Outreach Steps I Planning Your Campaign I
Developing and Implementing Your Campaign I Evaluating Your Campaign
INTRODUCTION:
Outreach is a good way to reach people doing bad behaviors to encourage them to reduce their part in contributing to a water quality problem. The best outreach programs often use a technique called social marketing.
With social marketing, you:
- Figure out what behaviors you want to change
- Figure out who does those behaviors
- Focus your efforts on reaching those people doing the behaviors you want to change
- Develop messages that make the change appealing to them.
Conducting an effective outreach campaign educates people and empowers them to do the right behaviors to prevent your water quality issue.
STEPS FOR DEVELOPING A WATER QUALITY CAMPAIGN:
Below are the steps to conducting an effective outreach campaign. The most effective outreach campaigns are well planned, focused, and include ways to measure success.
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STEP 1 – WHAT IS YOUR POLLUTANT OF CONCERN?
Identify the real water quality problems that are facing your community that people in the community can help you solve.
STEP 2 – IDENTIFYING TARGET BEHAVIORS AND ACTIONS
Effective outreach and education programs focus on people’s actions that affect water quality. They:
- Identify bad behaviors and
- Encourage people to trade them for better behaviors
Therefore, you want to pick good behaviors to encourage that you think are the most likely to help reduce your pollutant of concern. When choosing behaviors, think about how good it is at reducing pollution, how likely people are to adopt it, and any other factors that might be important.
Examples
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STEP 3 – IDENTIFYING TARGET AUDIENCES
Some people are more likely than others to contribute to any particular pollutant of concern. Effective outreach and education programs focus on people who are more likely to contribute to the water quality problem.
STEP 4 – GETTING TO KNOW YOUR AUDIENCES
After you identify your audience, you need to get to know them better. This will help you figure out what your message should be and how you should deliver it.
Some Things You May Want to Know
Example: The dog owner does not pick up after the dog because he/she believes it is good fertilizer. |
STEP 5 – SETTING GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
Now, you need to set the goals and objectives for your outreach program based on those target audiences and desired behavior changes.
Sample GOAL: |
Sample OBJECTIVE |
DEVELOPING AND IMPLEMENTING YOUR CAMPAIGN
STEP 6 – DEVELOP YOUR PROGRAMS
Because each of your objectives should be based on your pollutant of concern and changing specific behaviors in your target audiences, you will want to make sure your activities are directly related to your objectives.
You also know how your audience likes to get information. Consider developing activities that reflect where you might find your audience.
STEP 7 – IMPLEMENT YOUR PROGRAM
Now it is time to have fun actually putting on the activities to promote behavior changes in your target audiences! But you still have some work to do. Ideally you will pilot your messages and activities to make sure your target audience is hearing what you think you are telling them.
EVALUATING YOUR CAMPAIGN'S SUCCESS
STEP 8 – EVALUATE YOUR PROGRAM
A campaign’s success can be determined by evaluating several factors:
- Did you accomplish your goal and objectives?
- Did your target audience gain awareness, knowledge, values and/or skills?
- Did water quality improve?
- Was your message clear?
- Were your activities effective in communicating the message?
Some evaluation methods include:
- Surveys – written, phone, or oral
- Interviews
- Focus groups
- Statistics – hits on a website, attendance, etc.
NOTE- A combination is often the best way to determine your campaign’s success.