In July, Utah Clean Energy welcomed world-renown environmental psychologist Doug McKenzie-Mohr to present the acclaimed workshop, Fostering Sustainable Behavior: Community-Based Social Marketing.

The workshop was attended by over seventy-five participants including representatives from Utah's utilities, energy efficiency program managers, and other local government leaders interested in energy conservation.  Mohr's pioneering workshop outlines effective strategies to encourage sustainable behaviors through a variety of proven outreach methods.

The workshop was sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency, Salt Lake City, UBEES, and Rio Tinto, with supporting sponsors Questar, Nexant, Rocky Mountain Power and PECI.

McKenzie-Mohr used both lecture and small-group activities to facilitate information on “Community-Based Social Marketing” (CBSM). By reducing the barriers to sustainable behavior, CBSM uses various techniques to not only change behavior, but attitudes as well.

The workshop illustrated ways to adapt and implement successful energy efficiency programs, whether it be through social diffusion, prompts, or making use of public and durable commitments. By using these various strategies, program managers can designate a target audience and analyze how to best reach them with limited time and resources. The end product is a well designed pilot program used to test social marketing approaches in their area of interest. The results of the pilot can then give insight into how successful a program can be when launched at a much larger scale.

About Community Based Social Marketing

In order to increase consumer participation in more sustainable practices (e.g., energy and water conservation) we must encourage the adoption of new behaviors. While consumer education and advertising can be effective in creating awareness and changing attitudes, studies document that behavior change rarely occurs as a result of simply providing information. In contrast, Community-based social marketing is based on research that demonstrates that altering human behavior is often most effectively achieved through initiatives delivered at the community level that focus on removing barriers to an activity while at the same time enhancing the activity's benefits.
The workshop provided:

• A comprehensive, introductory understanding of community-based social marketing.
• The strengths and weaknesses of information-intensive marketing campaigns.
• A five-step process to effectively include community-based social marketing in your program design.
• How to select actions that will achieve the greatest impact.
• Barriers and motivations to behavior change.
• Tested tools for encouraging behavior change.
•   ow to design and implement a pilot program to test your social marketing approaches.

This workshop has been made possible by the following sponsors:

The Environmental Protection Agency, Salt Lake City, Rio Tinto, and UBEES.

Supporting sponsors include: Nextant, PECI, Questar, Rocky Mountain Power.