Michelle Vigen, Campaign and Metrics Coordinator for the Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs) is a 2011 Bush Fellow. This article is adapted from a post on her blog, Common Spark.

Everywhere, people are working to improve the lives of others and their communities: tables and booths about composting and recycling, workshops about energy efficiency, organizations handing out brochures about renewable energy. Collectively, these efforts are daily raising awareness around important issues and encouraging people to look at their lives differently and make a change.

But beyond awareness, we want action. And moving from awareness to action can be difficult for people. There are a host of barriers in the way. That's where something called Community-Based Social Marketing (CBSM) comes in.

Community-Based Social Marketing is an approach to achieving broadly sustainable behavior in our communities.  It combines knowledge from psychology and social marketing to leverage community members’ action to change behavior. CBSM is more than education; it’s spurring action by a community and for a community.

According to an article by Doug McKenzie-Mohr and W. Smith, it's composed of four steps:

1) Uncovering barriers to behaviors and then, based upon this information, selecting which behavior to promote;

2) Designing a program to overcome the barriers to the selected behavior;

3) Piloting the program;

4) Evaluating it once it is broadly implemented.

Social marketing emphasizes that effective program design begins with understanding the barriers people perceive to engaging in an activity. Social marketing also underscores the importance of strategically delivering programs so that they target specific segments of the public and overcome the barriers to this segment’s engaging in the behavior.

But Will They Use the VendingMiser?

One of the places I’ve seen this is in energy efficiency. At CERTs, we work to help communities identify and implement clean-energy projects. We’re interested in helping communities feel empowered through action--energy-efficient action. This is often easier said than done.

We start with educating people about energy-efficiency upgrades that are low-cost and high-return. I mean, really low-cost and very high-return: an easy plug-and-play VendingMiser that costs $175 retail and saves about the same each year on vending-machine energy costs. Twist-on spray valves for commercial kitchens, at a program price of $28, that save $400 or more per year.

 But economics and information are simply not sufficient to achieve the broad and lasting sustainable change we strive to see.

This is where community-based social marketing is very informative. CBSM tells us: You’re missing some of the barriers.  

Maybe people don’t have time, no matter the payback.  

Maybe the time and effort involved in the change feels more significant than the benefit of changing.  

Maybe people don’t believe in the energy savings.  

Maybe people don’t know who they need to talk to at their workplace in order to purchase these devices.  

You need to find out what’s getting in the way, what's making the good choice hard. You need to address that up front and help make the right choice the easy one. (A favorite example of mine is all the bike infrastructure in Copenhagen.)

Results, Results, Results

The first thing I like about CBSM is that it’s results-oriented. Think of your local political campaigns--the postcards, brochures, letters, etc.  They provide lots of information, but it doesn’t necessarily spur action. CBSM says: If you want to get people to vote, you need to help them vote, not just tell them to. In Get Out the Vote efforts, volunteers door- knock on election days, and organizers offer people rides to and from the polls.  

Results-oriented approaches are especially important for organizations that don’t have a lot of resources.  It’s costly to print and send out hundreds of brochures, just hoping someone will take action.  But helping people actually get to the action, such as showing up to install efficient light bulbs, demonstrating composting in the workplace, or accompanying a colleague on a first bike commute, means that one more person is starting a new, sustainable behavior. CBSM helps groups achieve measurable change.

You Can't Buy Behavior

The second thing I like about CBSM is that it differentiates between “selling a product” and changing behavior.  The two are different causes, but too often we employ strategies for the first to achieve the second.

The act of buying (not to be confused with the ability to buy) is pretty straightforward. As a consumer, you go to a store to find a product to meet your objective.  But where do you go to “get” the habit of turning off your lights, or taking shorter showers?  Conservation behavior isn’t something that can be bought at a cash register, so why should it be advertised like it can? CBSM understands that behavior is overwhelmingly based on social norms and habits rather than rational real-time thinking. (Dr. Christie Manning at Macalester College emphasizes this in her report to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, "The Psychology of Sustainable Behavior.")

One of the most important observations from psychological research is that many decisions are made by automatic, unconscious processes on the basis of information that our conscious, rational brains are hardly aware of. When we shop, we compare prices and negotiate deals and branding. But we need to rely on our habits and energy-consciousness to remember to turn off the lights when we leave the room. CBSM recognizes that this challenge is different.

It's Hard to Be the Lone Recycler

The third thing I like about CBSM is that it recognizes that we, as individuals, act within our context and our community.  It’s hard to go it alone, to be the lone recycler, to be the only one with the garden, to be the only one biking into work. You are different and you stand out. Our human nature generally wants us to fit in with those around us and “go with the flow” based on social and physical infrastructure. Most people don’t want to wear the pink tuxedo at the event where everyone is likely to wear black. We  don’t want to bike down a busy road that has never seen a bike before. And, conversely, we don’t want to be the only business on Main Street without the “We Buy Green Power” sign in the window. It’s this third aspect of CBSM that intrigues me the most.

CBSM isn’t as clear about how to help activate existing community connections and relationships around actions.  It provides a great method for understanding a problem and countering the psychological barriers to changing behavior, but says less about who is the best to lead and manage a CBSM initiative.

Power Shift: From Program Managers to Community Members

I think that CBSM has the potential to flip the ownership of sustainable action from program managers to community members. Instead of direction coming from the outside, CBSM’s use of social norming indicates that communities can enact sustainable behavior from within and outward. CBSM recognizes that we take cues from strong social and civic leaders about what books to read, movies to see, restaurants to try…and maybe where we get our food and how we get to work every day.

Finally, I think that Community-Based Social Marketing is more than an approach to achieving desired changes; it's also a way to strengthen the way communities work and address issues. I will be exploring this further in my fellowship. Through pilots and talking with others about CBSM in their own communities, I hope to see the extent to which this approach can help communities identify their goals, leverage and recognize local social and civic leaders, and organize low-cost and effective initiatives to achieve action.