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Education

education

Education gives people a compelling reason to change their behaviour – an understanding that butt littering has consequences or impacts on other people and the environment around them.

Face-to-face education is considered to be the most effective method of encouraging behaviour change. It enables messages of these impacts to be communicated from another community member, rather than a less personal media outlet, such as outdoor advertising. It also strives to gain full attention of audience members.

When successful in gaining the full attention of target audience members, 'educators' have an opportunity to appeal for change – that the individual commit to it, or promise to: "PLEASE BUTT IT, THEN BIN IT ®".

If education and commitment are delivered in a friendly, positive and genuine way, it is an effective and persuasive – yet non-confronting – approach. If conducted frequently and/or broadly, it has the potential for 'social diffusion' – or spread – of the butt littering impact messages, as the 'educated' people have been known to then influence those around them.

Education delivery

Having identified a target audience, the next step is to determine how best to educate them, depending on the Context.

The first aspect to consider is 'what activity is the audience engaged in while they're littering', and how, or if, a brief education period could fit into that activity.

Education tools

In addition, which tools of getting the messages across would be highly engaging, yet non-intrusive.

Education can be delivered using various tools, including:

Face-to-face education
Performance artist/installation
Media – poster, print or tv/video
Printed material – flyer, coaster, sticker etc.
Props – foam cigarette butts, impact photographs etc.

While some of these obviously have a cross-over with broader awareness-raising, they can also play an important educative role in their own right.

Face-to-face education

Butt Free Australia recommends face-to-face education as part of behaviour change campaigns. It is a very effective component of behavioural change, but it does require substantial resources and should be considered carefully within your budget.

Sourcing education staff is extremely critical to project success – it is a skilled role requiring more than willingness and dedication to the issue.

Sourcing and resourcing educators

We strongly advise sourcing educators with the following skills and attributes:

Language skills: very strong competence and/or first spoken language
Language skills will be appropriate to the ethnicity demographics of the target audience and is vitally important for project management, training retention, education delivery, project reporting and overall results.
Outgoing personality/confidence
Educators need to be confident enough to approach and engage someone who may be trying to avoid them and appealing enough to convince them to stop what they're doing and engage in conversation.
Friendliness
Once educators have been able to initially engage a person, they then need to be able to be casual about the personal nature of the approach and not be confronting.
Promotional/sales experience
Asking for commitment requires some negotiation skills, persistence and appeal – what's in it for me? Successful experience in sales, promotions or fund-raising is a good indication of these skills.
Education/engagement experience
This will be useful, however the opportunity for engagement is usually a very short period of time and other skills will be more important.

First source staff with the above skills and attributes from within your own organisation or those of your partners. This can help reduce substantial costs to the project. You could also ask partners to provide staff as an 'in-kind' contribution to the project budget.

Then source staff with the required skills by perhaps advertising at Sales, Marketing or Event Management training institutions, model agencies, gyms, environmental organisations or promotional companies.

Be wary of some agencies that only provide 'promotional staff'. Ask them if they have regular staff or do they advertise on a job-to-job basis – these agencies may source backpackers or other transient workers with highly variable commitment to work, presentation or language skills.

Training educators

Training is vital to ensure educators are able to engage an active audience. They need to attract attention, retain attention, convey relevant impacts about butt littering and gain commitment. All this is required within a short amount of time and with an audience that may think they're being sold something, asked to quit smoking or wanting to return to what they were doing. It's not an easy job! However after a fun training session with their peers, most do well!

A PowerPoint template can be downloaded in the Tools list below, which includes a script for the trainer and some exercises. This can be tailored to your project.

Also provided is a suggested script for the educators to use with the public to incorporate appropriate education and commitment techniques.

If hiring external staff, it can be economical to train them in the hours before the education period. Otherwise it should be no more than two or three days before the event to ensure that points covered in the training are not forgotten before the education period.

Managing educators

It is extremely important the educators are managed to ensure they have a point of contact on the street, are well hydrated, protected from the sun and kept safe.

A managing presence will also allow you to ensure educators have retained the information provided in the training session and are delivering it effectively. It will invariably take a little time for educators to settle into using the script and gaining confidence with the public. Nervousness may be expressed by their pairing up with other educators to talk, or their not engaging with as many people as they could. Please read 'Managing Educators – Guidelines' in the Tools list below.

Behavioural change tools

Education alone is not enough to be sure that people will use information to change their behaviour, remembering you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Further encouragement is needed.

A number of tools have been identified by community-based social marketing theory to foster change. The following have been the most successful for ButtFREE projects.

Commitment

A commitment or promise to the request for behavioural change makes face-to-face education even more effective. Social studies have shown that behaviour change is 40–90% more likely if a person made a commitment to do it. It is based on people's perception of themselves – an internal voice that might say, "I said I'd do it, so I will."(1) An important point however, is that the person must not feel pressure to commit. It must therefore only be requested after the education about the impacts of butt littering.

A term more common in the United States is to 'make a pledge'.

Written pledges

Written pledges can be gained in the form of a signature using a 'pledge sheet' (See Tools list below). Written pledges are known to be more effective than verbal pledges(2), however they can take more time to gain.

Pledge sheets are a simple way to gain pledges and count them. You may also like to use a pledge poster asking for signatures only, which also provides a fantastic promotional tool after the project. By making the commitment public – by displaying the poster - people are further encouraged to stick to it. Pledge posters can be less confronting than the pledge sheet, which also asks the person to write their name.

Verbal pledges

Verbal pledges, while slightly less effective, are easier to gain from people in a hurry – commuters for example. They are a verbal promise in response to a prompt by educators, and asked for in exchange for a personal ashtray. They can be counted by monitoring the number of personal ashtrays given out in exchange.

Incentives

Issuing on-the-spot prizes to people seen correctly disposing of cigarette butts during a period of education is an exercise in positive reinforcement of the desired behaviour. If the potential for people to win these prizes is publicised*, it offers an incentive for many people to 'butt it, then bin it'.

*Some State gaming legislation may stipulate the requirement for permits and other guidelines such as the allowable size of prizes or prize dates and eligibility to be published in a widely published newspaper – please check with relevant authorities in your State.

Thank you

Thanking people for helping create a Butt Free Australia allows them to view themselves as doing their bit for the environment. This can be included in scripts provided for educators.

Footnotes

(1) Fostering sustainable behaviour change, McKenzie-Mohr, D., Smith, W., pp 46 - 59
(2) Fostering sustainable behaviour change, McKenzie-Mohr, D., Smith, W., p 52

Action – Education

Refer to your Context guide for examples of education tools appropriate to your hotspots.
Decide what proportion of your focus, and budget, should be placed on education, depending on the Assessment of the problem, Context and the audience you’ve identified.
Decide how many educators you'll need, estimate hours they'll need to work and the number of uniforms – enter into your budget.
Consider sourcing staff through your own or potential partner organisations.
Decide on how you will gain pledges – verbal, written, pledge sheets or posters.
Start recruiting educators.