. And I'm going to talk a little bit about timing in a minute. But this is the crux of the session.

Honi Rosenwax:

And what I really hope that you take away is the best approach for your campaign, how to best use the budget you've given or you've allocated, what's going to make it most impactful on that budget? Sometimes clients come to us and they say, "What can you do?" And we say, "Well, how long is a piece of string?" And it doesn't matter if it's a small budget, you can do some really great stuff, these days, on a little budget. You don't have to spend like we used to. It's just about being clever and smart, and knowing where your audience eyeballs are, and ears, these days, with podcasts. And how to use that resource you have internally, or get an external resource that's really going to drive success for you.

Honi Rosenwax:

So one thing to remember as I talk through this, and just keep thinking about it for your own success, is, "Who's my target audience? Who's my demographic? And which one of these applications suit them?" We need to really understand that that target audience is just a person as well. So you might be targeting local businesses, for example, but those entrepreneurs or local business owners also have kids, or love footy, or they're of a demographic that ... or an older demographic, so they might be part of the local bowls club, or something. So you might do some campaign that ties in with them.

Honi Rosenwax:

So just try and have a little bit of think of ... And it's okay if it's a broad audience, but just think about, "I need to touch this person multiple times for them to remember our campaign. So where are their eyes and ears? They're predominantly reading this, but I think they would also read this as well." And that's how we come up with a multichannel campaign.

Honi Rosenwax:

So I'm going to move on. It can get a little bit overwhelming, all the terms that are thrown around these days, and what exactly paid, earned, shared and owned mean. And I'm just not going to assume that you all know exactly what they are, and if you do, I'm sorry that I'm repeating it, but we get so often people say that, "Remind me which one's paid and which one's earned, and can they both be paid and earned or shared? Fill me in on that." So I've made a little glossary.

Honi Rosenwax:

So paid is when, say you, just what we were talking about, you pay a celebrity or an influencer to let you use their face all over your social media. And in your ads. And so you've paid them to do that, and you might negotiate that you can do it for six months. Generally quite expensive. Unless they're really engaged with the topic and it means something to them, which is part of what I was to talk about later, being authentic. Paid influence is where you're paying them to post on their page, and then yes, you might share their content, but ultimately, you're paying them to just write something fantastic on their own social media.

Honi Rosenwax:

Social media ads, boosting a post, which is really affordable, it can be $100, $50. We've had ads boosted and make such a big difference. And then in-door advertising being your television, your radio, ads on your iPad, and then outdoor being that signage or tram stop. I'm from Melbourne, so I'm talking a lot about trams here, I suppose, but buses, train stations. And then advertorial.

Honi Rosenwax:

Advertorial is an interesting one, because it can look like editorial, can look like earned media, but it will always have the word advertorial somewhere on that article. So you might pick up say, the Australian Financial Review. I'm saying that one because it's a national publication, and you might think, "Wow, how did this guy get a whole opinion piece in this publication? They must have really great public relation team. This is really interesting. This sounds very biased about this person or this council, or whatever it may be." But there'll be, if you look a little bit closer, there'll be the words "advertorial."

Honi Rosenwax:

And a lot of people notice that word, and then it becomes less credible, because it's actually just an ad. And yes, they can work in some circumstances where you have a message, and I know that a lot of local governments do this, they have an announcement, a community announcement, and they'll write it more like a letter. And yes, it can look better than just an ad with a great image and a slogan, but it is known to be paid. And when something's paid for, the perception immediately is that this company is getting across a message, and it's not necessarily vetted by a third party that believes in it or loves it, or has run it through a temperature test.

Honi Rosenwax:

It doesn't matter if that ... We've got lots of clients that couple them. So it can be really successful if you've got a certain product that doesn't have a story, or you need that really strong image in someone's face that draws on their memory and keeps hitting that logo or that image at them, so it just keeps reminding them and is really memorable. We all know certain campaigns have different (hand gesture, with one hand above and one hand below) I'm doing that, because I think everyone knows it, different imagery that you just can't get out of your head. Or you want that community message to go out. But you know that it's not newsworthy, and the journalist is not going to write it for you.

Honi Rosenwax:

And then on the right here, we have earned, which is predominantly what I do in my career, so public relations, which can come in many forms. You can have tier one and tier two media. So tier one would be those big national publications, or these days, there's a publication called The Conversation of just purely digital publications, that has as big a readership as the AFR does, so look beyond just those standard ones we know of. And then tier two is your industry media or your local media.

Honi Rosenwax:

Editorial is timely commentary, announcements, features. So timely commentary, I mean you're checking the news daily and you're getting comments in the paper, or online in a digital publication, regularly. Because you're commenting on a topic that's familiar to you. And a feature is what we all want, don't we? We want a big feature on our campaign. That's harder to gain, but you can be clever and get them.

Honi Rosenwax:

Thought leadership post is on your own LinkedIn, write a great opinion piece, or thought leadership piece, and consistently get them out and start to create a fan following. And then socially-led campaigns, I'm going to show you a couple, but that's where you go, "Let's kick our campaign off with a simple post on our Instagram, or a tweet," or something like that, to gain attention from our audience, but also maybe gain attention from media, because we've made the post so powerful, or it's a progressive way to start a campaign that is not traditional and is still on trend, I suppose. That interesting way to kick something off and get a bit of attention.

Honi Rosenwax:

And then owned is stuff that you guys would kill, your blogs, website, webinars that host videos on your website, is a really powerful, as we've all learned in the last few years, that videos get a lot more cut-through than reading. Case studies or testimonials on the site and your brochures and the standard content, I suppose.

Honi Rosenwax:

And lastly, shared. Content created by your community and shared. So this is someone that loves what you're doing, loves your campaign, and just chooses to share it. They could be a mom that is local and says, "I want my friends to know about this. It's really cool. I'm going to share it and say, "Check out blah, blah."" it could be a consumer review, or comment under an article that's in the paper and they make a little comment about it, could be someone sharing it across their socials, it could be someone making a comment on, if you've got an opportunity, like a blog page, and people can also comment on that.

Honi Rosenwax:

And then user generated content. Again, it's just where someone ... Any form of content. So it could be an image, video, text, audio, that has been posted by the user of that product or a customer or resident, and that could be them using a wiki or social media, and they're just giving you third-party endorsement. So shared is really strong, because that person is choosing to do it, and earned is really strong ... Look, they're all really strong, but shared and earned is sometimes where you get the most take-up, because it's demonstrating that someone else thinks what you're doing is successful and interesting.

Honi Rosenwax:

We can definitely do some questions about that if you want, down the line, so just, if you got anything, write it down. I hope you're not all seeing me move my screen around a bit. It's just, I'm on a laptop because I'm hiding from my children, and it's not big enough. This is an example of a campaign that we did for Yarra Valley Water, just recently. And the reason I put this upon the screen, it's because it shows how we used all mediums. So earned, we got this amazing piece of coverage in the Herald Sun. These water watchers are tiny little cute rings that you put on your tap to remind your children to turn the tap off, and to not have it on for very long. It doesn't do anything, it literally just sits on your tap. It's a really cute little thing, but it doesn't necessarily stop you from doing anything. A kid could use it as a toy.

Honi Rosenwax:

But the way we positioned it as recall for kids, education for kids, it was really successful, got 11 pieces of coverage, although it's only in metro papers, although it was only available to people within the Yarra Valley. So you would think maybe we'd have to stick with local media, but the image was strong enough that we got metro coverage. And it's a cute enough idea, and we positioned it as educational. We also then engaged this influencer, her name's Mama Knows East, she's got a great following, and she did several posts for us. We paid her a very small fee. She's passionate about sustainability, and she did lots of posts, and therefore, through her posts, we got a lot of people contacting and requesting, "Can I have one?"

Honi Rosenwax:

And then lastly, we went to the local school and we asked if we could take some imagery of some of their sustainable warriors at their school. And we got a release form signed, so Yarra Valley can use those images on their social medium going, they could supply that image to a journalist, and if the journalist doesn't have the resources to send a photographer out, they could send this image along. So it started to create a great asset pool. And imagery is really, really key. So this was part of the school incursion program, and it was really strong, and those kids felt really proud, and again, they got home to tell their parents, "I'm proud of this campaign," their parents are telling their friends. Here we go, we start to create momentum and spread.

Honi Rosenwax:

They did do some banner ads as well. If you go to the Age website right now, there's one for Visy. They're quite affordable, and they did a couple of those after we had got the first piece of coverage. So there, they're using all their tactics here. But they did it on a budget. To even demonstrate even greater, I suppose, use of social media and a smaller budget again, is, you may have seen this, Danni Hunter. She is the head of the Property Council, and she's recently launched FOMO Friday, which is trying to get people back into the Melbourne CBD. Unfortunately not right now, but few weeks ago, we could, and draw people back. "Come in on a Friday. You'll have FOMO if you don't, because all your friends are finishing work at 4:00 and heading out to all the activations in the city."

Honi Rosenwax:

The way she kicked it off was, Danni has created quite a profile for herself, just by constantly, every week, couple times a week, getting on her LinkedIn, talking about something to do with the city and how we can use our infrastructure better, or what she thinks should be built, what the council should be doing, and she's got a really large voice. She's in the media all the time because she just rings those journalists and pushes her point of view.

Honi Rosenwax:

But the way she kicked it off was, she got someone to get a iPhone, and they filmed her talking to her iPhone about FOMO Friday. And that top video got 4,000 views, and I think about 3,000 people shared it. It was pretty strong for just a video she put on her LinkedIn. Then, 9News picked up that video from her LinkedIn and used it on the news that night. Just iPhone footage. Really, really smart way of doing it. This cost her nothing to do, other than her time and her creativity. She then did follow it up with spending some money on public relations, which I'll talk to now, how she utilised PR, to then really amplify what she had done on her socials. And the City of Melbourne got involved, which again made it more powerful.

Honi Rosenwax:

So, why is something PR-able, and would both of these campaigns be effective without spend on advertising? Yeah. I think they would have. I think they would have easily been effective. Danni only did an ad at the close of the campaign for a community announcement because of lockdown, so she needed to inform the community of something and she wanted it to be greater than what was on her website, being FOMO Friday on pause. And she positioned it like an advertorial, a letter from Danni, to show that she cared, and that it was coming from her. She's really built up that personal profile.

Honi Rosenwax:

But the reason that these would have been ... The way that we would have made these successful, I suppose, without any additional spend, is making it timely, new, and different. These are three rules, if you can always remember these when you're talking about earned or shared tactics, just timely, new and different. If that's all you take from today. And when you go, "I don't have something that's timely, new and different," then great. Move to advertising. Look at your strategy and go, "We need to put some advertising in this, because this isn't timely, new and different."

Honi Rosenwax:

Are you telling a story? And storytelling is a big thing. You'll see on the website, actually, we say, "Is the story worth repeating?" And that's what we help people find that story that people are going to read or hear, or watch, and go, "I'm going to talk about that at the dinner table tonight. That's really interesting. I'm going to talk about what my local council is doing, because that's different. It's new." Or it's timely. It's in the media all the time at the moment. This issue with sustainability, or this issue with lockdown and not getting people back into the city, people being scared to. The media's talking about it all the time. Great, I'm going to jump on that and start talking about it myself.

Honi Rosenwax:

So the importance is telling a story that resonates. And what does that is thought leadership, putting your opinion out there. Things that can improve the community, influencer engagement, which you don't always have to pay for. So find some people that are influencers online that care about what you're talking about, and shoot them a DM, direct message, and say, "Hi, we're working on this campaign. I can see that you post about it all the time. Would you put something up on your Instagram or your LinkedIn or your Facebook about what we're doing?"

Honi Rosenwax:

Things are on trend, as I said. If you've got data and statistics, a journalist loves data. You need a confident spokesperson, a case study, and then you've got the package. So if I was to go to a journalist, straight away in my first sentence, I would say, "Hi, I've got something important to talk to you about. I know you've only got a minute." Journalists are short of time. "I've got a great spokesperson, I've got some good images for you, and I've got a real case study. Can I talk to you for a minute?" Great, they're engaged. "You've just done my job for me." That's what they're thinking. "You're not going to pitch a story to me, and I've got to go and find the case study. Do you have an image? You don't. I like your story, but there's so much work for me to write it. Someone else has supplied me all that. Thanks, but call me when you've got all your tools together." So before you even think about editorial, do a little checklist. "Do I have all these things ready to go, and can I make the journalist's life easier?"

Honi Rosenwax:

So I'm repeating myself a little bit on this slide, but it's just so important to make friends with media. And this slide was originally called, "How do I make the media my mate?" But the journalist will respect you if you have a good story angle, case study, statistics, and a great spokesperson. And you can media train that spokesperson. They need to know everything about that journalist. So journalists do not like it if there's a mass pitch. They can see their own BCC of a pitch. They hate that. They also know if you've pitched it to one of their colleagues. They all talk, they're still in the same office. I think we forget they sit across from them.

Honi Rosenwax:

"I just got this email, how did you get it?" "Yeah, I did." "Okay, I'm not interested anymore. That person hasn't targeted me. I want to feel special." They might even talk to a local radio station. Pitching on a deadline, so journalists at 10 am, in conference with the editor, or the producer, of, "What are we going to put out today?" So pitch before that meeting. So then they're taking that idea to the meeting. Or do not pitch at 4:00 pm. Again, they're submitting their story, they're filming at that time. It'll annoy them, and next time you call, they'll think, "You don't understand my job."

Honi Rosenwax:

Broken record pitches, you just keep going back with a similar pitch. They've told you once they're not interested. A month later you try that pitch again. I've already told you I'm not interested. Bring me something new." So just don't keep coming back with the same story. And we hear from journalists all the time, "You're targeting the wrong person. I've said I'm not interested. Stop wasting my time. I don't care that you've made it slightly different, I'm just not interested in that topic." And that's when you get creative. You go, "Okay, do we have stats or is there a spokesperson willing to say something outside of this? Is there something trendy in the media that they could jump on the back of, and therefore my pitch does become interesting? I know you weren't interested in it last month, but now, this has happened in the community, and my story has something to do with that, so you're interested now." And now authentic relationships, which comes back a little bit to mass pitching, but also ... And this applies to influencers.

Honi Rosenwax:

You're talking to someone that just doesn't care about this topic. "Hey, my title, I'm a producer or journalist. My title is environment journalist, but you're pitching something to me about food." We've done the, recently, the sustainability Vic bread waste campaign. If I went to a business writer and told them about that because I haven't really researched who they are, they would find me annoying and probably not answer my next call.

Honi Rosenwax:

"I've researched you, I know your last article last week was interesting about food waste, or just about sustainability in general. Can I talk to you about my campaign?" And again, unaware or tone-deaf, last week, when Victoria, or the week before, went into lockdown, we stopped all of our pitching. It seemed a bit tone-deaf to start talking about something that wasn't related, for a few days, to COVID. It seemed a bit insensitive, actually. So some of our pitches just paused for a week, and then we picked them back up again.

Honi Rosenwax:

You've got to think about what's your journalist's job and what's important to them. On the right there, "Is your story really cute and worth sending that journalist or the producer or the influencer a little media kit? It doesn't cost you much." The water watches would have cost a bit to produce thousands of them. But say this box here, we brought some plates from Target, we brought some knives, that little ... Obviously, that card talks about the campaign on it. It's in a nice envelope, there's some lavender oil. Because that was talking about food. And we could have done something similar with the bread waste. We could have put loaf of bread and some spreads in there, or some croutons would have been idea. Because when your bread's starting to get a little stale, we encourage people to use croutons rather than throw it in the bin.

Honi Rosenwax:

And then all of a sudden, you've got someone's attention. "Oh, this is cute. This is better than a media release sent to me. What's this?" And they start opening it. An influencer might film themselves opening it, and then you've got a post, instantly. They might not do anything else, but you're in their story, because they think it's exciting that they've received something. And it cost you $10. Below, I don't know if some of you use these, but these are the platforms where you used to do what I've just said, to research the journalist, to understand the media landscape. So Meltwater will track coverage, not just your coverage, your competitor's coverage, anything on the topic that's trending. Source Bottle is great. Journalists post on there stuff that they need all the time.

Honi Rosenwax:

Recently, we had a journalist ask us, or ask everyone, "Does anyone have any food tips for my article that I'm covering? I don't have time to ring around." We rang them within 10 minutes, and they ended up doing a feature on our account. We made their job easy. On Social Diary, we posted, "We've got 100 kits to give out to influencers if you post on that kit about this item called Raphy." Great. We had 150 say, "Yeah, can I have the kit?" We posted them out, we asked that client for an extra 50. We got 150 posts within 72 hours, of people taking a photo of the kit that they got. That just made our campaign digital-led and we didn't have to do any PR at all for that client.

Honi Rosenwax:

I'm conscious of time. So coming back to my very first point, all of this will fall over. All these tips and tricks and techniques that I've just told you won't work if you don't know your audience well. Are they even looking where you've decided to base your campaign around? Did they read that? Did they listen to that? Will this message resonate with your local community? Why should locals care about what you're saying? And is it worthy of media attention? Is all the things that you want to think about.

Honi Rosenwax:

So when you're picking a social media platform, you might just look at the demographics. So Facebook, millennials, gen X and baby boomers. It's a broad reach, so that's great. There's two billion monthly users. Fantastic. Facebook is still going. Some people will say, "Is Facebook still a thing?" Yes, it's very alive and kicking, but make sure the language that you use, or the story you're putting on there is relevant to that channel. Got some good content and really great image. You look at Instagram, millennials and gen X. Okay, does that relate to millennials or gen X, what I'm putting on there? And do I have some fantastic video footage or video to put on there? Because that's the predominant use of Instagram.

Honi Rosenwax:

I love LinkedIn, and I think it would work really great for local councils, because you're putting out an opinion. You're standing for something. You're speaking on behalf of your community to improve something, or to seem like a thought leader. I think it can be really effective, and I think local councils should stand up for something for their residents. And as you can see on the right there, young Australian of the year, standing up to help those in need, senior Australians of the year, the elders fighting for the next generation. So these are all the kind of things that I would use that are engaging, they're interesting, you'd click on it, because, "What's that about? I want to learn more. It resonates with me because I popped that maybe on Facebook, and I've got an article editorial in, maybe my audience listens to 3AW or 2GB, and I've got the producer to talk about it because my audience is a baby boomer." And that's where they're listening to.

Honi Rosenwax:

I'll very quickly go through some of these case studies that talk about how we've utilised those techniques. So Underworks is a sock company who cares about socks. And what we did is say, "Let's make a digitally-led campaign. Let's get a whole lot of people to post a picture of themselves with socks on, and shoes. Like thongs or sandals, so it looked a bit daggy, and every time someone posts, we would give a pair of socks to the homeless.

Honi Rosenwax:

We got so many people posting. We paid a couple of influencers small fees to do it, they were engaged. "Great. We want to help the homeless. How can we help you?" Some did it for free, some wanted a small fee because they were such big influencers. But most said, "How can we help?" "We'll send you a pair of socks that are Underworks socks, and if you can just post in the next couple weeks, that would be great." Fantastic. We had thousands and thousands of people post within one week, and therefore, all of a sudden, journalists started contacting us, not us contacting them. "What's this campaign we're seeing? What's happening?" 121 pieces of coverage resulted in this because it became a movement. And now we do it annually for this business.

Honi Rosenwax:

Wasn't really about the sock brand, but because they did something good and we called it I Give a Sock, people started to respect that brand over Bonds, they started going, "Wow, this brand is doing something really good. Let's buy those socks." And also, they'd click through to the website and go, "Oh, they've got great socks for babies." Or, "These socks have great grip." As I talked at the start, there's some campaigns, you only need to kick off with social media, and they'll create their own momentum. They become a beast of their own.

Honi Rosenwax:

Robert Connor Dawes Foundation is an amazing woman that started a foundation for pediatric brain cancer. Her son died of it, and three months later, she had this foundation up and running. It's not got national funding, it's a hugely successful business. What she's done to make it successful is use influencers. So as you can see there, Dave Hughes, Lisa McCune, Andy from Hamish and Andy, and they all do the run, each year. She doesn't pay them anything. Obviously, it's a charity, so people are engaged with it. But again, we're giving some kind of ... as we did with I Give a Sock, we created something that filled people's heart, and when we engaged each of these ambassadors, we said, "Will you give us six hours of PR?"

Honi Rosenwax:

Six hours of talking to a journalist about why you're doing this, your healthy diet, how you keep healthy so you can keep running, little things that were cute to them. And all of them, well, probably 90% of the ambassadors said, "Yeah, sure, I'll do six hours' worth of PR for this." So we got their quotes in media releases. We got a couple of them to turn up at the launch events of this year's Connor's Run where you can register online, so we could get people going, "I'll go down and register on the iPads down at the park, because I get to meet this celebrity."

Honi Rosenwax:

And the last one that I popped in is this, just to show how effective one piece of coverage can be. So Caravan Crusaders, their objective at the moment is to raise funds. Not necessarily for more people to buy Caravans. So they wanted a business piece. We can get them really easy, "Five Top Tips to Caravan in These Caravan Parks." We partnered up with the big four Caravan parks and did a collaboration with them. That stuff's obvious. Though it's effective, really effective. But they said, "We want some investment. We want some capital." It was really hard to get a business piece on a caravan company for a journalist of The Australian to think it was worthy, but we gave them lots of stats, and we gave them some financials.

Honi Rosenwax:

"This company has grown X% in two years." Which was really impressive. "Our forecast is to grow this percent, or to engage this amount of people." And the journalist said, "Okay, you've given me some stats. Great. And you've given me a great spokesperson. Let's go." The reason I showed it is just, we got one piece of coverage in The Australian, and all these publications on the right syndicated it. And they either syndicated it verbatim, or they took pieces from that coverage and wrote a new article. So what we gave them was so compelling, what the journalist wrote was so interesting about this little company that had made good, that a whole lot of other media, without even contacting us, got them these extra bits of coverage.

Honi Rosenwax:

And that is really it from me, that I can really share with you. Has that stopped sharing? I hope so. I suppose if I was to leave you with something, it would just be, make sure it's timely, new and different, use your resources well, and just try and stop before you put anything out of, "Can I stretch this campaign a little bit further? Is my audience potentially on TikTok?" Or they're not on TikTok, but because it's my age group, 40-something, but their kids are. And their kids really, quite often, will influence parents on what to do and what choices to make. So maybe our campaign wants to support small local businesses. So could we get our businesses to create a whole lot of emotive videos that are featuring small clips of real businesses in their day-to-day lives and post it on TikTok?

Honi Rosenwax:

And then these kids are all going, "Hey mom, the local milk bar posted this hilarious TikTok video of what this guy has to do. He's got to be up at 4:00 am, his day, the milk delivery, and then what kind of lollies he's chosen because of why. Have a look at it." And then mom goes, "Oh, what a clever guy. Let's head down there tomorrow and get an ice cream." So I think just thinking about your audience, and then checking that what you're saying is timely, new and different, will help you decide what channel to use. It'll help you decide, "Is this earned, is this advertising? Would someone share this? How much of this is interesting to get up on our website? Is it worth a blog? Or is it just worth a banner on our website?"

Susan Benedyka:

So Honi, there were a few questions as you were going through. Some of them are definitional, so I'll give you the two definitional ones first. One is, "What is a whitepaper?" And the second one that fits definitional is, "Tell us about syndication." So what's a whitepaper, and what's syndication?

Honi Rosenwax:

Sure. Great. Good questions. A whitepaper is, just using another term, is a research paper. So it could be something that you house on your website that you can download, a user can download, that tells them a lot more about what you're doing. So it might have some research that's global, and then let's say it's, "60% of people have voted that they would like, in their retirement years, to get a tattoo," for example. They never got one, now they're retired, they have freedom to do all these things that they never did. And therefore, there's a bit of survey data, and then it talks about how we're going to have more retirement villages because people feel more free when they've got less housework to do.

Honi Rosenwax:

And you might build out a big story, how why, when, and then you house this on your website, and people can download it to learn something. It forms a part of their own research, and then you can take sections of it and send to a journalist, and cut it up in soundbite pieces, and you've got all this new content for journalists. Journalists love it when you contact them and say, "We've got a research paper, we've got a whitepaper." They love it. And it can be anywhere from four pages to 54. But I'm sure you all have research documents that you've got to use. You might just cut them up so they're a little bit more interesting or they've got a great heading or their own specific topic.

Susan Benedyka:

Fantastic. And syndication.

Honi Rosenwax:

Yeah. So every publication is part of a family. So it might be part of Fairfax or News Corp, and under News Corp, they might have, I think they have something like 160 newspapers. I know a lot of newspapers have sadly closed down during COVID, local newspapers, but there's still lots of gazettes out there. I have a Weekly Times in my area. A lot of areas would still have a local paper somewhere. But say, if a story is strong enough, and you get it in a local paper, the metro paper that's associated with that local paper, so The Age is associated, or the Sydney Morning Herald might also publish it. They have a house on the internal website, which, all stories are covered off and journalists can pick and take stories from it. So syndication is really when you've got an article and it's strong enough that it's worthy of sharing across the whole of News Corp's publications. And-

Susan Benedyka:

Thanks very much. And then two other bits. One was someone saying, "Look, local government's often restricted in the media it can use. And that will be internal policies. Are you aware of those restrictions, and what are likely to be the boundaries?"

Honi Rosenwax:

We have worked with local government a fair bit where it takes a long time to get things through. There's lots of people to sign it off. And that can mean you miss that timely element of it. What we've done in the past is, months before our campaign, is make a PR kit that needs to be signed off internally. So you might have a whole lot of messaging that you want to use through that campaign, and the images, and then months before, you get that long list of sign-offs internally. And then what you can do is say, "As long as we stick within these boundaries of these approved messages, we can go as fast as we want during the campaign period. So we can run a media release that only has those messages. We can send an email pitch to a journalist that only has those messages in it. As long as we don't go out of the bounds of this messaging document that has been signed, we can move fast, we can put out what we want in the campaign."

Honi Rosenwax:

So that's one way we've got around it with all the red tape of what you can say. And then the other way, which has been really successful even for big corporates, I suppose, they have lots of rules about what you can and can't say, but if they've signed it, you can use it. And another way would be, get a person to not necessarily talk, in the business, to not necessarily talk about the campaign, but to talk about something that's going on in that space. So you might have them positioned as a futurist, and they're talking about the future of that council, what will happen in the future. But because they're so interesting, people will naturally go and look up the campaigns that that council's running.

Susan Benedyka:

Great. And then the last one is, "How do you deal with the prospect of turning people off?" So for example, the FOMO campaign for an individual on the chat was saying, they found the FOMO campaign extremely offensive, because it's driven by consumerism. So there are going to be some people with whom the message resonates, and some who are going to be quite divided. Is that an issue?

Honi Rosenwax:

Look, you can't make friends with everyone. This is where research would come in is, is the target audience predominantly going to be engaged with this? And also the language you use. I suppose what we're doing is trying to help small businesses in the CBD. We're trying to get people back because Melbourne was such a great city before COVID, we're trying to get that Melbourne vibe back, and we're trying to help the little cafes and restaurants that are now really struggling.

Honi Rosenwax:

So I would position the language of helping, of community, but also, you win some, you lose some. If you want to put yourself into the public arena, you're always going to have someone that says, "I don't like this." And if you have a journalist kick their heels up about it, you try and make friends with them. "Can you tell me why you don't like it? Can we get over this hurdle?" But I just think, no matter what you do ... We worked with Hugh Jackman, everyone said, "How can you not like Hugh Jackman? Lovely, lovely man." And he was still saying he gets people write horrible things to him about great things he's doing. So I think you've got to be ready to cop a small group of people or some people not liking what you do, when you put yourself out.

Susan Benedyka:

Thanks so much, Honi. What we're going to do now is a fairly quick breakout room. This will be only eight minutes. In the breakout room this time, the question that Kate posted is, "Has this presentation changed your mind about PR-led or social-led campaigns?" So presupposes that you had a position to start with. There'll be four in these breakout rooms. Honi might come around and have a little jump in. Yes, I'd love Hugh Jackman as the face of SV recycling, very nice. I'm going to open all the rooms, and see you in eight minutes.

Honi Rosenwax:

I think Linda and I were just finishing chatting, but I think the consensus that I heard is that everyone would love to be able to use these tools, but they've got this ceiling. And maybe not being listened to by the marketing and comms team. And so have limited ability to roll out some of these things. So you feel you've got a great story to tell, but your comms team's so busy, that they're not really making it a priority for them. I think that's what a few people were saying to me. I suppose my suggestion would be, is that you go ask for a meeting with them and say, "What is going to get your attention? What is going to get my initiative, or my campaign on your radar, in the calendar of PR or the calendar of social media activity for the year?" Just have a chat with them and ask them for a coffee.

Honi Rosenwax:

Or submit them that package like you would a journalist. Treat them like your are their journalist. "I've got this great image, I've got this great local person that's willing to talk about it, I know that one of our spokespeople internally is really passionate on this subject, and I've done a survey to even get this campaign up, and here's a little bit of data from it." If I was the internal comms manager, I would say, "Wow, good on you for putting a package together and not just writing me an email with a couple of sentences in it. You've gone to a lot of effort, let's have a look at this. You've also made my job quite easy. Because you're not asking me to do something for you but I've got to go and find all the elements of that story, you've given it to me on a platter."

Honi Rosenwax:

I know that you would each have your own individual problems and it's probably something I need to speak to each specifically about, because everyone's challenge will be slightly different, but overarching, I would create a package for that internal person, that they can't refuse.

Susan Benedyka:

Thank you. And then the last question is a little bit of a research question, but, "Any good ideas to find local influencers in local areas without having to go back to a media agency?"

Honi Rosenwax:

Yeah. So on Instagram, there is a function that you can do, geotargeting". If any of you got kids, so teenagers, ask them to show you it. But you can also, you would say that you can search hashtags. And so you could put in a hashtag that's relevant to your topic. That will then bring out a whole lot of people that are using that hashtag the most. And normally, those people that will come up first on the list will have some influence. If you go there and click on them, if they've got over 6,000 followers or 5,000 followers, that's pretty good. Just check that they've got no skeletons in the closet, like they haven't posted something six months ago about themselves that is a bit controversial, a bit political, or they've got a bikini shot or something. Sometimes that can be a bit ... Google their name to make sure they've never been in local media for getting in trouble for something. I always make sure I check their background.

Honi Rosenwax:

But there's a lot of functionality in the backend of Instagram and Facebook where you can geotarget people. And if you Google "How do I do geotargeting on Instagram?" It will give you steps. But then those platforms I showed, Telum, and all the likes, have functionality, but ask your comms manager, "Are we subscribed to any of these social media platforms that are social media analytics?" Telum is one that's really good.

Susan Benedyka:

Thank you so much.

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #5 Thinking outside the square, ‘Les Robinson, Changeology’, ’8 June 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

Thank you so much. I'd like to introduce Les Robinson. For many of you, you are here because you know of Les' work and Les' fantastic work with councils and with communities. And his book, Changeology, which I found incredibly useful and interesting. Les lives on the south coast with his wife, as he says, young son, five chooks and two budgies to be precise. He likes people and sunrises, which is perfect because his professional life is devoted to facilitating workshops about change. And one of those workshops is described as as fun as a paddock of baby goats. And I'm looking out at baby lambs running around a paddock at the moment, and I can tell you, they're just gambling everywhere, it's really good.

Susan Benedyka:

Les specialises in community change, but he brings science, rigorous process, clear thinking, as well as warmth and fun to designing effective change. He helps organisations devise innovative change programs, he trains staff and volunteers in the fields of sustainability, health promotion, road safety, natural resource management and emergency management. Les really welcome to you. We're looking forward to you running an engaging, wonderful session for the next hour with us.

Les Robinson:

Thank you very much, Susan. Hello, everyone. How are we all today. Let's just start as I said, great big out of five, how are we? Where five is I'm absolutely fabulous and one is, "Oh, god, I'm having such a crap day, I can't believe it. The budgie's just died." Okay, so good, very good, everyone. So, welcome. Now, what I want to talk to you about is how we be creative. And of course, none of us feel creative. We certainly don't feel very creative when we're sitting in our corner of the office at the desk trying to be creative. So, how do we go about that?

Les Robinson:

And all of this work requires us to come up with ideas which are buzz-worthy and exciting and grab people's attention. So, how do we get into that space and do that? And I want to do a really quick session with you about that. But before that, I want to mention something else, and that is that you're practically all in the waste business in local government, and that all of you are here partly because you'll be rolling out new services, FOGO services or glass collection services in the next year or two. And so, I just wanted to just mention something about that, which is to tell a little story.

Les Robinson:

I don't know whether it will help. But I was around when recycling services were being rolled out for the first time, and I got to be a fly on the wall of watching the process happening behind the scenes. And there was one local government I worked with and the manager in charge kind of tried to outsource it all. They got a consultant in and they tried to do it remotely by sending emails to people and just having the odd meeting. And that service collapsed, it literally had ... They had to literally go and collect all the recycling bins and bring them back again, it was a catastrophe because it was just badly administered.

Les Robinson:

And I sat in a different one, and this was one run by two women who were relatively junior in the organisation. They've since gone on to amazing things. But they sat there, and I sat in the room with them, and they were planning the whole thing, and nothing was small enough to escape their attention. Everyone had to sit in the room with them. I was the communications consultant, and then there was the staff who roll it out, and there were these other people in the room plus them. There was this table, a full table, and they went through everything excruciatingly, in fantastic detail again and again and again. Everyone had to be there for every meeting, people weren't allowed to just not be there.

Les Robinson:

And my lesson I took away from that is that roll-outs are probably one of the most complicated things that local government ever does. It's a massively detailed, administrative enterprise. And the behind the scenes planning and the intricate attention to every detail and following everything up is the measure of success. So, that's what makes a difference, not even the message or any of that stuff, it's the behind the scenes work. So, I just wanted to tell you that story because for me, it was such a moment about learning how we do these kinds of complicated things well.

Les Robinson:

Now, having said that, I want to get into a little bit about how we be creative together. And I'm just going to leap into part of the workshop I do called Changeology that a lot of you have ... I could do a little hand up and I know a lot of people would have done it. So, this will be, for many of you, a little bit of a refresher. Now, I'm going to share a screen that looks a little bit like this.

Les Robinson:

So, now, I mean, I think that Honi mentioned to us that, sure, the choice of media is important and incredibly interesting. And what she shared was wonderful insight. However, unless the message is there, all the cleverness with the media in the world isn't going to make any difference. What is the message? We need to think about, what is the content of what we're trying to communicate? And if we have great content, it doesn't really matter whether it's on the side of a garbage truck or whether it's on an Instagram site, the media is less important than the message itself. And that's what I want to work with you on today.

Les Robinson:

So, you can see this page here called Tactics: how to be engaging. Now, who's used the word engaging lately? Little bit of a sign up there. Who's used the word engage? All of us. If I said, how many have done it in the last week? Everyone will actually put their hands up because it's the most over-used word that we have. But we need to unpack it because it does mean something. So, I want to share with you ... Here we go. Share, share with you. Good.

Les Robinson:

Okay, what does it mean to engage, to be engaged? The first thing is obviously people have to notice us. When we put a message out there, it has to pop into people's consciousness as they walk down the street or as they're looking at their Facebook. So, there has to be something a little bit different about it that grabs attention. And people are surrounded by stuff all the time, their brains are cutting out, so it certainly can't be predictable what we show people. The second thing is that it needs to cause people to talk to each other. And Honi talked about that as well, that people need to see our message and then talk about it. So, it needs to be buzz worthy.

Les Robinson:

And then, thirdly, it needs to be the kind of thing that you'll make time for in your life to come and play with, to appreciate, or even just to unpack your FOGO caddy and make a decision about where to put it in the kitchen and to read your manual, that takes time. People need to not just put it in the corner of the kitchen and ignore it, which is really easy to do, but to play with it. So, how do we get those things happening? Being noticed, buzz worthy, and play with. So, that's what I want to focus with you.

Les Robinson:

And actually, I think the answer's pretty simple in every case: there needs to be something about the way we're communicating that surprises, something is a little bit different, out of the ordinary, a tiny bit unpredictable and so people see it, it pops into their consciousness. And then, they're intrigued and they want to learn more. So, how do we do that? How do we surprise? Now, here I am sitting at work, oh, boy, it's about 11:00 in the morning, just had my third coffee. I'm trying to develop a campaign that's surprising. Sitting there and I'm being distracted by all sorts of stuff. Seriously, it's not going to happen, is it? We're just not going to surprise ourselves, partly because I suspect it's technically impossible to surprise yourself, if you just think about the logic of it, you can't surprise yourself because you already know everything that ... You know where I'm going with that.

Les Robinson:

So, how do you surprise yourself? How do you create surprising things? I'm going to jump over. Oh yeah, I want to share this with you. This really ... This is a tiny, little book published in 1940 by a guy called James Webb Young, who was a Madison Avenue advertising executive. And it's a great little book on creativity, it's so tiny and thin that, seriously you can read it in about 40 minutes. And get it on Amazon for a couple of dollars. It's got a lot in it. And one thing he pointed out which is really valuable is that every new idea is simply a combination of old ideas, that a new idea is just two things that have not previously occupied the same space coming together.

Les Robinson:

So, that was a really great insight. It taught me that I don't have to come up with completely new ideas, I just have to combine ideas in a slightly different way. That was one idea. But the main idea he's got is his method for coming up with original ideas, and it's a five step method. Step one, he gathers lots of raw material. He just gathers lots of ideas from all over the place, he's like a collector of ideas. And if he's selling stockings, he probably goes and grabs all the stockings and then he collects ideas about stockings and talks to people about their experiences of stockings, so he's gathering lots of raw material for inspiration. And he's probably not even being particularly discriminating about it, he's just getting stuff together, forming a big pile of ideas.

Les Robinson:

And then, step two, he digests the material, he feels it all over. So, he plays with it and thinks about it and wonders how it might come together. And then he stops, he just stops trying. And I think that is the absolute point of genius in his method is that he doesn't try anymore. He literally just sleeps on it until the idea self-assembles in the back of his mind. Now, I can see a few of you here. Now, I want to just quickly pose to you where are you when you come up with your best ideas? Emma, Emma Avery, where are you when you come up with your best ideas?

Emma Avery:

Hi, Les. I'm co-facilitator here, but I'm happy to share as well. I'm a parent and I've actually had this epiphany of when the time is quiet, settling a child in a dark room, you cannot use your phone because the light brightens up, dark room, empty, quiet, nothing, and I come up with brilliant ideas when I'm in a dark room and it's quiet and I'm all by myself, that's mine.

Les Robinson:

What a genius method, I'm going to try it. Thank you.

Emma Avery:

Other things are like doing monotonous tasks, like pegging out the washing, you know? Things come to me there, I'm not thinking about anything else, my brain is clear.

Les Robinson:

Thank you very much for that insight, Emma. Now, Jennifer Lewis, I'm going to ask you next. Where would you be when you come up with your best ideas?

Jennifer Lewis:

I'm a 3:00 in the morning wake up.

Les Robinson:

3:00 in the morning person.

Jennifer Lewis:

Yeah.

Les Robinson:

Its actually the most productive time of day.

Jennifer Lewis:

Yeah.

Les Robinson:

I'm also going to ask ... Let me see, Kate Bell, where do you come up with your best ideas?

Kate Bell:

Same as someone else in the chatroom, either driving or definitely in the shower.

Les Robinson:

In the shower, great. All right, now, look, I hear that all the time. And the sure ... the long and short is that we only ever come up with good ideas when we're not supposed to and when we're literally not even trying a little bit. That's interesting, isn't it? Like, we can't make ourselves come up with these ideas. We can't worry ourselves into new ideas, and they are not going to happen on schedule, they just aren't, but they will happen. That's the really beautiful thing is they will actually come together, bang, in the back of our minds. So, sleep on it, and only at that point does the work begin of realising it and sketching it up and prototyping it and trying to make it work.

Les Robinson:

So, I think that is the most beautiful model. And it rings true with me. And good thing is, it takes the pressure off because our only actual job is to gather ideas, is to gather raw material and play with them. So, how hard can that be?

Les Robinson:

Now, I want to just check the timing, good, and my list. Okay. All right, I want to do a method with you now. I'm going to actually dive into practice, and I think that the facilitation should ... That creativity should never be done by an individual, even though it will eventually come to us in the back of our minds, it's enormously accelerated by doing it with others, by doing it with two people who come together, or three people, or a small workshop. And the new idea seems to pop into the space between two people. It's like one person doesn't have it, the other person doesn't have it, but it pops into the space between them, and suddenly, it's there. Suddenly, a new idea has popped into existence, often because someone misheard what the other person said.

Les Robinson:

So, it's best if it's a facilitated process, if we're sitting down with our teams and we're having a facilitated team adventure together, playfully coming up with new ideas. And I want to suggest to you a really great method for doing that, a great all-purpose method for any kind of new idea generation for innovation, whenever anything needs innovating or freshening up. So, let's copy James Webb Young's method.

Les Robinson:

The first thing I'll do with you, I want to do with you is to share with you some raw material to stimulate your thinking, and then we'll go into breakout groups. In the breakout groups, there are a set of instructions for what to do in the breakout groups. And when you come back, I'll be very keen to hear some of the ideas that you've come up with. Now who's got their instructions? Because it was in the information pack that went out to you. Everyone got their instructions? The instruction document is called Creative Tactic Session, it's a Word document. Can you see if you can locate that document? At least one person in every breakout room should have one. Thank you, good on you, Stan. Thank you.

Les Robinson:

So, see if you can locate that document. Good. So, now, step one is to share ideas. I want to share a couple of things with you. Firstly, I want to share this really neat ... It's a little sort of meme I found on the internet ages ago, and I do think it's very insightful. Can you see this? The 21 types of content we all crave. Can you see that? I don't know ... I hope you can read it. Is it readable? Can I get some thumbs up? Is it readable? Good, okay. This is one of those things that it's kind of like a checklist. It's a checklist of places to take your brain.

Les Robinson:

So, imagine you're working in your team, you're sitting down. If you're facilitating a group of people, you could say, "Okay, in pairs, each of you choose one of these numbers and discuss what in our ..." Let's say we're talking about our FOGO rollout. "What in our FOGO rollouts could be a story about one of these kinds of content?" So, one group of people may say, "Okay, is there some content that we could imagine that's about dreams coming true connected to FOGO? What would that look like?" And then get your people to talk about it and then share their idea.

Les Robinson:

And another group could be talking about content that reminds us there's more. That's interesting, what about FOGO, is there a story there that could remind people about what is more? And all of these ideas are great. Is there a David versus Goliath story here somewhere to do with FOGO and green waste and compost and what it gets used for? And what are all the stories connected to it that we could tell?

Les Robinson:

Oh yeah, is there something here that reminds us of the basics of life? The real simple things about having a kitchen, the way we use our kitchen and our families together. Is there a story here that's about those basics? And so, this is a checklist of potential story subjects and individuals, pairs in your team could go and try to imagine stories and then share them with each other and see what you've created that could inspire you. So, I personally, I love stuff like this because it's a checklist of stuff we would just forget about if it wasn't on the checklist. So, I'm going to share that with you, and you can easily Google it on the internet.

Les Robinson:

So, that's what ... By the way, I've just got something else. So, let's say that our idea was content that dreams can come true. So, here's a possible example of it in real life. This is the very first FOGO campaign ever that was done by Queanbeyan City Council in New South Wales. And they called it the City To Soil Campaign. And the theme was everything you put in this bin is going to end up in a farmer's paddock giving back to the soil the nutrients it needs. So, it made a beautiful story. It's a kind of dreams coming through story.

Les Robinson:

Imagine if they go one step further and they got a farmer to talk about their dream for their land and their dream for their soil, and how FOGO was making that dream come possible for them. So, that's an example of just one of those kinds of content that we could build into our campaign. So, checklists like this really spark our new possibilities for thinking in our groups. So, I'll stop sharing that.

Les Robinson:

What I want to share with you next is a little bit of my personal collection of inspiring ideas. No, not inspiring ideas, of engaging ideas about what engages people. So, we want to engage people now in something and I'll let you worry about what the something is in your groups. But right now, I'm just going to show you some ideas to spark the imagination. Let's say that with your teams, you're about to have a creative session and use the method I'm going to share with you in a moment to generate new ideas. But never do that without first expanding people's minds. Always give them a slideshow of something that's kind of exciting and mind-blowing. And that expands their imaginations and gives them this sense that more is possible than what they previously thought at 11:00 in the morning in the office. Suddenly, there's a big world out there full of surprising possibilities.

Les Robinson:

So, I'm going to share you this slideshow with a few surprising possibilities, and then we'll go straight into our breakout rooms and we'll do a creative session together. So, this is step one of James Webb Young's method. So, just let these ideas wash over you. The question is, how do we engage people? What engages people? Universal speaking. Where's my slideshow gone? I'll just find my slideshow. Everyone just talk amongst yourselves for a moment, it'll be okay. Good, okay. Single page view, all right. Okay, ready everybody? What engages human beings? Let's keep these kinds of things in mind because they engage us too.

Les Robinson:

Darn, I've got to close the window. There we go. Okay. So, here's a slideshow of possibility engaging ... How embarrassing. Engaging ideas. I've got to hide my phone. Engaging ideas. Firstly, what engages human beings? The number one thing in the whole world that engages human beings is anything to do with food, thinking about food, eating food, playing with food. And the power of food is, the minute we even talk about it to people, they start salivating. So, we have already engaged people's subconscious on quite a deep level simply by having a food talk with them. So, anything to do with food or food in a nice place, picnics, barbecues, high teas.

Les Robinson:

This photo here is of a local small NGO in Wollongong that does waste education around food waste. This is one of their events, this is how they make it look. They barely even need to issue invitations to these events, they spread by word of mouth. So, they really focus on the food. They really want to get everyone salivating. Another lovely case here, this is down on Phillip Island, every year there is a Bunny Boiler Challenge, which is actually a cunningly disguised rabbit control information night. But it's called Bunny Boiler Challenge, and people bring their caught rabbits along and cook them up and have a competition for the tastiest rabbit. And they also get a talk from a rabbit control expert. But you can see why this is working, it's a social event and it's a food-based events. It's one of the most popular events on the Phillip Island calendar.

Les Robinson:

Anything to do with food grabs people's attention at a deep level. What about coffee and chocolate? My personal favorites. As soon as you talk about coffee and chocolate, you've got my attention. What about marshmallows? If you want kids' attention, then marshmallows, great. You get kids' attention, you get parents' attention. So, could your project possibly involve marshmallows or games? Anything with games. We're all still four years old inside, so we're really attracted to play and playfulness, and here is some examples here.

Les Robinson:

Could there be something game-like about what you do with people? I love this one here, this is getting people in Switzerland to use an outdoor recycling station, it's literally irresistible. Or at Adelaide Airport, there's a trail to follow that takes you to the right bin to put your recycling in. Down in Wyndham City, it's a healthy eating campaign called Give Peas A Chance. And these yellow spots appear in the main street with no explanation. You follow them and they form a trail that goes to a popup kitchen in the local supermarket, and you can share your pea recipes there and go and buy some peas. It's called Give Peas A Chance. You can't resist but be led into it.

Les Robinson:

Anything with kids' activities will get parents involved. What about a treasure hunt? Could your project possibly involve a treasure hunt or be like a treasure hunt? And similar to treasure hunts are scavenger hunts. And I think these things are an absolutely brilliant way to grab people's attention. People have to go and spot these items. And then, when they spot them all, they're a winner. And no one can resist doing this. Or simply anything social, any kind of coming together that's social.

Les Robinson:

Now, I appreciate right now it's a little bit tricky in Melbourne, but people love ... People are so denied sociability now that there's a real hunger for it. There was a jazz event in my village recently. I didn't think many people would be there. It was literally sold out, it was standing room only. People just wanted to get out and interact with other people.

Les Robinson:

I love this one, this is a guy who wants to promote the idea of sunflowers as a soil rest crop in cane fields for cane farmers, so they don't need so many fertilisers. And so, he got the local ... The Mackay Symphony Orchestra, the Mackay Youth Orchestra to come and do an event called Symphony in the Sunflowers. Sunset Symphony in the Sunflowers. And they all had champagne together and they all talked about sunflowers, and they made sunflowers a buzz topic in Mackay amongst a very conservative community.

Les Robinson:

What about a dinner, a community dinner to break bread with other people? What about street parties or street takeovers? Streets are for cars, aren't they? So, when they're not for cars, it's exciting, grabs people's attention, it's memorable. If you ever Google tactical urbanism or place making, you'll be swamped in ideas for engaging the community in public spaces.

Les Robinson:

Could your project be a little bit like speed dating? Could whatever you're doing, could you mash up speed dating into it? Could you meet people through your project? So, somehow to do with a FOGO rollout, how could you meet people, meet similar minded people? That speed planting for singles is really a land care project where people go out in the bush onto a farmer's land, plant trees together and all have lunch afterwards.

Les Robinson:

Could you take people for a walk somewhere as part of your project? Now, this is another kind of surprisingness. Sure, there is surprise in what we engage people with, but there's also surprise in simply the medium that we use to communicate. Could there be something unusual about that? Could we ask, instead of council sending messages to people about waste, what if individual people wrote messages to their own community about waste and we shared those messages with everyone else? So, these little chalkboards are virtually a kind of virtual community conversation in which we're all talking about waste together, or food waste together, or the environment together, and sharing our ideas with each other.

Les Robinson:

I absolutely love this one. This is a local land care group, and they put these little ... They're almost handmade, they're very humble, but quite personal introductions to people passing by as they walk past that little bit of bushland. And it's just ... It's so non-governmental that it's quite engaging.

Les Robinson:

Could you use the footpath to communicate with? People are always walking around looking down now, so why not give it a go? Could parts of the natural environment speak to people? Could you do some guerrilla stenciling on footpaths? Could you have huge chalkboards and give people a chance to send messages to each other? This idea here is one of the most popular ideas that's copied all over the world. And people are really having a conversation with each other using chalk.

Les Robinson:

I love this one here. This is a pick up your dog's poo campaign. And the council officer has gone around and sprayed the dog poo and then put little messages on the footpath. How beautiful is that? That's so going to go viral and everyone's going to talk about it. And I guarantee it finds its way onto the internet as well. And that's a council campaign, it's very smart.

Les Robinson:

Here are some wonderful ... I love this one, this is on the rise, Yarra City Council. And all of the litter bins have got this totally scary, maimed soft toys on them. It's like what? What the heck? I'm going to walk up and down the street and really notice the litter bins now because they've got these weird little creatures on them. That's surprising and out of the ordinary.

Les Robinson:

I love Totally Renewable Yackandandah, they way they use their TRY logo. They've made it into this symbol that's everywhere. It's given to people as prizes, it's put in front lawns. They've really used their logo really smartly for their campaign.

Les Robinson:

And Dumb Ways To Die. How could your project have a piece of music associated with it that people can't get out of their heads? Or maybe a little song that kids can't help use to badger their parents with? So, why don't we try using music and song in one of our campaigns? Every community has composers or music groups who love to make music, or music teachers who can make music with their students, and then you can borrow it and use it.

Les Robinson:

Could your project possibly involve nudity? Why not? Lots of people do, you know? It definitely works. Or just something whimsical and out of the ordinary. People will want to talk about it, they'll want to understand what it is, why it's being done. This one on the right is actually trying to get cyclists to slow down.

Les Robinson:

Here's some Sydney councils that are hiring chalk artists to go and communicate with people. Lovely, really beautiful, gets everyone talking, it's different. That's the City of Sydney, that's full of cigarette butts. What about just do things in public places that are a little like ... That cause people to say, "What?" Actually, the "what?" is a very important part of a good communications campaign. Everything we do that ever grabs attention should have a "what the heck?" moment in it, so people look at it and they go, "What?" And then they want to understand it and pay attention to it. So, things that are out of the ordinary are very valuable.

Les Robinson:

Could your project learn something from the Gertrude Street Projection Festival? Could you use the sides of buildings to promote messages free of charge, no advertising fee involved? Could you get people out in public planting things, perhaps using compost from the FOGO system? And in local government, I don't have to tell you what an amazing opportunity the side of a truck is. And litter bins, the bins themselves are an amazing opportunity as well to get messages out.

Les Robinson:

And this is the last one I'll show you, I absolutely love this. I know the City of Melbourne did something like this recently as well. So, there's a little hole there to put your cigarette butt in. You can't resist it, you have to do it. So, I wanted to share those ideas with you as feedstock for the imagination. And I'm now going to pop you into breakout groups for 20 minutes, and in those breakout groups, you have some instructions. So, let me explain the instructions about what we're about to do.

Les Robinson:

I haven't put you into the breakout room yet. Close shared screen. Okay. I think this is it. Good, okay. So, you're in the breakout room. Now, here's how this method works, step one, how many of you have used the Zoom whiteboard? Most of you? Everyone's used ... Not many people. Some people have not used the Zoom whiteboard? All right. Let's see how we go. I'm going to give you a two-minute orientation in the Zoom whiteboard.

Les Robinson:

As soon as you get into the breakout rooms, one person will go down to share screen and they will share a whiteboard. Go down to shared screen and you can see white board is an option. You open it and you see something that looks like a whiteboard. Can you see a whiteboard? Didn't work, okay. Do it again. Can you see a whiteboard? You can, good, okay. So, there's the whiteboard. It's just white, there's nothing there at all.

Les Robinson:

Now, can you see a bright green box at the top of your screen, a long, thin, bright green box? Can you see that? Okay, good. And just next to it, it says view options. Can you see view options in black? Good. Go to view options and turn on annotation. Have you got annotation? We have annotation. Good. Now, please feel free to play. The whiteboard is one of the most powerful features of Zoom, it's simply wonderful. You can scribble on anything. And you can actually annotate maps or anything you like. It's a really powerful tool.

Les Robinson:

Okay, right, good. So, everyone's getting the hang of it. What I want you to be using is the text tool. So, can I get you to practice using the text tool? You'll be putting ideas up like that. Okay? Can you pop down the text tool, type in your ideas. Good, that's what we're doing. Now, if you want to prioritise ideas, if you want to show you really like ideas, you use the stamp tool. See the stamp tool? You can put hearts next to the ideas that you love. You can instantly see how typing and stamping is a brilliant way to brainstorm ideas and then prioritise the ideas.

Les Robinson:

Okay, good. All right, everyone gets it. Everyone completely gets it. All right. Now, I'm going to clear this up. Sorry, I'm going to just do a really cruel thing, sorry, everybody. I'm going to close off that. Now, so everyone gets it. That was quick. Let's come back to shared screen, I want to share the instructions again. So, this is going to be complete chaos, I'm sure. All right. So, I am about to send you ... Now, can you see that Changeology: how will you engage people? You can see that? Good, all right.

Les Robinson:

So, as soon as you get in your groups, choose one person to be the facilitator. And then, also choose one person to share the whiteboard. Step one, this is what you say, facilitators, these are your instructions. Step one is to quickly agree on five, say five tactics that a boring project team, not you, would use if you were let's say rolling out a FOGO, you were rolling out a FOGO scheme. If you're not doing FOGO in your group, then choose something else. But quickly imagine that you've got to roll out some new service. And so, if you were a project team and you were rolling out that service, what are five boring tactics that you would use to communicate and engage people? What would be some examples? Let me think.

Les Robinson:

I know, we'll have a brochure, and we'll have a letterbox, and we'll have a banner in the main square. And we'll have a Facebook post, and we'll have a poster in the town message board. See what I mean? Like, mention a list of these really boring tactics. As that's happening, you write them down here on the left-hand side. So, you put down the boring tactics here. Seriously, don't sweat this part. Like, don't spend 10 minutes trying to get your good boring tactics down. Just spend one minute and type down five boring tactics. Do you get stage one? That's step one.

Les Robinson:

Good. Step two, your facilitator says, "We have an announcement from the CEO. It's a shock announcement. We have now been informed that every single one of those methods is banned. We are not allowed to do any of them anymore. We're not even allowed to talk about them anymore." So, what can we do if we don't use them? And now we need some alternatives, not those methods. Facebook is banned, posters are banned, banners are banned, letter boxing is banned. None of it is permitted. What could we do instead? How could we engage people if we weren't using those methods? And then have an open brainstorm.

Les Robinson:

Each person puts down as many alternatives as they can, typing it on the right hand side of the screen just like it is here. Can you see they've all been typed in? So, in 10 minutes, and this is the really important part, everyone, in silence. Don't talk about them, don't negotiate them. Every single individual person puts down their ideas as quickly as possible. Do you get it? And then, if you've got time, stamp the ones you love most. But we'll come back in ... Let me see, in 15 minutes, that's not long, in 15 minutes, and we'll report back on some of the alternative ideas that we put down. Okay, everyone, over to you. I'm about to put you into breakout groups of ... Let me see, quite intimate breakout groups. See you back in 15 minutes, everyone.

Les Robinson:

Now, welcome back, everyone. Everyone's certainly pouring in. Here's the others. Wow. So, now we haven't got time to do a full feedback session, but can I get people to use the chat feature to reflect on that session and also to share the coolest idea you came up with? What was your coolest idea? I'll create two minutes of silence for us to chat down your coolest idea and also your reflection on working together in that space.

Les Robinson:

Great. Yeah, it is. Yep. A food festival, what a great idea. A story trail. As soon as I hear trail, that's interesting. Flash mob, great. Working with farmers, videos of farmers. That's actually a really good idea. Nature ... Wow, bomb a nature strip. Sky writing, follow the worm, follow the worm trail. Wow, picnic in the park, truck art competition. Wow, your group were on fire. Line dancing under the stars. A little bit of FOGO in my bin. Wow. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Now, there we go, there's a song.

Les Robinson:

Okay, so that was fun. I guess there's ... More ideas. Chalk paint. Chalk paint, using traffic lights stopping people walking backwards and forwards over crossings with key messages. That's pretty radical. Great work, wild ideas. Having a palate full of ideas, the wilder the better. It's a great starting point. And then you can just look at what you've created and start to have choices. Lovely work, everyone. Royal party. How royals dispose of their recycling. What do royals recycle? Great work, everyone.

Les Robinson:

By the way, it might be really valuable to save the chat, there's a lot of nice ideas there that we could walk away with and maybe not lose. To save the chat, it's in that little box at the bottom of your chat window, little box with three dots in it. You can save your chat there. I'm going to save chat right now. Okay, everyone. So, that's the end of my time with you.

Les Robinson:

The real power I want to share with you is that we tend to think really predictably because we're all risk averse. And we need tricks to get out of that space. And one trick is that one I showed you there which is firstly identify the standard model, the safe model and then ban it. And suddenly, it turns out we're all amazingly creative, more creative than we ever imagined. What was actually happening was that the standard model had control of our brains, it had our brains like this in its claws. So, if we can kill it for a little while, suddenly it's amazing what we can create together, and particularly if we've been inspired with all this feedstock for our imaginations.

Les Robinson:

So, there's a method. I hope that you enjoy using it the next time you facilitate a session with your teams. And please send me some of the ideas that you wrote. Thank you, everyone, it's been a pleasure.

Susan Benedyka:

And thanks so much, Les. We really enjoyed that. I can see lots of clapping, it's fantastic. Les and I had a great conversation while you were in rooms about how much we enjoy this medium. And the energy, Les, that you've given us just by being able to stand up, engage, give us great ideas, but also get our creative juices going has been superb. Thank you. I think the combination of having been shown some PR and social tactics and then developing a message or an idea that hooks, something that can be really used and creates energy and fun. And I think the biggest word there is the fun and that engagement with fun. Thank you very much, really appreciate it. Back to the main ...

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #6 Creating effective campaigns, ‘Simon McCrudden, McCann Melbourne’, ‘6 July 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

Presenter is Simon McCrudden and Simon's the Chief Strategic Officer with McCann in Melbourne. And McCann is a Melbourne-based agency, but it offers what they call the full creative strategy, creative and media. It was founded in New York and, as all advertising agencies should have, they've got their own three word slogan and that's three simple words, Truth Well Told. And it's about creative work that connects with us as consumers, buyers of products, but also sells the message of their clients. So I'm sure that we know many of their campaigns: L'Oreal and "You're worth it"; MasterCard celebrating the priceless things in life; Metro Trains, there was a really great series of ads about "Dumb Ways to Die". And I quite enjoyed all of that sadly. And all of this finds its way into what McCann does best and that's create work that allows brands to play a meaningful role in people's lives.

Susan Benedyka:

Simon, thank you so much for coming on board with us. I know that your background is in well over 20 years in advertising, predominantly in strategy and you're working across the world. So I really appreciate you being here. Welcome.

Simon McCrudden:

That's great. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Do you want me to-

Susan Benedyka:

Yes. If you'd like to share your slide, that would be fantastic. For those of us who are watching this presentation, as usual use the chat. If a question comes to mind, put it into the chat function. I'll be able to then direct to Simon straight afterwards. And we're going to have about an eight to 10 minute question and answer session straight away with Simon after his presentation. For those of you who don't know how to do this, in the top right hand corner, you'll see a little grid with nine boxes called View, and you can have the speaker side by side with their presentation. You can see everyone in the Gallery View, so you can go to the Speaker side-by-side, and that way you get to see Simon's face as well as his presentation. Over to you, Simon.

Simon McCrudden:

Lovely. Thank you. Can everyone see the screen ok?

Susan Benedyka:

Yes, thank you.

Simon McCrudden:

Fantastic. All right. Great. Well, hello everyone. And thank you for the lovely introduction, Susan. My name is Simon and I work at McCann Melbourne as Chief Strategy Officer. I'm concerned with things like working out what a brand or organisation's objectives are, who the target audience might be that we need to engage, how are we going to engage those people? And then I take all of that and pass that onto the creative team who then actually create the work based on those insights. So hopefully I'll be able to share lots of useful and interesting stuff for you today.

Simon McCrudden:

Little snapshot of McCann and what we do. So yes, Dumb Ways to Die, an incredibly successful work from Metro Trains a few years ago. More recent work, Victoria Police bottom right. We did a piece for them for suicide ideation last year, really tackling underlying culture and behaviour that needed changing for that organisation. We've done a lot of work with WorkSafe over the years and University of Melbourne. Then on the top right, we also worked with the Federal Government last year for the first round of all of the pandemic work. So a lot of experience in government-based work and behaviour change-based work as well.

Simon McCrudden:

So what you'd like from this session. So I think that questionnaire that we shared before, a lot of those questions around how to use paid media. I think Penny's going to be awesome at explaining particularly the notion of paid media and the media strategy and media thinking you need. I think what I'm able to bring today might be more around, how do you get to a really tight and focused brief that is based around good behaviour change principles to make sure that the work that you create for those paid media channels is going to be really effective? So things like understanding the campaign objectives, identifying the core problems solved, and then into developing the strategy and the communications journey.

Simon McCrudden:

So let's start with defining objectives. On the right, you may have seen this before, but it's from Alice in Wonderland. I love this quote. So one day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree, "Which road do I take?" She asked. "Where do you want to go?" Was his response. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter." I think it's a lovely example because it just brings to life in such a clear way why it's so important to know your objectives and to understand what your objectives are. Being clear with those objectives is really important to make sure that everything you do works towards the desired angle. Now for government work, you're not going to have the objectives such as increased market share or sell more of product X.

Simon McCrudden:

They're going to be much more about behaviour and perceptions. So for example, increase awareness, education, information targets, addressing the image or identity, or conveying a specific message. But I think the key thing is try and make them S.M.A.R.T where possible. So try and make those objectives Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, because doing that is helpful when you are creating the work cause you know why you're creating it and what you're trying to achieve. But it also helps the learning process once you've had your work in market and to look at what's worked and what hasn't. And I just want to share, this is a great piece of analysis done for Effies which are the Advertising Effectiveness Awards globally. Major study on all of the global awards over the last 10 years was completed recently and it found that the fewer objectives you have, the more successful and more effective your work is going to be.

Simon McCrudden:

There can be a real temptation, particularly if you don't have a lot of money to say, "Right, I want to achieve seven things in this Facebook post". And the problem with that is that it's much less likely to be effective. So where possible try and limit yourself to one or two objectives for your paid advertising, for any advertising actually. Okay. There's four stages to strategy development. This is our model at McCann, but it follows a very basic model for any strategy development. So you start with the client brief and problem definition, then into what we call the truth hunting. That's really doing the research and analysing the data to make sure that you are building it on truth. You then get to a truth well told which is really the one message or the one proposition you want to communicate.

Simon McCrudden:

And then we look at the journey. And I think Penny will probably pick up much more on this. But it's really that understanding the customer journey and what are the messages to deliver to the right people at the right time on that journey. So problem definition: typically for government-based work, this is defining the behaviour you would like to change. So really, what is the current behaviour that people are displaying in relation to your service that needs addressing? And I think being very single-minded and focused with that is going to help guide the strategy and creative in the most effective way. So, if people aren't doing the behaviour you want them to already, then save your money and don't advertise. You're only advertising if you're going to try and solve a problem or change the behaviour they're not currently doing the right way.

Simon McCrudden:

So that's a really important start point for developing strategy. From a Truth Hunting point of view, this is probably the most critical part of strategy development because it's where we find the truth that's going to provide the right answer. The model we use at McCann, we call this Six Cs, five of those Cs are probably quite obvious ones. So you have Consumers: so your target audience, what do you know about them to inform your messaging? Connections: what are the touch points that they interact with both paid and earned and owned where you can communicate? What's happening in broader Culture? Particularly interesting, I think, in the space of sustainability in the environment, there is a lot of stuff going on in the broader culture which is impacting on people's relationship to it. Category: category is a slightly different one here because it's not so much competing brands you're up against, but more broadly in the space of the area, the catchment that you operate in, what can we learn from to inform our development?

Simon McCrudden:

And Company: obviously you are not a company, you're an organisation or a government. Those words don't start with letter C. And advertising people like to make everything start with the same letter. I don't know why. But essentially that's what is it about your organisation or your council that we can learn from to inform how we bring the message to life? The sixth one is a recent inclusion but it's a critical one, is Conscious Inclusion. It's the realisation that we all have unconscious biases that can lead us down paths and make us not consider all aspects and all viewpoints and all relationships that all people might have to this particular issue. So for us, it really forces us to step outside of our own bubble and make sure that we're being very consciously inclusive of all of the audiences that will be engaging with this work.

Simon McCrudden:

I just want to call out the consumer as one critical part of that. It's a particularly important part of the strategy development. And uncovering a true insight is really hard. I don't know if you know these two people, but on the left, we have Prince George, one of the most recent additions to the Royal Family and on the right, we have American rapper and convicted criminal Lil Pump. They're next to each other because they're both members of Gen Z. And there is a real temptation I think sometimes with audience targeting that we go, "We're targeting Gen Z or Millennials. Or we're targeting men or we're targeting women or whatever it may be". And the danger with doing targeting at such a broad level is you actually overlook the fact that within that group, there can be huge differences in values and behaviours and attitudes.

Simon McCrudden:

I'm sure there's not an awful lot that connects these two people together, even though they're both members of Gen Z. And there was actually a wonderful piece of work done in the UK a couple of years ago, which looked at group cohesion by generation versus other audience groupings. So this was based on about 200 attitude and behaviour statements and then it looked at how much correlation there was in answers between different groups. As you can see, Gen Z, very little cohesion in terms of their shared attitudes and behaviours. Millennials out of all of the groupings had more than the others, but still it was pretty small. People who floss their teeth are much more likely to believe the same things and the same attitudes and behave the same way than any of those generational groupings, right up to Orangina drinkers who have greatest group cohesion. Even people who eat nuts daily have a greater sense of cohesiveness than the generational grouping.

Simon McCrudden:

So, really good piece of research cause I think it highlights when you're thinking about your target audience, really try and understand what is the attitude or behaviour you're trying to change. Because it's probably more important than just the demographic grouping that you're trying to influence because there are so many differences within those groups themselves. Okay. So all of that gets to the truth well told which is really the strategy. And this is the summation of all of that research and it provides a messaging direction. It needs to be two things. It needs to be clear. So it needs to be really simple and it needs to be logical and it needs to lead to the work that delivers the right message for the outcome. But it also needs to be interesting because it needs to inspire interesting creative thoughts. Humans are pretty bad at remembering boring, functional things.

Simon McCrudden:

We're much more likely to remember interesting, unexpected distinctive things. And so your strategy really, or the thought about what the messaging might be, the more interesting it can be the much more likely it's going to lead to interesting work that's going to change the behaviour. Just give you a quick example. It's quite a famous one. So, imagine this was a brief that you received as a creative person: "Please paint the ceiling". Well, it's not that good a brief, is it? Because it tells you what the objective is, what you need to do, but it doesn't give you any... So it's clear, but it doesn't particularly give you any inspiration or excitement around the task at hand. This is arguably a slightly better brief because it's a bit more directional, although you could argue as well, it's limiting, it's already saying that you can't use a whole lot of other colours, but at least it's being a bit more directional.

Simon McCrudden:

This is a terrible brief. So this brief is, "We have got terrible problems with damp and cracks in the ceiling and we'd be ever so grateful if you could just cover it up for us". That's an awful brief to develop good creative work because it starts from a negative point. There's not really much value being put in the outcome. And it's just saying cover it up as best you can. This is starting to get better. So, "Please paint biblical scenes on the ceiling incorporating some or all of the following: God, Adam, angels, cupids, devils and saints". So you're starting to get a bit more of a clearer sense about what is required and it's starting to hint at a more inspirational tone.

Simon McCrudden:

But this is actually a really good brief. "Please paint our ceiling for the greater glory of God as an inspiration and lessons to his people. Frescoes which depict the creation of the world, the fall, mankind's degradation by sin, the divine wrath of the deluge and the preservation of Noah and his family". And that brief leads to something like this which is the Sistine Chapel. And so the inspiration part, it was very clear, but it was also very interesting and inspiring as a brief. And that is just a fun example to show you. But it's really to say the more that you can be inspiring with thinking about your messaging, the more likely you are to get something inspiring in return.

Simon McCrudden:

Okay, I'm going at some pace so I hope it's all making sense. And the final part of that strategic development is the journey. Customer journey mapping is a really critical part of strategy and creative development. And it's not a perfect science because we all have slightly different journeys and relationships to products and services, but it does provide a focus to message rollout that's really important. I think critically, it needs to be informed by data and research rather than opinions. So it needs to be governed by objective facts where possible. Now there's lots of different models for customer journeys, but some key principles lie behind each one. So firstly, what is the journey that you need people to go on to move from their current behaviour to their desired behaviour? So you've worked out your very clear and focused objective. You know where they are now. What's the journey that's going to get them there?

Simon McCrudden:

At each stage of that journey, what are the barriers that are stopping people from moving along? And that's the bit that needs to be informed by research. Given those barriers, what role do communications need to play to drive the change? So there needs to be an answer or a response that the advertising can help overcome that barrier. And then what are the best channels at each stage for the messaging to appear in? And we're talking about paid advertising stage, but really this customer journey is a way of understanding all of the channels at your disposal, cause there's going to be plenty of times where actually you don't need to use paid advertising and own channels will be fine. But then there's other times where you know that you will need to use it in order to achieve the outcome.

Simon McCrudden:

Now for behaviour change campaigns, our belief is that it's best practice to use a proven behaviour change model that's overlaid on the comms journey. So the one that we've built here and we've used in partnership with Sustainability Victoria is adapted from the stages of change model. It's also known as the Transtheoretical Model. So developed in the 70s, widely used by governments across the world, often actually in health-based campaigns, but is used more broadly as well. And we've adapted it here for our customer journey. But it starts with Pre-Contemplation. So when the audience aren't even thinking about the thing that you want to talk about, they're not even thinking about different coloured bins. To Contemplation, we've given them some information, they're now thinking about what they're going to do or what they should do. To Action, which is their acting on it. This model builds in a really important stage, which a lot of behaviour change models can overlook, which is relapse. And we all know that, right?

Simon McCrudden:

Because when you are changing behaviour, there are plenty of times when you might relapse. You think of smokers stopping smoking and obviously there are plenty of times when a smoker will be out having a drink one night with friends and have a drink too many and go and have another cigarette. Or when a gambler thinks about wanting to have a little punt because they think that they can. It'll just be that one time only. Or the time that someone might put something that's meant for the recycling bin into the normal bin. And so those relapse times, there's a clear role for communications there to understand that people relapse and to help them overcome it. And then obviously Maintenance is the final one for that, long-term maintenance. And then down the list, we have the target audience, the behaviour from and to at each stage, the messaging. The driver and tactics are things like, is it about normalisation? Is it about ease? And then the KPI.

Simon McCrudden:

And the conversation we were having in our break room before with Eleanor, I'm just saying there might not always be lots of money to do everything that you want. Using this model allows you to really focus in on what is the key behaviour? There might just be one of these that you want to really focus on and invest all your money behind because that can then unlock future change more easily. Okay. We're now going to meet the creative department. One super awesome cheat for making any brief better, and you might not be briefing an agency, but to get your own thinking really simplified, this is a very useful trick. So a Get, Who, To, By. And you should almost write this one sentence against each of these. So it just flows as one large sentence. So get audience X who are currently doing or thinking X to think or do Y by... And then that's the strategy. So as a simple model to just organise your thinking, I've always found this really useful. So you might too.

Simon McCrudden:

Okay. Creative execution: many potential answers to one brief. So typically when a brief goes into our creative teams, they will normally develop that 10 to 12 initial ideas. So lots and lots of thoughts come off a brief. Now seven to eight of those will be rejected internally even before we share them with our clients. We'll reject them for a number of reasons. They might not be clear enough. The work might not be distinctive enough. They might not be interesting enough. The final three to four ideas are then shared with clients to gain feedback and input. And obviously as the day-to-day people working on a particular project or service, you know this so much better than we do. But then from there, a final idea is chosen. And sometimes that's done through pre-testing research. Other times, the marketing team make the final decision. And there's arguments for either/or of which approach works better.

Simon McCrudden:

And there can be many answers to the same brief but all of which are valid. What I want to do now is, I think I've got time, I've got about five minutes I think. I'm just going to play a couple of examples to show you how the same brief can arrive at different executions. So this is essentially for the same products or service, but two very different answers. This first one's a bit long, but it's so good we'll just let it play. It's about three minutes long. And hopefully you can hear it.

EPURON Advertisement:

I think I was always misunderstood. People just didn't seem to like me. I think I annoyed them. I got on their nerves. I don't know why. That's just the way it was. Yeah, maybe I was too intense. Maybe I came on too strong. I don't know. I really can't say. Yeah, it was lonely. But you get used to it after a while. And then one day, everything changed. Somebody finally accepted me for what I am. Since I've got this job, life is completely different. I finally feel useful, good at something.

GE Advertisement:

(Singing) In the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty, I want to be in the warm hold of your loving. To feel you all around me and to take your hand along the sand, ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind.

GE Advertisement:

Capturing the wind and putting it to good use. Wind energy from GE.

Simon McCrudden:

So you can see two very different responses. They're still both about the same thing, which is winds and the benefits of winds, but delivered in very different ways. Susan, how am I doing for time? Do I have a couple more minutes?

Susan Benedyka:

Yes, you do. You've got about three more minutes, four more minutes.

Simon McCrudden:

Lovely. All right. Well, I might play these then, because again, it's just to show two different examples. So these are anti-smoking ads.

Terrie Anti-Smoking Ad:

I'm Terrie and I used to be a smoker. I want to give you some tips about getting ready in the morning. First your teeth. Then your wig. Then your hands-free device. And now you're ready for the day.

NHS Anti-Smoking Ad:

(Singing) What you say, boy? Fancy getting jiggy? Say what's the problem, boy, the smell of my ciggy? I watch you there, boy. I want to hold you close. Is it my breath, my hair or stinky clothes? You disappear right out sight when I say, have you got a light? Why do you keep on running, boy? Can't run so fast, got a pain in my chest. Oh, why do you keep on running, boy? I wish you'd stop cause I'm so out of breath.

Simon McCrudden:

So two really different examples, both targeting female smokers. I think there's probably an age difference, although you could argue that the one on the left is going to target similar demographics. But two very, very different approaches to tackling that issue. I might stop there actually, Susan. I think that's probably, rather than showing these, I think the point's been made.

Susan Benedyka:

Thanks so much, Simon. And what I will do is you can stop sharing your screen and we'll open it up to just questions. I just think that what you've done in that presentation is taken us on the ride that we've been on with our different campaign labs and being able to help us really work out how it all fits together. And great examples at the end. We'll open it up to questions. So you can either put your hand up or try and talk and let's get into the questions. There is a first question. Abby asked, "Anyone else singing along to Donovan?". [Laughs] Anouk?

Anouk:

Hi, Simon.

Simon McCrudden:

Hello.

Anouk:

I'll add my question. I'm just wondering, how do you work with residents who really just don't give two bobs on what goes in what bin? Where do you start with winning their buy-in on having care factor?

Simon McCrudden:

Yes, it's a hard one to answer off the cuff like that. I always believe you've got to go and do the research. You've got to go and speak to them, understand why. There is always going to be an audience that is immune to change, right? You can give them all the reasons, all the proof, do everything else and they're just not going to do it. And we see that with vaccinations and COVID, for example. It doesn't matter, they're just not going to do it. So there might be a segment of the audience you just go, "It's actually a waste of money spending there." That said, I do think you shouldn't dismiss those people to begin with. I think understanding what are the motivations and if it's not just the pure factual information, if that's not going to convince them, then what is it?

Simon McCrudden:

Is it about the negative impact it might have on their family and community? Is it about the positive impact it can have on their family and community? Is it about someone other than them? I think drink driving is a great example where often there'd be young lads that wouldn't listen to messages about how they might die in a car crash because they believe they were superheroes. But actually as soon as you make it about, "But the person you're traveling with, you could kill them and then you are responsible.", suddenly they realise actually that is a behaviour I need to change. So it might just be about reframing the problem away from their immediate action onto understanding who else is impacted by it and therefore what you need to do.

Susan Benedyka:

Jennifer's asking, "what's your idea on how to make recycling appealing to a broad range?" Or in other words, how do you make it sexy?

Simon McCrudden:

Well, I think hopefully we're doing that in our work with Sustainability Victoria. I think the funny thing with recycling, based on the data that we've looked at, is people in Victoria overwhelmingly think that recycling is a good thing to do and they think it's a great thing to do. So it has great appeal already. The problem is that that intention isn't always followed through by action. So I don't think the problem is necessarily about, how do you make the concept of recycling appealing?

Simon McCrudden:

It's how do you make them, at that moment, remember to do the right thing or to spend the extra 10 seconds it takes to pull apart the chicken tray and put all the bits in the different bins in the right way? And so I think it's, how do you make it feel easy for them in that moment rather than having to sell the notion of recycling, which I think from memory, I think it's 88 or 90% of Victorians believe is a good thing to do already. It's the action that's the problem, based on the data that we've seen.

Susan Benedyka:

Thanks, Simon. And there's another question from Catherine who's saying, "when you look at the difference between the business and private sector and government, business and private sector sometimes are more open to risk and going down interesting pathways and government wants to play it safe," That's a generalised picture here. So, "what advice do you have in finding clear and interesting in campaign development when working with government?".

Simon McCrudden:

Yes, it's a really good question. And I think it's a fair question too, because as government you're spending taxpayers' money, so you're immediately more open to feedback and potential criticism from the community than private businesses. I think there's a couple of things. There's the data, and I'm happy to share links after this, of all the analysis done on effective work over the last 10, 20 years shows that the more distinctive and interesting creative work achieves greater results. It's more efficient and it's more effective. So I think doing work that is... In fact, Peter Field and Les Binet, who are two people from the UK, have analysed thousands of cases in government and non-government, and the same rule applies which is if you can do work that is famous, then it's going to be shared more.

Simon McCrudden:

It's going to get talked about more, it's going to be remembered more and it's going to get acted on more. So the evidence is there to do that work. The problem is it requires a leap of faith, which can be a subjective thing. It's when the risk, the personal thing comes and goes, "Oh, I'm not sure about that", or "it feels risky", or "I don't like that." And so really the challenge there is how do you remove that from a situation and make it about, objectively is it right? Is it meeting the objective? Is it delivering the message that we want and is all the data we have pointing to it being the right answer? We did a piece for Victoria Police last year, suicide ideation, where we brought back to life an officer who had taken his own life in 2012.

Simon McCrudden:

And we recreated him digitally to give a message to Victoria Police about the signs of suicide ideation without revealing to them until the very end that he was no longer with us. A hugely risky piece of work for an organisation like Victoria Police to do. And really they took the leap of faith on that because we showed them the evidence of all the interviews that we'd done with the police officers, that it was the right thing, that the Force had to be shocked into confronting the issue of suicide ideation themselves. And so there was a belief from the outset that it had to be that level of surprise and cut through if it was going to work.

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #6 Strategy to activation and execution’, ‘Penny Shell and Tate Nalen, OMD’, ’6 July 2021’]

Simon McCrudden:

Thanks.

Susan Benedyka:

I'd now like to introduce our second presenters and they're from OMD, that's a D, not a G, although one could imagine a G with an exclamation mark [laughs], Penny Shell and Tate Nalen. Penny's the Head Product and National Head of Planning at OMD and Tate is a Campaign or Account Director. Penny's held a whole range of roles - strategy, business development roles - across the globe and across local media and she's worked with some pretty high powered companies and brands that we would all really know.

Susan Benedyka:

She's also been an award winner, and she's just been incredibly successful. OMD have now been appointed to the Victorian Government as their agency and that's a major coup, Penny congratulations to you. Penny's also a judge and mentor for the Media Federation Australia and Cannes Young Lions Awards and she's part of the Women's Health Victoria Committee for ShEqual, the first coordinated effort to address gender equality in advertising. Tate, I don't have as great a bio for you, but I know that Petty's going to introduce you beautifully during the presentation. So over to the two of you and welcome.

Penny Shell:

Thank you so much, Susan, for that great introduction. I gave you a bio on myself, very egotistically, when I should have given you one for my agency. OMD is a global agency, so we have offices all around the world and we have 600 staffers across Australia working with the likes of Coles, Telstra, Qantas, some really big brands and some small brands too. And as Susan mentioned, we've been fortunate enough to successfully acquire the Victorian Government as of June this year, so it's fairly recent for us.

Penny Shell:

Tate is going to share the presentation, so while he gets set up, I'll give you a little bit of an introduction to Tate. Tate's been an incredible Account Director here at OMD, most recently leading the Coles business to a huge amount of success through COVID, which was an incredibly difficult year for Coles, as I'm sure you can imagine. We were looking at ad campaigns changing on a daily basis, at some stages it was up to an hourly basis, as stocks were changed. And we were looking to really reassure people in that space. How are we going with the presentation there, Tate?

Tate Nalen:

Great, sorry, classic technical difficulties and everything cut out for me just as it became time to share, so one second while I pull up ...

Penny Shell:

Try one more time? [pause with technical glitches] So, I'll touch on campaign strategy, really from a top line perspective, because Simon's done such an in depth view of how to approach a strategy. I'll focus more clearly on the task and what success looks like and getting quickly into consumer behaviors and how we can bring, kind of what the campaign needs and what people are doing, closer together through a big idea. We've got a couple of case studies to share. One is a Coles case study, so a more commercial brand-led idea. And the other case study that I'm going to share is hot off the press, it's our first strategy for TAC, so a little bit of an insight into how we've kind of developed a new approach for their upcoming campaign. Do you want me to give it a try, Tate?

Kate:

Would you like me to share the screen?

Susan Benedyka:

Kate's also ready as the backup, so we've got backups of backups. So, Penny, you try then we'll come back to Kate. Thank you.

Penny Shell:

I'll give it a go.

Karen Cosson:

So, I share your pain and it was a difficult day for technology.

Penny Shell:

(laughs) I'm sorry, we're usually pretty good at this, but I've usually got a bit of tech support on hand too. Let me see, if I go to share screen and into sustainability.

Susan Benedyka:

Yep, you're all right.

Penny Shell:

Here we go. Can everyone see this? Oh, yay.

Susan Benedyka:

Yes, you just need to put it into the view so we can just see one slide at a time.

Penny Shell:

No problem.

Susan Benedyka:

So just go into the current slide. Perfect, thank you.

Penny Shell:

Okay, great. So touched on the agenda, I'll touch on campaign strategy, quickly into some ideas, Tate will go through the media channel planning and also campaign management. So making sure that you're getting what you're paying for and that you know how to track a campaign and really holding those media partners accountable too. You've met us already, I'm the one that can't work the tech. Campaign strategy and ideas, so let's get straight into, kind of, our ways of working, and this just really reiterates what Simon was saying previously, strategy is really just a fancy word for focus. And I guess what's important for us as we're approaching a campaign is really interrogating what's the most critical task to be done. And how will success be measured? And those two things kind of underpin our approach to market, the right channels and developing a solution. Put really simply, strategy is just a structured approach to problem solving.

Penny Shell:

So again, what's that most important issue to address? What are we going to do to solve the problem or the challenge that we have. But importantly also, what aren't we going to do. Because it's really easy when we get given a campaign budget, you sort of think if you can put that everywhere, that's enough. And sometimes actually the channels that you don't use, are just as important as those that you do end up working with. Lots of different processes, lots of different agency kind of approaches to developing a campaign and to putting together that solution. Really simply, they all kind of look something like this, Simon shared his before. Starting with that challenge, what is that key task, the most critical task and filtering it down to what success ultimately looks like and how success will be measured?

Penny Shell:

How insight, so, Simon talked about what people are doing, what do we want them to do? What behaviors will help us to resonate, or what barriers do we need to overcome? That audience apathy is a huge barrier. How do we influence audiences to act, even if we know they don't really want to. And then finally, the strategy. So, that key opportunity for achieving campaign success and our governing campaign behavior, or ultimately, how we're going to show up in media. And how we'd like our partners to activate. A couple of case studies before we get into kind of the channels and the detail behind a campaign.

Penny Shell:

The first campaign I'd like to share with you today is Coles What's For Dinner Live! Hopefully some of you saw this on Channel 7 over the last 12 months. Susan's giving me a thumbs up. This was a really interesting challenge for Coles. As I said, as lockdown was hitting, we were worried about getting 24/7 messages out about toilet paper availability or store safety. People had to purchase products they wouldn't usually purchase, because they just had to buy what was available to them. So there was a real need for positivity and a real need to kind of reassure people. Now, Coles interestingly has just been announced as one of the most trusted brands in Australia, climbing again the second year in a row. And I think that trust metric is a really important one for us to think about when we're building that reassurance for our audiences.

Penny Shell:

Our insight was something that is no surprise to us now, but if you cast your minds back to 12 months ago, it was something that was really starting to emerge as a new consumer behavior, which was that Australians were cooking their way through lockdown. And there were two kind of facts or stats that underpinned our inspiration for Coles What's For Dinner Live. The first was that there was a massive increase in cooking, so 18% of people were cooking more, because they were trapped at home and it was something productive and positive that they could do. And the second was a massive surge in news viewership, so pretty much as soon as COVID hit, everyone had their TVs on, their radios on, and we were glued to the news for kind of the latest updates. But again, there was kind of a need to bring some positivity to that environment.

Penny Shell:

So, our strategy was quite simply to stage a nightly cooking show in the news, we called it Coles What's For Dinner Live! And it led to a number one increase in brand trust for Coles last year and, as affirmed today again, Coles being one of the most trusted brands in Australia. I do have a video. I don't like my chances with the tech, but I will try and play that for you just as a quick reminder of what it looked like. No sound?

Tate Nalen:

No sound.

Penny Shell:

Sorry, I've got sound at my end, but you don't have sound. You can see here what the trends were, that we were acting from. No longer were people just looking for a shortcut at 3:00 pm, they were cooking their way through isolation. So, we really launched into What's For Dinner Live. I guess what was really interesting was that we couldn't access a TV studio. We couldn't access any bespoke creative materials. Our chefs filmed their content themselves on their mobile phone. And that was then edited down in real time so that it was airing in the news that very same day at 6 o'clock. There was a question before about campaign bravery. And how do you manage to balance that government requirement factually with what a campaign needs from a bravery perspective?

Penny Shell:

I guess our solution was to rely on our media partners to help there. So yes, Coles was active as a brand in the way that we had to show up, but also Channel 7, who was our partner for What's For Dinner Live was able to create content around the campaign, which meant that we didn't necessarily have to jump through those same hoops when it came to campaign approval. What started as our initial idea for a week's worth of content, ended up being more than a hundred episodes. And you can see here how engaging the content was. I'm doing a terrible job of narrating this video, but you can see here that Coles was the biggest mover in brand trust, 3 point increase, which is just huge. We had a suite of celebrity chefs, so we had a lot of people that we could draw on to create that content. But again, it wasn't polished, it didn't look like a shiny ad campaign, it was very much a human lens of people in it together, like us at home, cooking in their kitchens.

Penny Shell:

The second campaign I'd like to share is, as I said, hot off the presses. We were appointed the media agency for Victorian Government in June of this year and this campaign is still in the planning stage, so you're seeing something before it goes to air. This is TAC Vehicle Safety campaign, a really big challenge for us in terms of getting people to think about the new safety measures for their vehicles. The safety content in the media is really outdated, so their safety content on the likes of sites like CarsGuide is more than three years old and there are brand new safety innovations in cars that people just aren't aware of, predominantly lane keep assist, which actually steers your car back onto the road if you happen to run out of your lane.

Penny Shell:

And there's some really compelling statistics, something like over 80% of vehicles [accidents] are caused because a car has run out of their lane or from a head on crash. So, essentially, a campaign that can save an awful lot of lives if we get the solution right. Our challenge though, is that Victorians are really valuing style over safety when it comes to navigating that car purchase journey. And they're unaware of that urgent need for safer vehicles. Most of the cars on the road are over 10 years old. And really, the TAC have a massive objective by 2030 to get the road toll under 30 people, which would just be really significant and working towards a zero road toll goal ultimately, obviously.

Penny Shell:

Our insight was that we're prompted to action when we were confronted with the reality of hard hitting statistics. So, 74% of road fatalities happen in cars that are over 10 years old. And that was actually a line that came out in the brief from the client when we were sitting down with the TAC and they were telling us the why behind the campaign. And we were really confronted with that stat. 74% of road fatalities, that's just huge. And that's something that you don't necessarily know, that we thought, "Well, that's real conversation fodder". You know, and we know that that's not the creative message for your campaign, but having just come out of COVID, we know how important it is to know the stats. That's a real cultural currency now. So what if we can also start to surface some of those statistics through media too?

Penny Shell:

Now, that's something that could play out in earned media, could play out in partnerships or through supplementing our paid media activity. Our strategy really became to treat vehicle safety as a crisis, and we called the strategy, The Vehicle Safety Crisis Management Plan. To create big statements, hopefully many of you would be familiar with the confronting ads of the past from TAC and we're certainly looking to bring that back in terms of the shock factor, so that people really start to take action. The statistics, so the why was so important, why are TAC telling me about lane keep assist? Why are they telling me about safety features in the car? Well, that's why, the proof is in the stats.

Penny Shell:

And then to set the new standards for vehicle safety too. So that when people are looking at purchasing a new car, or even a used car, they're walking in there with the right information. So, our strategy is treat vehicle safety like a health crisis. Now, we don't have the campaign materials developed 100% yet, they're still a work in process. But you can see here, we have the beautiful campaign materials that have been developed by our creative partners, Clemengers, in the centre there, which is quite a confronting image clearly. But then when that's peppered with some pretty hard hitting statistics, 295 Victorians in the last 12 months could have avoided life changing injuries. Or would save 24 Victorian lives a year. That why behind the what just hits so much harder.

Penny Shell:

So, it's really important to have that clear and defined role for communications, be that awareness, you have the new 4-bin facilities right now, or they're coming. The education on the how, and then that reinforcement to really ritualise that routine. And thinking about what that defined role for comms is in both your phase one of roll out, as well as your phase two. And it may be different. Simon spoke to you about a consumer journey. Here's another version of one. When we think about the actions that we need people to do and how we can influence, we've used a pretty simple kind of traffic light system here to think about each stage of where the campaign's at and what we need from people. So be it right at the start, building that awareness, thinking about how people currently behave before the campaign's in market, it's probably a relatively passive stage for a category like recycling.

Penny Shell:

What current channels do they use to navigate that behavior? I've had a bit of a crack at them. They might not be right. But thinking about those channels that they're currently interacting with, it's probably the leaflet that comes in the mail once a year telling them when their bins go out, so a direct mail type thing. Perhaps there's something in the local press or the local radio perhaps. Then discovery, how we might take them on that education journey. This is where they may be more actively aware or actively interested, or it might be a really negative experience. I think one of the questions in the chat before was, "how do we overcome that some people just don't want to get involved?" And you might need to think about their surrounding influences. So, perhaps they might not personally be willing to change, but perhaps their partner is, or perhaps we can get their children to even call them out.

Penny Shell:

How we navigate that learning journey, how we prompt a new action and importantly too, how we ritualise. So think about the long tail of your campaign. Yes, it's really important to announce a new change, but think about how frequently might you need to continue that message in the long term. Are you looking at a monthly reinforcement schedule? Is it something that you really need to be out there every week for a while, every two weeks, et cetera. I'm going to hand over to Tate now. He's going to jump through channel planning. I think I might even have to give him my headset, because his computer's died. So here's Tate to talk through some of the channel specifics.

Tate Nalen:

How pure was the timing for my computer to just sort of crash on me. So here we are to go through media channel planning and what I'd like to do with this is give you some considerations for paid media and what we would consider with local area campaigns specifically as well. So, firstly, what we would all like to consider is diversity. So, there are 210 different languages spoken in Australia, so that's just really a lot of different people we'll need to consider there. But when we look at it and start to break it down a little bit more, 20%, well, 25, over a quarter of Australians were born overseas and almost half of us have at least one parent that was born overseas and I'm included in that. So when we've all seen a statistic like over a quarter of Australians were born overseas and we compare it with this one, we've got to start then considering the age of these people as well, understanding that they're probably a bit of an older audience and an ageing audience as well.

Tate Nalen:

And then, 4% of the population are Indigenous and we've got to make sure we do acknowledge that in our comms and I believe we should all make sure we're speaking to people as well. And I wanted to give you a bit of a snapshot on what Victoria looks like. I think not too much of this should come as a surprise and you might have seen some of the Greater Melbourne area sort of decline in population a little bit from over 80% typically in the past, to now down to around 77. But what I like to point out on this slide, again, to go along with the diversity, is when we look at the top languages or top language groups across Victoria, with Mandarin being the top spoken language other than English, it only accounts for 2.9%. So we should always consider as well how much effort we're going to put into producing multiple languages and in-language creatives and how we can target there. And how much of our paid media effort should go towards that.

Tate Nalen:

Not all paid media formats will be suitable for local area marketing as well. A question came up around TV and should we be on TV? That is quite a mass broadcast channel, can be very suitable for campaigns that need to speak to all of Victoria, but the targeting options aren't quite there for local area. So, when we do look at channels like radio, out-of-home, newspapers and cinema, they can all be quite localised into stations and publications. And when we get to our digital channels and we can really ...

Susan Benedyka:

Tate, can I just get you explain out-of-home media for people, please? So, big posters and signs, so out-of-home.

Tate Nalen:

So, out-of-home that can be anything from big billboards to in shopping centre panels, those vertical poster panels, you could even include them as the scooters that you see driving around. What's available to you will be different likely to what area you are looking after. If you're in a more metropolitan area, you'll have probably all the out-of-home advertising options available to you. But if you are somewhere with a lower population, you might not have the same inventory, so we might need to be more creative in what we look at. And that might be something like mobile billboards, where you can get a truck to come out with your advertisement on it and place it in a high population part of your town or your catchment area. So, those are some examples of out-of-home.

Tate Nalen:

And then when we look towards our digital channels, internet here is quite broad, but social, we think about how we can target here, and you can go down as far as a postcode level. So this is where we can be really targeted and smart with how we advertise in our local areas. But then, another consideration is what influences our audience, and I think Simon touched on it nicely and so did Penny as well, in when do we consider our consumer journey and what channels are the right fit for that? Based on a mindset really, we can look at the number of times you see a message as well, so the frequency in which you see advertising to really embed a message. The duration of the creative as well, if you're looking at audio or video. How long do you need to communicate your full message and to educate the audience?

Tate Nalen:

And then even within that, what sort of impact will it have? Because you can see internet, you might be able to reach a lot of people, but sometimes if you choose display advertising, we know ad blockers are a huge thing, which I believe something like 50% of Australians use ad blockers for standard display. You might be able to get the reach, you might be able to get efficiency with paid media, but it might not have the impact and people might not really see it and register it. So again, understanding the mindset of the audience and the task at hand, which all comes from that pre-planning work and making sure you're considering that with your paid media. And then to go through understanding, like I touched on before, what's available in your area. There can be some really location specific formats, some that do better with reach, impact and targeted. I'm conscious of time, that we're probably getting towards the end now, but this is something to consider as you're going forward. What's available in your area and what format will suit best?

Tate Nalen:

I wanted to touch on social specifically, because I believe that will form quite a large part of these local area campaigns. We can optimise to a number of things on social and so can you. You have all the same access within Facebook, Instagram, as we do. But with targeting capabilities, when looking at local area marketing campaigns, don't make your targeting too niche. If you're looking at your local areas, Facebook is really good at optimising towards the goal and letting their smart algorithm do its work to get the most efficient campaign as possible, so try to avoid over targeting when you can. And finally, again, talking to mindsets and sort of what's available to you at the time, choosing whether you want to leverage static and broadcast formats, the static being your standard print that doesn't move, that doesn't change like digital formats can. The longer that it has in market, the longer and larger impact it can have and the way that it can build reach will continually grow.

Tate Nalen:

You can choose localised messaging if you're looking at your digital format, making it really relevant to your area and having it stand out to your audience. And also, we want to make sure everything's underpinned by data. Really leverage the support of the out-of-home providers and what they have on hand. And understanding where the traffic is in your local community. It's really important to reach out to those guys and make sure that they're helping you with your planning of paid media. And this is going to be more of a read through for everyone later, but I just wanted to include a bit of a checklist, a bit of a consideration slide for everyone that, depending on what media you're looking to lock in, to what you're entitled to and proof of posting and considerations of your timings and deadlines, because it can vary depending on media. So, the more that you're armed with this information, the more successful your campaign can be. And that is it from Penny and I, we are open for questions.

Susan Benedyka:

Thanks so much and your timing's absolutely impeccable. It was really good between the two of you. I'm sorry that technology was getting in your way. I'd like to open up the questions and one of the ones that I'd put off before has generated a really interesting chat in the chat function. It was a question from Elsie who was saying, look, in terms of intention in advertising, for example, could you put recycling food ads inside cooking shows at peak periods or inside news? And it just goes with what you were saying before. So, the timing and placement seems to be important as well. Penny and Tate.

Tate Nalen:

Sorry, our audio cut out for one second, can you please repeat the question?

Susan Benedyka:

No problem. It was just about aa comment that was made by one of the participants, Elsie, who was saying particularly regarding intention, obviously the timing and the placement are important and she gave an example of recycling ads on during peak cooking periods, either in cooking shows or in news slots.

Tate Nalen:

I think that's absolutely correct as well, so timing and placement into getting into the mindset and when the message is most relevant is really important. And then, the context in the environment of that message and how it shows up and how you're speaking to the audience. Examples of that, which if we were to look at in something like this, and how you could probably localise a message, do it through audio streaming, target those dinner playlists, where people are preparing dinner and where that waste can come about. Those are great opportunities to keep it local and hit people in that mindset.

Susan Benedyka:

Nice. And the other thing, Tate and Penny, is that many people will have, they'll start with a budget. They might have 50 grand or whatever it is, and then they've got to say, "Well, how am I going to get bang for my buck?" And they'll then have to go back through the questions. Can you give anyone any advice on managing from that perspective?

Tate Nalen:

I would say it comes to, let's look at what your primary task is first. You might have a couple and some of it will begin with, you need to weight the importance of the task. If you need the reach and in market, how much effort do you think the paid media should go towards that? It might be 75% to reach. Within that, how do you split that above into channels? Some of it will be, I would start with the channels that you can really measure first, say with your digital channels and when you've gone to tools like Facebook, which I'm sure a lot of you will have access to. You can start planning out how much it would cost to, say, reach 50% of your audience. And then you can almost work backwards from that stage to how much budget will that leave you, with something like out-of-home, which you might have to brief out the out-of-home media to come back with a response based on your leftover budget. But that is certainly a way that you can approach it.

Susan Benedyka:

And I love what you've done there. You've said, do what's doable, then you know your impact and then you can work out whether you're actually making a difference. So, a couple of questions, or one statement really, Rhonda is saying that Whittlesea promoted the new food waste recycling service with table decals at our shopping centre food courts. Very busy locations and easy to reach a high number of people. So thanks for that comment. And a question from Maddie, should paid media complement owned and earned media, or should you only turn to paid media when owned and earned isn't achieving the desired result?

Tate Nalen:

Yes, so paid media allows you to control the message that you're really putting out there and to what people see, along with the timing, and it guarantees scale. So, I think when we've looked at, say, social media in the past, and when do you go from an organic social post to a paid social post? I believe something, the stats that come out of Facebook, and I believe I last read it in 2019, so a touch over a year ago, was that it's approximately 5% or less of your audience views your organic social posts. So, if it's something, if it's a message you really want people to see, you should definitely be putting that money behind it, so you can control the narrative of your message and of your brand, essentially.

Susan Benedyka:

And all within the strategy, so getting the strategy right is important, is it on message, is it changing the right behavior, is it insightful? All that sort of stuff. And tied in with that measurement and management, as you were saying before.

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #7 Creating a movement, ‘Susan Benedyka, The Regional Development Company’, ’10 August 2021’]

Emma:

We're going to flip the presenters a bit, I'm going to introduce Susan, who you've all heard from, from every Campaign Lab. She's our fearless leader when it comes to putting all these Labs together, but just a bit of background on Susan and leading into the session that she is running next. So, Susan is the Managing Director of the Regional Development Company and she has a diverse background in government, business, community leadership, across rural and regional Australia, specializing in bringing together government, non-government agencies and regional communities for sustainable outcomes. Susan's experience of more than 30 years in working in community and economic development across Australia on major projects in rural, regional and metropolitan areas, has shown her that there is an effective way to develop solutions to issues facing governments at all levels through involving those most affected by these decisions.

Emma:

Susan is passionate about creating positive futures for regional and rural communities. Drawing on her high level, strategic planning, facilitation, and project management skills, she designs develops and implements community consultation and engagement programs, strategic plans and community and leadership development programs. Susan is a graduate of the Australian Rural Leadership Program and an honorary graduate of the Alpine Valley's Community Leadership Program. Susan Benedyka has announced that she will run as an independent Victorian Senate candidate in the next federal election, which is very, very exciting news for her in the next step of her amazing leadership journey and we are very lucky to have Susan lead all of these Campaign Labs with all the skills and expertise that she has brought to the Labs to date. So thank you, Susan. I'll hand over to you.

Susan Benedyka:

Thanks, Emma. And I'm excited to be actually running a session, because it's been holding everybody else's sessions together. And what I'm wanting to do is talk about creating a movement. And Kate, when you're ready to share the slides, I'm ready to go. What we've heard about is a lot of the techniques that we've been learning over the period of time, is how to inform, how to work out your target audience, how to inform that target audience and how to really send out that messaging and it could be paid, earned, whatever, but I'm going to talk about creating change at a community level. And yes, Kate, that was the perfect slide to have up. And there are some things that actually create change. First one is that there has to be a level of dissatisfaction. It can be a created level of dissatisfaction with the status quo, or it can be a real level.

Susan Benedyka:

So, I'll give an example. I was called into a particular town, not far from here, just across the border and, I think it was 10 years after they'd done their last economic development strategy, they really needed to do a new one, but no one was really engaged. No one was turning up. It was a bit of a tick the box exercise and it didn't have any excitement. So, what we did at one of our first sessions, we said, "What if this town was bypassed? What if our bridge went out? What if..." And created a whole lot of scenarios. "What if we lost our major manufacturer," which was their largest employer. And that level of dissatisfaction moved people from being apathetic, to actually getting really highly engaged during the rest of the development of that economic development strategy. And we ended up developing MOUs with the major employers, working out what would happen when the town was bypassed, which eventually it was, doing a whole range of things.

Susan Benedyka:

It was a bit of a created level of dissatisfaction, but that's one of the drivers for change. If people are comfortable where they are, there's no driver for change. That reason for change could be a personal reason for change or a required reason for change. Quite interesting to watch the vaccine debate at the moment and when it becomes closer to people's reality, when they go, "Gosh, I'm no longer able to move as freely as I want to. I really want to get vaccinated." There's a personal reason for change. And in some ways in the future, we may see vaccine passports or other things being developed. I don't know what will happen, but that may give the required reason for change. When you think about some of the changes you are going to be implementing, it's tapping into the personal story and why people would want to change and the required story is what you're mandated to do as a Council over a number of years.

Susan Benedyka:

The other thing is to create hope and give ideas and ways of acting that aren't too hard. Being able to have a clear step forward. One of my biggest leadership journeys and lessons was that I was in the Australian Rural Leadership program. We were dropped into the Kimberley for 10 days of mind, body and spirit challenge. And I can remember having to climb a particularly, significantly high peak and really not able to get there. So, in the past, as a leader, I've always been the one who can see the top of the hill. I can see that long distance view or that vision. On that particular day, I couldn't. I looked over to another peak. I'm not so far away and a woman who was older than me and was about to have a hip operation was actually at the top. That started to motivate me.

Susan Benedyka:

But what motivated me even more was when the facilitator said to me, "What can you see next?" And I said, "I can see a rock." And she said, "Get to that next rock." So I'd get to the next rock. "What can you see next?" "I can see a tree." I could get to the next tree. And it helped me understand that not everyone can begin with the end in mind really clearly, they often need those small, simple steps, easy ways of acting, that makes it easier to achieve something. Another thing that creates momentum for change at community levels is peer support and sharing. That really, a sense of, "My mates are doing this. I'm having coffee with people and they're telling me what they're doing with their recycling, so oh, gee, I better look that up too." Or, "I'd like to be part of that." And "I'm one of many," or "my friends are doing it," or "other people I know are doing it. I'm not just the lone person way out there."

Susan Benedyka:

The other thing is that shared levels of success and celebration of success, having some milestones. My gorgeous friend, she was my facilitator, helping me get up that hill has become a lifelong friend. We met each other nearly 30 years ago, and just her excitement as I would achieve those milestones. And then when we got to the top of the hill, I could see that extraordinary vista right across the Kimberley, that was so exciting. And then another reason that people get involved in a momentum at a community level is that they feel that their action is something part of something bigger, that the little thing they can do, contributes to a much bigger thing. And that's that locus of control of feeling that they're in control. Thanks, Kate.

Susan Benedyka:

And, da da, as previously asked for, here's the IAP2 spectrum of public participation. I've trained in the IAP2 and I've been using it in my community engagement work for, gosh, forever, I think since it first came out. And it literally moves through a spectrum. You might not be able to see the text of this at the moment, but there is a level that underpins every other part of the public participation spectrum and that's inform. That's a clear message and the message could be the PR or the advertising or the fact sheets or the information. It underpins everything else and the promise to the public is we'll keep you informed. As we move along this spectrum however, consult, involve, collaborate empower, we're actually bringing people with us on the journey. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the collaborate end of the spectrum, which is pretty well the highest end that you can work with in local government, because, in fact, the final decision makers are those elected local government councillors. Again, next slide, please, Kate.

Susan Benedyka:

I also wanted to talk about collaboration and co-design, and this picks up from the work of Les Robinson, so if you remember his wonderful... when we got in and did that work on those whiteboards. When you have a shared dilemma with a whole range of stakeholders or people, and you then discover the issue together and think about the challenge and you think about your desired end point, and really go through focusing on the topic, but able to have all of these great ideas coming up from people who will be involved, then you're more likely to create buy-in and ownership and being able to walk in each other's shoes. You'll also get to involve people who you might not have heard their voices before, and their voices are particularly important in shaping the end product and the satisfactory outcome of the solution. Thanks, Kate.

Susan Benedyka:

I'm going talk very briefly about a local council recycling initiative that I was part of many, many years ago, and it was called Don't Bag It and they really literally were finding that they had a great amount of stuff going into the recycling bins, but equally, people were putting them inside plastic bags in order to put them into recycling. So, we needed to understand what was happening from a whole range of different age groups, understand their perspective, and then we got them to help us with the messaging. So, if we go to the next slide, the way which we did that was we had two stages and I took a series of focus groups through our local recycling materials, recycling facilities. And then the second stage was a social media and public campaign, but it used the messages and the experience developed by those focus groups, by those people who'd been through the materials recycling facility.

Susan Benedyka:

The sort of groups that participated, we had people from a Probus Group, so there are many Probus Groups in Wangaratta, there are about four or five. They came together, it was a mixed group, but they had a particular interest in, what could they do? And when they went through, they were thinking about people their age, and why people their age would be putting materials into recycled, into plastic bags. They opened their eyes as they went through and then they thought about, "Well, how could we talk to the other people around us?" Another group that we took through were the current environmental champions and they ranged in age quite considerably, from some young champions in their high school years, right through to some elder statespeople who'd been doing a lot of Landcare work and really were well known, so when they were going to get up and speak, they had some credibility. We also took youth council representatives through, and then we hit a whole range of primary school student leaders, so school captains and leaders from a number of schools.

Susan Benedyka:

Each of them started out where we said, "What do you think happens in recycling and what's your current feelings about it?" We had this discussion first, then we went through the facility, then we came back and got their immediate impressions. Then did a little bit of more education and then said, "Wow, what would you share from today that you think people really need to know?" And they then developed some initiatives and some key messages and then participated in council's waste management strategy review, about a year later I did that waste management strategy review, but they kept their involvement. Not only did they keep their involvement, they influenced their peers and then when the social media messages were coming out, they could see their own words and they were sharing it out with the people that they mixed with. Thanks, Kate.

Susan Benedyka:

I would also like to show you a little bit more about what creates a movement and this leadership dancing guy video is quite old, it's also just a little bit clunky, so hang in there with us, it only takes three minutes, but this is something I've taught many, many, many people about how to create a movement, so thank you.

YouTube Narrator:

If you've learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let's watch a movement happen start to finish in under three minutes and dissect some lessons. First, of course, a leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous, but what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow. Now, here comes the first follower with a crucial role. He publicly shows everyone else how to follow. Notice how the leader embraces him as an equal, so it's not about the leader anymore, it's about them, plural. Notice how he's calling to his friends to join in, so it takes guts to be a first follower. You stand out and you brave ridicule yourself. Being a first follower is an underappreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that really makes the fire.

YouTube Narrator:

Now, here's the second follower. This is a turning point. It's proof the first has done well. Now, it's not a lone nut and it's not two nuts. Three is a crowd and a crowd is news. A movement must be public. Make sure outsiders see more than just the leader. Everyone needs to see the followers, because new followers emulate followers, not the leader. Now, here come two more people, then three more immediately. Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point and now we have a movement. As more people jump in, it's no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there's no reason not to join in now. They won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed and they will be part of the in crowd if they hurry. And over the next minute, you will see the rest who prefer to stay part of the crowd, because eventually they'd be ridiculed for not joining. And ladies and gentlemen, that is how a movement is made.

YouTube Narrator:

So, let's recap what we've learned. If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy, all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement, not you. Be public, be easy to follow, but the biggest lesson here, did you catch it? Leadership is over glorified. Yes, it started with the shirtless guy and he'll get all the credit, but you saw what really happened. It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader. There's no movement without the first follower. See, we're told that we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective. The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow. When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.

Susan Benedyka:

Thanks for putting up with the not so great video. It's because of all that dancing, we will put a little clip in there and if you ever want to watch the Ted Talk about it, Derek Sivers, D-E-R-E-K, Sivers, S-I-V-E-R-S, he's really worth having a look at, that it's just as instructional that sometimes you absolutely feel like you are the only one doing this stuff. Find those other people, find those like souls, embrace them, and then you can start creating momentum. Another model comes out of American Community Organizing and this particular model is called the AHUYS model and it's by a fellow called Marshall Ganz, G-A-N-Z. And there is a point at which you want to be able to move people from the left hand column about their own actions and behaviors, into the right hand column, and you want this to be happening across a whole community or across a group of people.

Susan Benedyka:

I often have used this to get people to remember their own individual stories or to learn to tell their own individual stories. It's what changes you from apathy to...It's got anger here, but something that switches you on, that absolutely changes you. You might think about the moment that you got involved in waste management or environmental management, what was that thing that switched you from not even being aware of it, to being impassioned by it, to having that switch that switched you into, as this model calls it, anger. Again, I often get people to tell their stories to each other about this. What was that thing that switched you on, that got you engaged in this particular topic or this particular issue?

Susan Benedyka:

Then there's that concern about moving from fear, "Oh, look, I'll be shot down, no one will listen to me, there's too many barriers in the way, who am I to be doing this?" There's a lot of fear that we carry within us and it's moving that fear to hope. And we've already talked about some of those things that create hope, especially those simple steps. And thanks, Emily, for sharing the small sustainable steps. It's really quite useful. The other one is moving from a sense of inertia, just moving along, it's just very slow, to that absolute sense of urgency. And I think Peter and Stan and Zandy, you talked about that timeframe. How does this fit with other things? What's our driving action? What date do we need to get this done? What creates that urgency? What's going to push us towards something?

Susan Benedyka:

Then often, in groups, there is a group think that goes on, "Oh look, we can't do that. It's too hard. It's too difficult. No, we can't." And it's moving it to, "Yes, we can." For those of you who are older like me, and remember the Obama first campaign, his speeches were riddled with, "Yes, we can." He used this model in his community organizing. He helped people understand their journey from apathy to anger, from fear to hope, from inertia to urgency and from that, "This is too big for us, we can't possibly do it," to, "Yes, we can." And then just like the lone nut, you can also move from that sense of isolation, "I'm the only one doing this. I'm totally isolated," to some sense of solidarity, that feeling of we can do this to together.

Susan Benedyka:

So, once again, this is called the AHUYS model. Some of you shared these reflections when you were actually doing those four questions for the evaluation. You said that you've gone from that wanting to be able to see what others can do and not feeling so isolated, feeling there's a sense of solidarity. Having some skills to know that, "Yes, we can." Some of you have got impending timelines. There is a sense that there is a bit of hope out there and that there's things to help you along. And I'm sure that somewhere along the line, your passion has been ignited. Thanks, Kate.

Susan Benedyka:

So, I'm going to conclude there and I must say, when I do this as a workshop, I get people telling their own stories and really get engaged, but the reminder that Les was very strong about, change actually takes time. It takes effort. It takes time, be kind to yourself. Even though you might have a small window in which to do your advertising, or you might think, "Oh gee, I flooded socials. I can't do anymore." Just keep going. It takes time. People really get involved when it means something to them and when they feel that their ideas or their actions make a difference, they contribute to something bigger. The IAP2 spectrum is really important, because doing 'with' is much, much more effective than doing 'to'.

Susan Benedyka:

I do get the point that Zandy made earlier that sometimes you've got carrot and sometimes you've got stick, but even designing what would be the most effective stick, if you can co-design that, if you can collaborate with the people you are wanting to work with to change behaviors, you're going to be more effective than just doing to. I know through all the work I've done that peers talking to peers, word of mouth is really, really critical. I've got talking and out their why, and if no one's ever watched it before, I would highly, highly recommend going back to a 2009 Ted Talk by Simon Sinek, where he talks about leaders begin with why. When you can talk from your why, your very core, and you can ignite that why and talk to that why in someone else, it's actually so much better. And being able to tell a story, "What made me do this? Why did I get involved?"

Susan Benedyka:

Those people who came through for the focus groups for the Wangaratta Don't Bag It campaign, they could tell their stories and they were telling us quite nicely. And then they'd go out to their coffee groups or their yoga clubs or their school sports and they could tell that story. And simple ways to do things really work. And what I've got here is the importance of the second follower, do not underestimate it. And mostly, people don't want to be left out of the crowd and you actually get a whole build of momentum that goes with that. And that's the end of my presentation, so I'm very happy to take any questions or comments.

Emma:

Thanks, Susan, that was a fantastic wrap up of the leadership and the IAP2, and the other models you've shown as well, so really tying it all up and especially the message of taking time and planning out this and, I think, we all know that change will not happen overnight, so you've given us some really good thinking points and really good reflection there, especially for ourselves as leaders in our own organizations.

Susan Benedyka:

Thank you. Andy, you had a question.

Andy:

No, that was a clap.

Susan Benedyka:

Oh, thank you, that's lovely. I can tell you it's much more energetic when we're doing it in a room, but that's for another day.

Andy:

Look, I'll just ask the question about the apathy, inertia and isolation that we are faced at the moment.

Susan Benedyka:

Yes.

Andy:

The COVID compounds the issue. Some wisdom there would be appreciated.

Susan Benedyka:

It's really, there's got to be an order of things, so there are some things that are higher order, so things on people's minds at the moment about their family's health, their family economic stability, all those sort of things, will outweigh other things they need to be doing, so you've got to be aware of what other messages people are trying to receive and what other things they're trying to do in their life. But again, if you go back to why we are doing this, the launch of the IPCC report yesterday is scary and beyond what we could have imagined.

Susan Benedyka:

My former husband and I in the 1970s, were talking about the actions we needed to take then to avoid what we are going to have right in front of us within the next 10 years. So, sometimes the narrative or the urgency is created by other things, and you are hooking into that, but it's about trying to find the why of the other person. So, just the same as when we learnt when we are doing socials, when we are doing paid media, you're tapping into the emotion and the why of the other person and you can really only find that out by asking questions. Zandy, and then, I think, that's the last question, because we do now need to take break. Thank you, Zandy.

Zandy:

Thanks, Susan. Not so much a question, just a comment. It's really wonderful. It's beautiful, what you've summarized there and it makes so much sense. And especially that fourth bullet point, peers talking to peers, or also when you're talking to others, that you're talking to them as opposed to talking at them. And I think we've come to thinking about why you're talking to them and their story, is more likely sort of switch is where they're coming from.

Susan Benedyka:

Yeah, yeah. It's walking in the shoes of the other.

Zandy:

Yeah.

Susan Benedyka:

And the more we can learn to do that in life, the better. We can talk to brick walls sometimes. We're doing so much work on our messaging, but we haven't gone to the other side of that brick wall. We haven't looked over, we haven't tried to see what's behind or what's going on for other people. And the AHUYS model is really good, because when you can ask the questions that unearth the fear or what's in the way, what's worrying you, when you can ask those questions, that helplessness, that sense of I can't do anything, and then help people discover that they can do something, then you change the whole narrative and it really works beautifully.

Zandy:

It's almost like taking the time to do active listening.

Susan Benedyka:

Indeed.

Zandy:

Without jumping in, just listen here, ask the questions, or what they're thinking and what they're saying, to draw it out.

Susan Benedyka:

So, thank you so much and I'll go back into facilitator mode now. We're going to have a five minute break and then we're going to come straight back and have another-

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #7 Creating community change with CALD communities, ‘Kwabena Ansah, LOTE Agency ’10 August 2021’]

Susan Benedyka:

Absolutely. I'm delighted to introduce Kwabena Ansah. He's the head of communities and research at the LOTE Agency. And for those of you who remember one of our, choose our own adventures, we have had LOTE involved with us before. Kwabena is responsible for the LOTE Agency's broader community research and stakeholder engagement programs. He's currently working on a huge project for one of his most trusted clients, helping communicate COVID 19 messages to culturally and linguistically diverse communities across Australia. He comes with a wealth of experience, having worked with federal departments, as an advisor for a minister on two community based grassroots, local council campaigns and most recently with one of Australia's most influential industry association bodies, specializing in partnerships. Kwabena, we're absolutely delighted to have you and really looking forward to your presentation.

Kwabena Ansah:

Thank you so much, Susan, and I really appreciate the opportunity to present this topic. I think, especially in communications and campaigns, not many people consider the CALD community and creating a bit of a movement around that. I'm just going to share my screen so that people can see my little presentation. Fantastic. So everyone can see that? Amazing. So within this presentation, I do, similar to Susan, I have a bit of a video, but instead of playing it through the slide, what I'm going to do is actually give you guys the link. We'll spend two to three minutes watching it on YouTube, and then we'll come back in. That's later on in the piece and also, as well, we'll be doing a quick little poll that Kate will facilitate for us. And we'll be bringing that up just to kind of get some thinking around the group.

Kwabena Ansah:

So let's head straight in. So obviously a bit about LOTE. So LOTE, as Susan mentioned in the team and as my colleague, Ash, would've mentioned at the last presentation. We're a multicultural communication and research agency. And so it was established in 1998 and we've been working in partnerships with government agencies and corporate sectors and community organizations. It's basically a great group of people who I will show now. This is our entire team and we have people from all over the world. One in the Philippines, one in Russia. And so we are all very passionate about community and also CALD communication and research. We also do have a cross-cultural specialist, Amina, here. Amina here and she's amazing and is able to help I guess you know provide context into why certain communities want or have specific attributes and that can help facilitate some of the campaigns and the work that we do.

Recently, we've set up a National Advisory Group. So we have a group of individuals, both academics, academics and professionals from different communities across Australia. And they're helping us and our future clients in order to actually, and our current clients as well, to basically help engage more at a grassroots level. I'll come back to this point later in the piece. Just about, in terms of creating a community change within, within your LGA. How advisory groups, and I know from a lot of councils that there are advisory groups, but what an advisory group can look like with external parties involved, not necessarily within your council area, and using CALD community members from outside the region. So, today, I'm going to be giving you a general overview of working with CALD communities. So the types of people and that's where we'll do our little activity, followed then in by cultural in specific messaging so what types of messages, talking about translation and various other art forms to think about. Communications channels, so giving you a bit of ideas and understanding as to what communication channels CALD communities might prefer or what's occurring and trending at the moment. And then we'll follow into some practical approaches.

So three examples of reaching community groups. Activities that councils can implement for CALD communities, but more broadly, I guess, your general community. It's not a... This can be applied across different communities. So yes, feel free because, I know across Victoria, not many councils have CALD community members there, but you might have some who are transiting through, or who are visiting or who are wanting to explore so you can kind of look at those options. Thinking outside the box. I like to think in the box and also out the box. I guess, within thinking outside the box, this part where we'll have the video and so you'll be able to watch the video and then we'll come back together and then, I'll keep presenting and then test, test, test.

So I'm all about agile and working things through and just making sure that we are not necessarily just going through, you know, a waterfall approach. Just talking, taking you guys through that. So, let's kick off.

So general overview about CALD communities. So the types of people that are in CALD communities, when you are dealing with CALD communities, and your community in general, it is about knowing your audience. And that is vital to the success of creating community change within, within your local area. It is about producing content and collateral that, not only non-CALD people can identify with, but what CALD people can identify with or even people with disabilities. It's very important to look at your catchment, the types of people in there. Are they a young person, or do you have an older generation in there? Figure that out and then ensure your collateral is tailored to that look and feel. And so, in a way, CALD community members appreciate having their identity displayed and you can communicate it through a collateral.

What it does, it also creates a bit of cut through and engagement with CALD audiences. Where there might be a barrier before, you can create collateral that can help. I do apologize. You can, you can create collateral that basically individuals can put forward to towards their community or distribute within their communities. So, I guess what I'm trying to say here is that we really want to look at the community in general. You know. Right now, we are doing a census. The landscape of Australia is changing with CALD community members. So using data to actually understand what your community is and tailoring your collateral to that community to help really ensure grassroots program.

Kate, I would like to run this poll for everyone.

And so this poll, I kind of want to get a sense from everyone, what you believe as established languages, emerging and new. But what we're going to do is run the first poll where, of the languages listed, select the languages that you think are emerging in CALD communities in Australia. So

Susan Benedyka:

Can I just ask you, Kwabena, to give us, you know, what do you mean by emerging and what do you mean by new?

Kwabena Ansah:

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

So, when for emerging, I want you guys to. Emerging communities is under 15 years with first generational links to Australia. And then new with under 10 years, living in Australia. Established one would say is over 30 years and with second generation and above links to Australia. So If everyone can-

Susan Benedyka:

Yep, there's four questions that are up there.

So there's two pages for each question. There's 20 different language groups mentioned. So, two questions, two parts for each question.

You've really got them thinking, Kwabena, cause I haven't got any results finalized yet, but I'll give you how they're going on the participation.

Kwabena Ansah:

No, I appreciate that.

Again, once people start thinking about things like this, you know, it does help the planning and the various information that, you know, you start to do in terms of creating collateral.

Susan Benedyka:

Beautiful.

We're really getting results coming through now. We're into the teams and we'll try and get through to about 90%, again.

Beautiful.

Over a quarter of you are voted already, if you could keep them coming in... Oh wow, I keep watching the graph changing. It's quite exciting as somebody else finishes there. Oh, that's changed. Oh, this has changed.

Kwabena Ansah:

Nice nice. I can't see it because …

Susan Benedyka:

… No, no, no. Because I, get that privilege. I'll share it in a moment. We're around the 60% participation so just keep answering.

Kwabena Ansah:

Yeah. It's going to be quite fascinating when the census comes out because a lot of the work, research work, that we do, I guess local councils, in various stuff we look at that census data to see the demographics and what we need to do to ensure, you know, are projects likely, the SV, you know, four bin program we’re really capturing communities establishing?

Susan Benedyka:

Beautiful. 75% have participated. I'll give it just another minute or so and then we'll complete.

Kwabena Ansah:

Fantastic. How's the graph looking Susan?

Susan Benedyka:

Oh, interesting. It's almost like there's an Olympic race going on here.

And as every time another judge puts in, their mark changes the graph.

Kwabena Ansah:

Yeah. Brilliant, brilliant.

Susan Benedyka:

I'm going to end it there. We've had over 80% participated. Sorry to those who haven't hit the final button, but I think we need to keep moving. I'm now going to share it so that, so that Kwabena, you can talk through the results.

Kwabena Ansah:

Yeah. Fantastic.

So, very interesting in terms of the data, obviously languages you think are emerging. So we've got 43% being Arabic followed then by ah so Farsi being 46, that's quite interesting in terms of-

Susan Benedyka:

We have still, yeah, and we've still got others on the next page. So I think 51 is the highest.

Kwabena Ansah:

Yeah. 51 for Tamil.

So looking at the emerging languages. Fantastic. And, Tamil, the Sri Lankan community, certainly, especially up north, the Tamil community is very much emerging within Australia, in Victoria and also in New South Wales. We then have your thinking new. So languages you think are new in the CALD community. So Dinka-

Susan Benedyka:

Oh, I'll go back to that. So we are now onto the new languages.

Kwabena Ansah:

Fantastic.

So Dinka, certainly with the South Sudanese population increasing within Australia and obviously we are seeing more and more represent Australia at the Olympics. Where, and within basketball, it is it is a new and emerging language though. So well done to everyone coming through on that. Oromo, again, that is very new, a new community coming through certainly. So yeah. And Urdu, yeah certainly, especially within the Afghan community and the Pakistani community. So, well done. That's really good to see. Really good to see.

Susan Benedyka:

Would you like to tell us what the actual results are?

Kwabena Ansah:

Sorry?

Susan Benedyka:

What are the emerging and what are the new?

Kwabena Ansah:

I mean, with the team, with essentially the activity, I kind of wanted to get people thinking about what communities were coming through. So we are seeing, especially in the South Sudanese community, the Dinka language coming through as a new and emerging. And certainly, in terms of established, we have our Italians, our Greeks and out to a degree, one would say, Punjabi might be crossing into the cusp of slowly becoming established. But certainly it's good to see across the board that people have a fairly good idea as to the different languages that are occurring, not just in Victoria, but occurring across Australia.

I'll move on to the next slide. So cultural specific messaging. So across industry and sector, current communications approaches and channels are all... don't always reach CALD communities. I, think most people know that. So we basically have CALD community members receiving their information through various channels. And that can either be by social media or through large part through incidental conversations with each other. So key points for cultural specific messaging, when you are developing content is to ensure members of the multicultural community are well-informed beforehand. So really have that engagement process. What Susan was talking about, the IAP2 spectrum. So looking to engage the community and understanding what is occurring. You are going to take them through that journey. Ensure multiple tools for engagement are used. So again, not just social media, but looking at town halls, looking at printed materials, looking at audio recordings to those communities. Simple, clear and considerate language to communicate with CALD communities.

So what, what is key is that some, when we translate information from English to a certain language, it might not translate well. So ensuring that the communication and the message is simple, clear and goes through, I guess it captures, you want it to capture, the same essence of the message that you have in English, but in language as well. So considering that. Provide alternatives to written information where possible. So as I've mentioned, the audio and video clips and provide opportunities for CALD community members to develop review and culturally specific information. And as Susan was saying, again, that IAP2 spectrum. So where do you want them? Like are you looking at informal, collaborate, or do you want to get to that highest level of empowering those communities. Moving on, the communication channels. So what we know is that community change at the grassroots level, especially within CALD communities, is. it takes time. It really does take time. But it's about creating channels for different ages, ethnicities, location and accessibility to that specific content. So in the Chinese community, WeChat is-

Susan Benedyka:

You might just want to put your slide two slides forward. You've gone one backwards.

Kwabena Ansah:

Oh, I apologize.

Susan Benedyka:

That's it.

Kwabena Ansah:

Right? Yeah. Sorry. There we go.

Susan Benedyka:

No, the next one.

That's it.

Thank you.

Go, no. You had it.

Kwabena Ansah:

There you go. Oh yeah.

Susan Benedyka:

Next one. And next one. Got it.

Kwabena Ansah:

Oh, sorry. Sorry.

Susan Benedyka:

One back.

Kwabena Ansah:

Oh yeah. Yeah.

There we go.

Fantastic. Yeah. Sorry. I must be lagging then.

So essentially in the Chinese community, WeChat is by and in large, the most used social media app. Then in India, what we're seeing is an emerging trend of many social media users using video apps. And a lot of the time it is around that literacy level. Using video allows more people within the community, within the Indian community, to actually provide, to create content because they don't necessarily, for some people their literacy levels are quite low. So video is a great form to engage and interact with one another.

What we've seen in the pandemic is in this research from the public health messaging for communities in the UK, is that translation into a range of suitable languages is necessary, but not sufficient. Co-production and pre-testing of health messages within target community to identify language that retains the meaning of core message and considers the cultural context for the target audience is essential. So if reading skills are limited consider using audio files and animations. And I think that's a really important point when dealing with CALD communities and creating change, creating campaigns for future projects.

So, practical approaches to reach community groups, activities and councils can implement. So, option one, this new creative process. PwC have, and in various other companies now, obviously looking at new initiatives of engaging their staff and organizations more broadly. And across here you've got Tom Seymour, who is the CEO of PWC Australia. And what we're saying, in terms of creating community change within CALD communities, look at virtual coffee lotteries. So how I've repurposed it in a way for its delivery. So council to invite CALD community members to register for virtual coffee lottery followed then by councils to pick a coordinator or manager and an executive to be the winning prizes in the virtual coffee lottery for the project. So any change project allowing CALD communities to meet some of the key individuals and providing a bit of a, you know, here's an opportunity, try your best. And essentially you might be able to sit with someone quite senior out to talk about a particular project, or what a change that you're going through.

It's important that council, obviously with transparency to count, to publish a lottery in the local paper, and followed by the winning participants. Again, CALD community members will ultimately share that and distribute the campaign across their various channels. And again, having that representation and that identity and the opportunity of members of certain communities to win something, is really important, I think, to their self, to that community self-worth.

Option two and many of you, many councils, I know, do popups in activations. And so, a practical way, and of engaging CALD community members is basically meeting, intercepting them, at where they are located. So either at a mosque or a local grocery or a local high street that at many of them frequent. It's important that we are using the CALD community's locations to basically bring the information to them.

So one thing that we've noticed, is that CALD language groups is that receiving information is through individual networks or incidental conversations. So how do we actually intercept that? Create an environment for learning. CALD community members really want to learn and are very eager to learn. Live activations help reach community groups. Consider activations around religious festivals. So there are numerous calendar dates for cultural festivals. And so, you can basically tailor some of your campaign to fit into your identified communities. And use words like "become" and "your opportunity". So again, it's about that inclusiveness and bringing them into the tent. This kind of falls back on what Susan was saying in terms of the IAP2 structure, and just certainly, various methods to engage community members. And so inviting, so we've got here a fishbowl kind of scenario, and especially when it comes to implementing CALD communications, we definitely understand that funding can be very minimal or at times unplanned. And so pulling resources from other parts of the organization to help, oh we got to do a CALD communication, oh where do we get the money from?

So I think it's important to pre-plan. And activities like a fishbowl, where it can help change the specific thinking. So, a participatory budgeting for particular projects. And setting a community town hall meeting, either virtually or face to face, and inviting members from that specific, from your CALD community, to sit in the middle. Whilst I suggest maybe inviting others from other CALD community members from neighboring communities to maybe, to become part of that outer circle and helping guide future projects. And basically, ensuring that it's not just about that LGA there, but it's about our broader community, our broader Arabic community, our broader Italian community, our broader Dinka community. So really looking at how you can actually help start to influence a lot more in terms of CALD communities coming out. This method, I think, really brings people together. And using the insights for discussion and feedback and follow them by using CALD chat channels to distribute the funding announcements. So again, that ensuring that your council looks at its overall funding for particular projects and thinks about CALD communication going forward.

Here we have the thinking outside the box element. And so, I will, if I can essentially, I'll put this in the chat so that everyone can, so if you all want to go click on that and just have a quick view of this video.

[plays video]

Okay.

Fantastic.

Okay. Fantastic.

Bringing you all back. So thinking outside the box. So that video is a classic song, 'Singin’ in the Rain', coupled with an amazing, a brand that is high fashion, followed then in by dancing in the streets of London with some graphics coming through, you know. Ice being dropped in. And it's just a magical piece of work. I saw a lot of you quite happy or quite you are smiling. You were engaging with the piece and thinking outside the box. Especially with CALD communities, you really want to, in terms of creating a local campaign is that, members in CALD communities want to fit in. They want to do the right thing. And certainly a lot of them want to engage.

And so how do we, as practitioners and people who are trying to create engagement activities, how do we try and use some of their cultural elements into some of the work that we do? So really consider using visual footage that showcases elements such as dancing or we can in some certain cultures to get the message across. You could use pop stars or TV personalities from their country that they can recognize to really create local movements. Use CALD social media influencers to deliver messages. And finally thinking outside of the box, looking at developing design competitions that allow CALD young people to be creative and to actually create something that's tailored to their specific community. So really think about, how you approach that thinking outside the box. And finally test, test, test. So, as I mentioned before, really, in terms of your ultimate thinking, creating community change with CALD communities is about active listening, continual testing, and deploying creative concepts.

As we've got here, the two examples. A waterfall at the bottom here is a linear sequential life cycle model. Whereas agile is a continuous iteration of development and testing. When creating community change within CALD communities it's always about testing. It's always about a cost of developing and looking at the data that comes back and then deploying it again, and then retesting. It's cost effective and it's insightful. And it allows you to continually understand what's occurring in the community and speaking to faith leaders and various individuals across that community's spectrum.

You want different ages. You want to obtain information from different ages. It's really good to test that information instead of really planning it all out and then deploying where it might just fall flat within the community. That brings me to the end of my presentation. If there are any questions, please feel free to put them forward.

Susan Benedyka:

Thanks so much Kwabena. I absolutely loved that video. It made me smile all the way through, trying to work out who's selling what, until suddenly the little Burberry sign came up. And I thought that was just classic. It was really good. Are there questions for Kwabena and knowing that we'll actually have a little panel with him just at the end of the next presentation. But anything immediately? Beautiful. Kwabena, hang around, we've got one more presentation to come and then we'll put you on a panel and have a conversation then. Thank you so much.

Les Robinson:

Could I step in there and ask quick question of Kwabena?

Susan Benedyka:

Absolutely, Les

Les Robinson:

Kwabena, great to see you again, and thank you very much. That was really interesting. Look, I guess, we're thinking, you know, us as a group where there's a whole bunch of performance kerbside that we'll be going through. And one in particular, in my mind at the moment is FOGO and increasing participation of the community in our FOGO program. So putting down food and garden organics into the kerbside, bin. You've brought up some really interesting things about bringing CALD communities into the room, making engagement, ongoing, meaningful and understanding it over time. Really trying to get an understanding of different cultures like guests. There's no silver bullet. Obviously you've got to try to be innovative and to test and test and test. And that's all really, really important stuff for me to kind of have first and foremost in my mind when we start developing campaigns.

I guess I wondered other than those opportunities to engage as much as we can, is there any type of other resources, organizations that we can engage with to maybe try to understand different cultures within our municipalities and their ideas of environmentalism? Their ideas of, you know, the environment and consciously try to understand how we can really start implementing measures and delivering messages that really hit home on a cultural level? And I know that culture is so different and it's ever changing, and there are so many different groups within our communities. I just wondered whether there's any types of resources, you might be able to recommend that we could sit back to understand that motivation? And then we start going through with how to engage? What channels do we use? When do we do it? How do we bring people into the room? I if that's-

Kwabena Ansah:

Yeah, no, absolutely Les. But look, certainly the Victorian Multicultural Commission is the really good starting point in terms of some of their resources base there. And I would also look at some of the broader organizations like the Refugee Council and those more national bodies, because certainly you can get information, especially I guess, insights into what's happening within Australia's multicultural community. But on a larger spectrum, but bringing it down to the macro, you really want to kind of get those influencers and leaders. And identifying those individuals and bringing them into the tent. As I said, those virtual coffees. Really, you can do a virtual coffee and sit down and have a list of questions and they will be more than happy to provide advice.

So again, faith leaders, young people, also as well, just general mums and dads in looking at those activation sites. And where you, where you might find someone, you can possibly find them within their local, like the Armenian community on Facebook or the Turkish community on Facebook. And they have certain groups for each state. So, yeah, these are a few avenues, but Victorian Multicultural Commission will be good starting point.

Les Robinson:

Fantastic. Okay. Thanks for that.

Kwabena Ansah:

No problem.

Susan Benedyka:

Thanks Kwabena and I also to carry on from you, Les, there's a little bit more information about a FOGO campaign that's been running for a long period of time. I'm now going to hand over to Emma to introduce our [end of video]

[Opening visual of slide with text saying: ‘Recycling Victoria Household Education and Behaviour Change Program’, ‘Campaign Lab #7 FOGO community change and champions model’, ‘Andrea Baldwin and Michelle Wilkinson’, ’10 August 2021’]

Emma:

Susan. And thanks again, Kwabena. So our final guest presenter for today is from up in the north of the state of Victoria, also reaching over to New South Wales. And we're hearing today from Andrea Baldwin and Michelle Wilkinson from Albury City Council. So just a quick background. Andrea Baldwin is the Team Leader for Resource Recovery at Albury City, and has worked at this council since 2008. Her role includes the management of several areas, being the operations of the Albury Waste Management Centre, which receives in excess 200,000 tonnes annually. She's the Halve Waste program coordinator, a project lead, to assist waste initiatives for 11 councils that run alongside the Murray River and Riverina areas and oversees the Kerbside Collection contract that collaborates with five neighbouring councils. So quite a task Andrea has on her plate there. Also joining her is colleague Michelle Wilkinson.

Emma:

Now Michelle has been working in the environment, and waste and sustainability sector for local government, privately and the tertiary sector for over 13 years and has a passion for engaging communities in the changes needed to make sustained impacts within our local and regional areas. Michelle manages the Halve Waste education program. Now in its 11th year the Halve Waste program has been attributed with supporting the community to significantly reduce waste to landfill and continues to utilise these learnings to keep recycling and waste reduction messages as a focus for the community. So a campaign that's quite local to us up here in the north east, I'm really excited that we've got Michelle and Andrea on board today presenting the Halve Waste campaign as a really great example of rolling out campaigns been lasting for many, many years and is still successful today. So welcome Michelle and Andrea.

Andrea Baldwin:

Thank you, Emma. Thanks for that lovely introduction.

Michelle Wilkinson:

Hi guys. Thank you.

Andrea Baldwin:

We're actually going to turn our video off just because we are having a few technical issues. So we'll start off with the presentation. Firstly, thanks for the invitation today, we look forward to sharing our program with you. We're quite proud of our program and has been going for, as Emma said, 11 years now. I understand that you are particularly focussing on community champions. So we see that as an opportunity for us to share our experiences and really let you know how those champions have in turn built community allies and how those champions have built significant role in shaping the success of the Halve Waste campaign. I understand this Campaign Lab is all about creating a local movement with the use of champions to extend the campaign message. So we look to forward to sharing our story with you.

Andrea Baldwin:

Kate, If you can go to the slide, please. And you can move to the next slide. Thank you, Kate. I suppose we thought we better start with a little bit of context around that in addition to what Emma has already provided. So back in 2009, we did report to council that we identified we were receiving a lot of material at the landfill. And as this slide shows, if we keep going the way we were going, pretty much our whole environment or our landfill facility would rapidly be filled and we would then have to work out what we were going to do next. So as mentioned, we do take in excess of 200,000 tons of material. 90% of that was actually being buried. We were taking waste from three New South Wales councils and three Victorian councils at the time. If we kept going the way we were going, we identified fairly quickly that by 2020 we would have no landfill facility.

Andrea Baldwin:

So it was very important that we needed to change something. And hence, that was the introduction of the Halve Waste campaign. But along with the Halve Waste campaign, we obviously needed to implement a lot of infrastructure as well. So they went hand in hand, education and infrastructure. And it's worked beautifully for us to give some good outcomes now, but we'll talk to you more about the story along the way. So Halve Waste was then born in 2010. It is a large-scale awareness campaign about the landfill particularly, about recycling education and also about future visions. We did set a goal to reduce what was being landfilled by 50% by 2020. And we'll talk more to you about the results of that throughout the presentation. By 2012, we did see that we've made improvement with diverting waste from landfill, but they had not decreased enough for us to support extending the landfill space. And we could see that we needed to make further change.

Andrea Baldwin:

Kate, if you can go to the next slide, please. So in order to do that, we have five councils in our collaborative Kerbside agreement and four of those five councils all agreed to change their service. So we had a weekly refuse service. We decided to change that to fortnightly and we introduced a weekly organics collection service. So in 2015, that's when that change actually occurred, but you'll find from 2012 to 2015, it was a three year journey to prepare for the introduction of that FOGO bin roll out and the changes. And that's where we'll talk further in the presentation about all the activities and the champions that have been associated with that work. So we did move to that service in 2015. All of the campaigns that were developed around that were due to all the pre-work that was undertaken within the region and in particular with our community groups. We were funded by both state governments, New South Wales and Victoria to implement this change because it was a significant one and it did affect a lot of our regional community.

Andrea Baldwin:

Kate, if you can move to the next slide, please. Now, something of this scale is obviously not easy for our community to understand. So you will find that council in Albury, we did lead this change, and we partnered with our waste contractor and we undertook significant research within the local community and externally to understand the motivations and barriers to change. The resulting campaign to introduce FOGO relied heavily on the work and uncovered some fantastic champions who advocated for their community and within their community to support this change. So we, in 2015 had to change the way of thinking for 40,000 tenements. It was across four council areas at the time. We were lucky that we had 27 councillors on board who were happy to support the change. And we did do an education program around our councillors to also be advocates for change. We didn't want to repeat mistakes and you'll see there, we've highlighted a few stories up on that slide, where we've learned from councils that have done it well and we took advice from the ones that didn't do very well.

Andrea Baldwin:

So we then went on to use trials, research surveys, and community focus groups to build a picture to identify all the barriers and the benefits of the new service across the community. And our program really did target those that are listed there. The nappies, the medical waste, the literacy rates, the MUDS that we have here and we do have quite a lot in Albury, not as many as Melbourne, but it is a growing area here for our multi-unit developments, the CALD community, socio-economy, we obviously need to address that issue and we do have a large area. So our council itself is 100-kilometre radius. Everyone has an opinion about their bins and we needed to provide them the opportunity to have their opinion. And that was done through those three years of work in that research section and the focus group that were done. Kate, If you can move over to the next slide, please. And I'll hand it over to Michelle to carry on from here. Thank you.

Michelle Wilkinson:

Thanks Andrea. I guess the first thing I wanted to highlight about the work that we did in leading up to the launch of the new system was that significant work engaging our community and you'll notice there that we don't really use council logos. So that's the opportunity that having a brand that's recognised regionally that was already in place had given us to step into the community and have perhaps conversations that were a bit tricky from a council perspective or with a council hat on. It also saved us a lot of money because we could pool our resources and as Andrea mentioned, we had funding to do some of this work from both sides of the border. And we have extended the life of advertising and collateral because it is branded under that banner. Council logos change, we've had council mergers on the New South Wales side. So it's actually been really beneficial in many aspects to have that brand overarching everything. Next slide, please Kate.

Michelle Wilkinson:

And this slide is just to highlight really that the campaign that the public saw really was the pointy end of the iceberg sticking out. As Andrea mentioned, there was three years of work leading up to this and we did support our community and everything that we did was linked back to that behaviour change research that we'd done and some of those community champions bubbled up through that process. So some of those solutions really supported the large-scale campaign that was very visible in the community at that time. So we had a team of people, we had call centres, we had community engagement teams and we had different bin size solutions for the community. Next slide, please, Kate.

Michelle Wilkinson:

And again, this is just a breakdown of some of the communication tools that we use. So the community champions actually were featured across all of these communication tools and we'll show you some examples of that in a moment. But again, I really wanted to stress that we didn't go out to an external communications company until we'd done all that research and linked how those different groups wanted to actually be communicated with. So a young mums group concerned about nappies did not want to be communicated to in the same way that someone living in a multi-unit dwelling who doesn't have the time to separate their waste might be. So all of those communication tools are developed to be linked back to a specific barrier or benefit of the service that we identified. So it was a very orchestrated campaign to end up with something that looks very nice at the end.

Michelle Wilkinson:

But this was the point where we actually went out to an external communications company and we are very fortunate that we had the budget to do that. And this is where we started to identify some spearhead people that would act as our initial community champions to introduce the service. So obviously we had some different personality types for the different groups of people that were identified as part of those focus groups. So obviously a mum from the nappies group... We had different people that you'll see featured throughout the campaigns and again, they all linked back to those different needs that were identified. Next slide, please.

Michelle Wilkinson:

So, as I mentioned, this is some of the advertising that was developed and we'll hopefully be able to show you some of those ads in a second, but... if you don't recognise Julie Goodwin, she's one the initial, I can't remember if it was the first series or the second series of MasterChef, but in 2014/15, a very recognisable person and was seen as someone to really spearhead that campaign, because obviously we're asking people to change their behaviour right in the kitchen. So a relatable person where those behaviours are going to take place. So that's the reason for Julie becoming our first big community ambassador.

Michelle Wilkinson:

And then we have Milton "Gumboots" Kimball, who's a local gentleman who's very well known in the Albury-Wodonga region. Was Albury city employee in the Botanic Gardens and then had a radio segment on local radio answering gardening questions and even, I think still does some shifts at the local Bunnings. So a very recognisable and relatable person and is very ingrained in the community. So we had two quite different community spearheads that we utilised there. And you'll notice that we use Gumboots outside of the house. So talking about things with your garden waste but also recycling as well.

Michelle Wilkinson:

And this gives us a lot of flexibility with our community champions. It's an opportunity to add many layers. So we don't just get to talk about the need to separate your food from your general waste. We were able to talk about all sorts of things using these two initial spearheads. And it gives us a flexibility across all of those different communication tools that I had put up before. But because we had that consistent approach, there's a consistent feel to the advertising. You really couldn't move in 2015 without seeing Julie and Gumboots across letters, across everything. So it's quite memorable, it's aimed at being impactful and engaging and easy to relate to all of those different target markets. Next slide, please, Kate

Julie Goodwin:

Together with our local councils, Halve Waste is aiming to reduce waste to landfill by 50% in 2020. We all know how important it is, protecting our environment for the future.

Speaker 5:

We don't want to live in a tip. Reducing waste helps fight climate change, saves energy and protects our planet.

Milton Gumboots Kimball:

We all have the responsibility to look after our beautiful environment for future generations.

Julie Goodwin:

So together, let's reduce, reuse and recycle at Halve Waste by 2020.

Michelle Wilkinson:

So each of these adverts were very planned and staged. So obviously this is The WHY, this is the lead up to before we actually launched the three-bin system and really trying to... As Andrea mentioned, we've gotten our councillors on board, we've gotten a lot of community groups on board, but this was a broad approach across the whole. We've got 100,000 people in our region. So we really needed to sell that WHY, why were we wanting you to go the extra effort and make all that change? So that was the initial one. And if we want to move to the next one, please, Kate.

Julie Goodwin:

When disposing of your food scraps, make sure they're separated from their plastic bag or container.

Milton Gumboots Kimball:

And these containers can be reused to grow seeds and cuttings in. For more handy hints, go to halvewaste.com.au.

Michelle Wilkinson:

So The HOW, we really utilised these sorts of adverts right around the launch time, we got really detailed into actually showing people the behaviours that we wanted them to replicate in the home. And again, really based back on some of that research that we'd done that had shown that people were really a bit... They're confused about what to do. So we really wanted to get into the detail of what we needed to do and really demonstrate that back to them. So we had a whole series of how-to adverts like that. Thanks Kate.

Julie Goodwin:

Remember, there are lots of things you can do to save space in your bins, like disposable nappies, wrap it tightly into itself and just pop it into the red-lidded bin.

Milton Gumboots Kimball:

Another great tip is to ensure your bins lids are kept closed, placed in the shade to reduce any nasty odours.

Julie Goodwin:

For more handy tips, go to halvewaste.com.au.

Michelle Wilkinson:

So these sorts of ads were about six weeks after the three-bin system was launched. So we got over that initial hump of, "what is this service? What are these changes? What nights do my bin go out?" The world didn't fall apart. We didn't end up with nappies all over the Albury city steps. But we really then had a chance to go back and focus on the actual barriers that some of those specific groups had put up. So obviously we've got young families who were saying, "oh, we're a bit worried about our bins filling up with nappies," and also larger families that needed to make more space for their recycling. So showing them how to separate properly.

Michelle Wilkinson:

So really linking those ads back to those next tiers of behaviours. In our research, we identified over 300 behaviours that we actually wanted people to do in the home. So really stepping it down to that minute detail of take your carrots out of the plastic packaging, for example. And then we actually prioritise those back to those tier 1 behaviours that really, across the whole community, we really needed those groups to get on board with. Thanks, Kate.

Michelle Wilkinson:

And this is just some examples of the look and the feel of the collateral. And this is pretty much how it still looks today. Like I said, you just couldn't move without seeing those sorts of things. We hit every communication channel. And again, really making sure that we were linking back to where those groups were telling us they wanted to be communicated with. Thanks Kate.

Milton Gumboots Kimball:

Since the introduction of the three-bin system, 82% of our household waste has been diverted out of our landfill. Thanks to the way you are using your green lidded bin. We've seen almost 16,000 tons of waste now being turned into compost. What a great effort. Our goal is to halve our total waste by 2020. Thanks to your hard work, we've already reduced it by 33% and are on track to achieve this goal early. For more information and handy tips, go to halvewaste.com.au.

Michelle Wilkinson:

So again, this advert came out of some focus groups with some pretty skeptical community members and right across the community that were, "It was all just going to landfill anyway," and we never go back and tell the community what's actually happened. So we found it really important to go back and thank the community. And again, Gumboots was really important in that campaign because he was believable. He was very well recognised, as I mentioned. And it's not just council talking to the community there. So a great use of our community champion. Thanks Kate.

Michelle Wilkinson:

So towards the end of 2016 into 2017, we actually needed to expand our use of community champions and introduce some new faces because there were some target behaviours and target groups that we hadn't spent a lot of time engaging with. And also Julie being a celebrity was quite expensive and coming to the end of her contract period. And it's allowed us to re-engage with different segments of the community by introducing new champions. So we've had this campaign of phasing out some champions and bringing in more local faces. And we haven't used celebrity faces since this campaign because we have just had such amazing responses to our local champions. People love seeing their neighbour and connect, laughing with someone on Facebook and it gives us that credibility to your campaign to have someone who's actually that expert advice talking with the community rather than preaching at them all the time. Thanks Kate.

Michelle Wilkinson:

So we've really utilised a lot of these new faces and really specific campaigns. So you can see we've got Gumboots introducing our tradie there and they're talking about KeepCups. And we do a lot of work about events waste separation as well. You know, we have peak times around Christmas where everyone has too much waste. So we put a lot of effort into those sorts of campaigns. Thank you. And this is some of the work. I think if this video works.

Speaker 7:

When disposing of timber, it's important to know it can't go in the green-lidded organics bin.

Milton Gumboots Kimball:

That's right, mate. The green-lidded organics bin is perfect to dispose of small sticks and branches from around the yard, but it's not to be used for timber.

Speaker 7:

Timber needs to be taken to your local recycle centre, transfer station or better yet save it for your next project.

Milton Gumboots Kimball:

See, it's easy to do good. For more information, go to halvewaste.com.au.

Michelle Wilkinson:

So you can see that we've really linked those champions. Thanks, Emma. We'll finish up there, just for those situational messages. And really now, the champions just bubble to the surface. We don't really have to go out and find them anymore. They answer questions for us on Facebook. We sponsor our local repair cafe. So it's really evolved how we engage and utilise those champions. Thank you.

Emma:

Great. Thank you so much, Michelle and Andrea. That was a really good snapshot of that campaign of what I know has been years and years of work, but has really paid off in the end. I especially love the transition that you've made from celebrity cook, Julie Goodwin, all those years ago through to a local well-known figure through to now your grassroots community champions. And this is the culmination of 10 to 15 years of work on the ground here. So this point's been made by other past presenters of that it just can take time to you really instill this change, but planned out and done well. It really, really pays off. I also love the point about selling The WHY before you've launched and then selling The HOW being really distinctive, those two messages were fantastic.

Emma:

So thank you for bringing to light the use of your community champions and how you've progressed that along the way. And I think there'll be some fantastic takeaways for everyone participating today. We plan to use our speakers now in a panel situation, which we can direct questions to either Kwabena regarding the CALD communities presentation or questions regarding the Halve Waste presentation. So I encourage you either to write your questions into the chat or if you'd like, we might be able have time to take a couple of hands up questions, as well. So if there's any questions for either speaker... Yes, Susan, thanks.

Susan Benedyka:

I'd be really interested, Kwabena, in the connection between community champions and the recognition of people in the community. Kate and I were talking some time ago when we were planning this particular session, how we actually love seeing local faces. Does that also work within the CALD communities?

Kwabena Ansah:

Yes. Absolutely. I really like what the team just showed and you're absolutely right. You need to have community champions. And so most recently we're doing the pandemic response for the federal health agency and working to articulate, "look, we need to some more community champions at a national level to help combat against vaccine hesitancy," within the CALD community. And again, it's using those faces that people recognise not just at a national level in the CALD space, but at a grassroots level. Like one of our NAG members is a local councillor in Fairfield in Sydney, which is one of the lockdown areas. So using her, she's been out publicly. People need to identify with individuals before they actually go, "okay. as your video said", start to become the follower and then it's a snowball effect. So yes, that really translates well within CALD communities.

Emma:

Yes. The snowball effect with the dancing man video is really important and it can be attributed to a lot of other situations to do with change in communities. So yeah, getting that key person on first can then create that flow-on effect. Just got a question come in from Tash. Did you reach the Halve Waste campaign objectives considering it was 2020? And that first, I think it was, the first clip Julie Goodwin saying 2020. I think that was done well off the start, was it Michelle and Andrea sort of five years before that?

Andrea Baldwin:

Sure. So we needed to have a goal. We did set a target of the 50% and you'll find that we reached 47% by 2020. So we've been able to revisit that goal and we've now changed it that we need to reach 75% because I think everyone thought that we were mad making a target that high anyway, but we feel quite very proud that we've been able to achieve that target. And it's been through not only education, but as I said, it's through the infrastructure improvements on site as well, which have enabled that. So we are being very fortunate that our council has invested in making those changes. Because there's been a lot of money spent out at the landfill facility to enable that to occur. So yeah, that's a pretty good result overall.

Emma:

Yes. I think that would be a gold star to hit that 47% and being transparent about that within the community. Yes, really I think would hold some credibility with the entire campaign and make people understand that, "oh, they are actually on track and this is working". Just finally you did bring up in the link with infrastructure as well that would've had to be in your plan. It wasn't just up to the community, but you needed to provide that on -round infrastructure for change to happen. We had a point made about that earlier this morning about infrastructure. How important was that to incorporate into your plan and communications along the way?

Andrea Baldwin:

It's critical. We couldn't actually ask for change to occur if we didn't have the right processes out at the landfill facility to enable that to happen. So we've gone down the path of spending somewhere in the vicinity of $17 million since 2009 to make those infrastructure improvements. And then on the back of that Halve Waste has been impetus to educate the community more broadly. So although Halve Waste looks after the Kerbside collection service specifically, it does branch out to transfer stations and the landfill and looks at community events and lots of other areas where we can make some change. So yes, it's been 10 years of hard labour, to be honest. We have put a lot of infrastructure just to support the change. Otherwise, there was no point doing it.

Emma:

Yes. Fantastic. There's been another question in the chat there and Michelle's able to respond to that one directly as well. But yes, the Halve Waste website is a really clear, well set out site, especially incorporating the overall brand of Halve Waste and then the ever-changing council logos and merging councils that's happened, has just been able to keep on progressing the campaign. So, well done to that. I'm conscious of time we could discuss.