Community Campaigns

During 2005, Graeme participated in two professional development workshops. The first of these was the advanced Fostering Sustainable Behaviour workshop in Community Based Social Marketing by Doug McKenzie-Mohr. The second was Enabling Change: tools for designing and delivering community change programs, presented by Les Robinson. Combined with our existing experiences and skills in adult learning, facilitation and program development, these two workshops have provided another array of skills to draw from.

A Butt Free Bay and Basin

The single most commonly littered item in Australia is the cigarette butt. Butts often end up in waterways where the toxic chemicals they are designed to trap leak out affecting water quality and aquatic life. Apart from this serious problem, they are plain ugly to look at.

Early in 2005 Real Options worked with Shoalhaven City Council to develop a cigarette butt litter reduction campaign in the Bay and Basin area, funded by the Butt Littering Trust. The Campaign used aspects of community education and social marketing and worked with local partners: Jervis Bay Tourism, Huskisson Chamber of Commerce and Tourism, NSW Rural Fire Service, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, NSW Marine Parks Authority and Booderee National Park.

This environmental awareness campaign aimed to change people’s butt littering habits by helping them understand that butts are litter. It was NOT a non-smoking campaign, people’s right to smoke was respected. The campaign commenced on the 6th March (Clean Up Australia Day) and went through to Easter (25-28 March) and then the April school holidays (9-25 April).

The campaign raised community awareness about butt litter and had a number of inter-related components:

• Recruit, train and support casual, paid outreach workers
• Direct contact with smokers to offer information and solutions to butt littering
• Research into attitudes, knowledge and behaviour of both residents and visitors
• Monitoring numbers of butts in the environment before, during and after the campaign
• Enlisting the support of retail and tourist businesses and community groups
• A promotional strategy including advertising and local media
• The achievements of the campaign were celebrated and the need for ongoing support highlighted with a performance from the Sydney based PaperBag Playback Theatre company

A campaign report is available. Please contact Graeme graeme@realoptions.com.au