Want to change behaviour? First, listen and learn

If you want to change people’s minds, you have to know what they are thinking. The RSPCA has set out to find out, with surprising results. Justine Pannett, Senior Campaigns Manager at RSPCA explains why.

It’s all well and good for charities to issue pronouncements from their soap boxes, offering their expertise on how people should act, but how effective are campaigns that seek to ‘educate’ or affect behaviour change if they don’t understand their audiences? Are charities being true to their objects or could they be accused of wasting valuable donations?

We’ve recently carried out a critical review of our campaigns having recognised that increasingly, our work is less about achieving legislative change, and more about affecting behaviour change. Some of our campaigns continue in the traditional sense. For example, our efforts to achieve a ban on wild animals in circuses and lobbying against the proposed cull on badgers both have a legislative hook.

But where our target for change is the consumer or pet owner, rather than the Government, we’ve had to wake up to the fact that our messages just haven’t been getting through.

Why not? The fact is that not everyone thinks the same way that we do. We know that people should look after their pets in a certain way, only get a dog if they can provide the cost, care and commitment involved for 15 years or more and make the higher welfare choice when they’re selecting meat for their Sunday roast. And if you ask people they would probably agree that they should do this too. So surely if we just provide them with the right advice and direction that will be enough? Wrong. Human beings are complex creatures and without understanding their motivations – and, more importantly, their barriers to change – these messages will just fall on deaf ears, or preach to the converted. 

Audience insight

So, for the first time, we’ve invested heavily in audience insights on a number of our key projects, including tackling the numbers of dogs that end up in animal centres, and helping people to make higher welfare food choices to reduce the numbers of animals farmed in intensive farming systems.

What we’ve learned has been really surprising, but it’s helping us to frame our campaigns in a way that we wouldn’t have considered before. The challenge for moving forward is to package our scientifically robust advice in a way that will be received by the groups of people whose behaviour we are trying to change. I strongly recommend producing an insights checklist and refer to it at every stage of campaign development, otherwise it’s very easy to get off track.

I’m pleased to report that we’re not the first charity applying this approach; a number of charities, for example Cancer Research UK, do so for their health marketing campaigns. And the Department of Health, NHS bodies and local authorities are applying this thinking too – but that’s where it seems to stop for not-for-profit organisations.

Social marketing

I’d like to think that we’re at the tipping point of seeing a greater number of charities investing more money in audience insights and applying social marketing principles – marketing for social good (not to be confused with social media) – to their ‘education’ campaigns. This requires taking a bottom-up, rather than top-down approach and putting the consumer at the heart of the intervention. For cash-strapped charities, audience insight work doesn’t need to be vastly expensive, but it will be resource intensive.

The Government has recognised the need for this approach for a reason and that’s probably because it is spending too much money on dealing with the casualties of society – the cost to the NHS related to smoking or obesity, for example. So it makes sense for charities, which are often left to pick up the pieces, to consider this ‘prevention, rather than cure’ model as well.

Behaviour change doesn’t occur overnight – it can take years – but stopping, analysing and understanding your audiences of today is a wise investment for the future.

Find out more

• Read more about the work of the RSPCA at www.rspca.org.uk.
• Find a whole range of free campaingning and influencing resources at www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/campaigningeffectiveness.
• Applications are now open for the NCVO Certificate in Campaigning, a seven module course which covers all aspects of good practice campaigning. NCVO members receive a 25% discount on course costs. 

With thanks to the RSPCA for the photo: Justine Pannett pictured with Quinn, a fixture at RSPCA HQ.