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At the root of nearly every energy efficiency program there lies a change in decision-making, behavior, or both. In recent decades, efficiency programs have focused mostly on the decision-making end of the spectrum. With the unprecedented rate of growth among members' efficiency program goals, however, CEE members have begun to express strong interest in more actively harnessing human behavior to help achieve ambitious program goals. There also appears to be increasing recognition among efficiency program administrators that whether the program goal is to get a customer to buy a more efficient product or to use energy in a more efficient way, programs are asking people to change behavior. But how do you get people to change? How do measure whether your program or campaign has resulted in behavior change? How can you determine the energy savings that result from that behavior change? And how can you determine that your program's efforts, and not some other factor, were the ones that changed the behavior?
At the January Program Meeting, a group of CEE members began to explore common interests in these questions and in changing energy consuming behaviors. They identified a preliminary list of topics on which they felt more research or support was needed, and ways that CEE might potentially support their efforts. Many members expressed interest in learning how to design and implement social marketing, so CEE organized a day long workshop to follow the MT Symposium in April.
The workshop, held in conjunction with the Association for Educational Development (AED) in Washington, D.C., showed participants how to apply lessons from behavioral science and marketing to develop social marketing campaign approaches to elicit behavior change. Ronne Ostby-Mailing and John Strand of AED, who led the workshop, recommended solid upfront analysis of the behavior and its determinants before designing a campaign or an energy efficiency program. They suggested answering the following questions:
- What are the individuals' or organizations' current behaviors?
- Which behavior do you want to target for change?
- What do you want to change the behavior to?
- What are the barriers to making the change?
- What are the benefits of changing the behavior?
- What are the costs?
For example, these could be not just money but also time, opportunity, inconvenience, or going against social norms.
Messages that focus on the benefits of the behavior ("fun"), on behavior that can be changed without much effort ("easy"), and on behavior that is approved by others whose opinions matter to the target group ("popular") are most likely to succeed. A good example is the Natural Resources Canada No Idling program, which successfully used positive reinforcement and peer pressure to reduce idling at commuter rail stations and schools. Members who would like to request a copy of the workshop presentation should e-mail Monica Nevius at mnevius@cee1.org.
The January meeting led to a May conference call that attracted over 60 participants, representing almost 40 members. Members further refined topics of mutual interest and identified more ways that CEE could potentially support member efforts. The group agreed on a name for this undertaking, which is not yet a CEE Committee: the Behavior Interest Group (BIG). With so many attendees and so much interest in a sprawling topic, it was decided to establish working groups to focus on more specific elements of behavior change. The working groups identified thus far are:
1. Persistence of behavior change: This group will identify and explore opportunities to address questions about the persistence of specific behavior changes to be determined by the group. These changes could be related to certain technologies, program approaches, etc., in the commercial, industrial, and residential sectors.
2. Social marketing and energy efficiency communications: The work of this group will include identifying and exploring opportunities to address questions about social marketing as it applies to energy efficiency behavior change, the effectiveness of different program marketing and communication approaches, etc.
3. Behavior change Web pages: This group will work together to design and develop a plan, text, and links for a series of web pages on behavior change to be hosted on the CEE Web site. The pages will serve as a Web resource for CEE members investigating the design and evaluation of behavior change program approaches. They could include descriptions of and links to key resources to use in developing or evaluating energy efficiency programs focusing on changing energy consumption behavior as well as other items.
BIG is looking for volunteers to participate in each group. Please contact Monica Nevius, PhD, at mnevius@cee1.org or 617-589-3949 ext. 227 to join.
The conversation continues at the June Members Program meeting, where BIG will meet in person to further refine its focus and identify and prioritize other possible topics for working groups. In response to a request made by BIG participants in January, CEE has arranged for three members to describe their organizations' approach to market segmentation at the June meeting. Register now to attend the meeting. |
