In this week’s climate change blog , we take an in-depth look at how getting to know residents better will benefit your climate change objectives.
Four steps to knowing your residents and what motivates them
1: Build a community
Building an online community not only helps you establish a deeper connection with your residents, it also offers a two-way channel to communicate with them. Your online community can serve as an information hub, whereby you deliver constant value. This will give you a space to talk more in-depth to residents on a variety of climate change topics and encourage action.
2: Discover more about your residents
The more you know about your individual residents, the easier it is to communicate with them. Capturing more information such as location, household occupancy, age and gender will allow you to better understand your audience, helping to make your communications more relevant.
3: Test different messaging
It’s important to test a variety of messages with your residents, to find out what they respond best to. By doing so you’ll be able to ensure your climate change communications are cutting through the noise and resonating with the right people at the right time.
4: Refine your communications
Over time, you’ll be able to build further insights into each of your individual residents by understanding what they respond positively to. This will allow you to further personalise their experience and automate communications based on their interactions.
For example: Once you’ve established whether a resident has a car, you can target messaging around sustainable transport tips and why it’s important/relevant to them (cost and environmental savings).
Building insights on your residents is key to understanding what motivates them.
How often should you interact with residents?
Many local authorities contact and prompt residents less than once a month. However, the frequency of interactions is key to maintaining campaign momentum and sustained behaviour change.
Consistent weekly messaging is the best way to prompt residents to consider their everyday actions. By delivering value every week you can expect much greater levels of engagement, which in turn will give you the opportunity to help drive your messages home and sustain changes in behaviour.
Connecting with residents 52 weeks a year helps build a dialogue around Climate change
Reward your community for taking action
It’s always good to pay favours forward, which is why rewarding your residents for tackling taking action is a must!
By giving your residents a choice on how they are rewarded, you can broaden the appeal, offering something for everyone. For instance you could offer:
- A charitable donation to benefit their community (it could be a school or national charity)
- A gift card or other monetary reward
- Competitions or prizes
Summary
The bottom line is, the more you know about your residents, the easier it is to understand what motivates them and the best way to communicate your climate change goals.
See below examples of the individual resident insight we collect on our Greenredeem platform. If you’d like to know how we could collect insight on yours resident, please get in touch.
In next week’s blog post we will focus on content, broadening the conversation by linking climate change topics and their related CO2 savings.
Request a live demo
If you’d like to see a live demo of how our digital platform could work for your residents, register your interest below & we’ll be in touch to arrange a time that suits you.
Alternatively you can send us an email if you have any questions.
