I'm a sustainable behaviour change expert for events. AMA


Hello,
I’m Livvy Drake and I work on corporate events and festivals. I started working on waste and recycling behaviour change initiatives at Shambala festival and went on to do an MA module in it.

Outside of events but focused on plastics, I was part of the team that piloted the award-winning Refill and Rethink Period campaigns for City to Sea. Most recently, I have been working on audience engagement and sustainability with the George P Johnson and Cisco Live teams.

I’ll be here to answer your questions about changing behaviour for event audiences so that they behave in a sustainable way, live on 2020-07-07T15:00:00Z2020-07-07T16:00:00Z.

You’ll need to sign up to the forum to take part.

Once you have signed up, feel free to add this to your calendar by clicking the three dots above.

Talk soon!

Hi @Livvy,
Thanks for doing this AMA! How did you first start working in this area?

Hi there, can you confirm the time zones for this session as it gives the same times for London and Adelaide and I’m afraid I won’t be up at 00:30 even to listen to Libby. Thank you. Also, I can’t work out how to sign up for the forum - is it just a matter of clicking GOING? I’m new here!

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Hi, Livvy!
How do I sign up?

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Hi,
Thanks for feedback! We have added a few more timezones to make this clearer. The event will take place at 16.00 BST, so 00.30 in Adelaide.

Please do submit a question for Lizzy now and you can come back and read her response in your own time.

You have asked this question so you are all signed up to use the forum.

Hi @DellaMarie, you’re all signed up! Click that you are ‘Going’ in Livvy’s post above. Just submit your questions now and come back at 16.00 on Tuesday 7 July to chat live to Livvy.

You can click the three horizontal dots in Livvy’s post (where it says Interested, Going) to add the event to your calendar.

Do you find it a challenge to align your sustainability values when working with big agencies like GPJ? Do you think they apply sustainability policy on a project / client relationship basis rather than a company wide basis?

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2 questions for tomorrow:

Do you specifically apply any conservation psychology theories or other psychological theories in your work? If so, can you go into detail about those theories or guide us towards the psychologists whom you’re influenced by?

Who are your idols/mentors/muses in this space? What authors, bloggers, vloggers or social media accounts do you follow to learn from which might be important/helpful/beneficial for us to follow as well?

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Hi Livvy! I’m about to start on a mini festival project, so this is perfect timing. I have a couple of questions for you.

  1. What would you say are the easiest sustainable behavioural changes to affect at outdoor festivals (the low hanging fruit)?

  2. Conversely, what have you found to be the biggest struggle(s) in this area (what are people most reluctant to do/change)?

Thanks,
Steph

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Hello everyone,
Livvy is live and ready to go so please keep your questions coming!

When discussing littering people often want the manufacture (and designers) to take responsibility.
My aim is to design packaging to change behaviour.
However
I feel part of this challenge is for the people who litter, They need to take responsibility for the actions that lead up to ‘dropping the packaging’
So the question
How do we challenge who takes responsibility? and change that behaviour?

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Thanks for doing this AMA! How did you first start working in this area?
Thanks Legacy team for inviting me!

So I got into event sustainability after getting disillusioned with the wastefulness of the events industry as an event manager.

I started working with Shambala Festival after a summer of gaining experience in sustainability at events and delivering some plastics and food waste projects at festivals.

Whilst working with Shambala as the Sustainability Manager, we brought in a Behaviour Change expert and she opened our eyes to the world of behavioural economics and what motivates our behaviours. I worked with her on developing fun and engaging campaigns to reduce the litter, left tents and recycling rates in the campsite fields.

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It would be great to hear more about these campaigns, can you please discuss your processes of creating these campaigns? What worked, what didn’t, and how you iterated?

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This is our Camp Champ campaign where we rewarded tidy camping areas with flags that said Camp Champs - this positively reinforced the desirable behaviour. These items became in high demand as a reward and people even stole them. The team delivering this initiative would have people begging them to audit their campsite

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Delighted to see you all at today’s AMA. Do feel free to share what you are working on, perhaps the group can help along with @Livvy.

It would be great to hear more about these campaigns, can you please discuss your processes of creating these campaigns? What worked, what didn’t, and how you iterated?

Hi Brooke, yes rather than assuming people were bad or stupid and that we just needed to ‘educate them’, we looked at what the strong social driers were and influences for the audiences. At festivals, like any where where there are big crowds, people are motivated by the dominant social norms and what their mates do.

Picking up litter and being tidy is NOT cool for lots of cohorts so we worked on making it cool- fun or just that the undesirable behaviours were so abnormal that people wanted to be part of the norm

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Hi Livvy
Looking forward to your replies to Steph’s questions as these would also be applicable to the Corporate events and meetings arena that I work in.

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Do you specifically apply any conservation psychology theories or other psychological theories in your work? If so, can you go into detail about those theories or guide us towards the psychologists whom you’re influenced by?

Hi Brooke, the theories that I use when approaching behaviour change are:

Behavioural economics which has a huge collection of biases and defaults that our brain uses rather than logic- yes that’s right we are not logical most of the time.

A good principle is this one from Dan Ariely: When designing things must assume:

  • have low motivation
  • low patience
  • hate doing anything
  • And are trying to complete a task as quickly as possible
    In other words we have to remove the friction from a behaviour and design “a path of least resistance”.

The easy to design something is with the principle EAST
Easy
Attractive
Social
Timely

If your intervention is none of the above you will find challenges- this is the principle I apply to most recycling systems at events of any type.
Are they EASY to navigate based on the waste stream a person is holding
Is the bin system attractive or is the action desirable to the target audience
Are other people doing it so it is socially acceptable
Have you positioned your bins/inititaive at the point a person is thinking of the activity- e.g. bins in a food court.

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Social Practice theory looks at how the materials and infrastructure influences peoples actions and skills, and what is socially accepted and expected.

It is a good way of seeing how an unsustainable practice or behaviour has developed over time e.g. drinking ater or coffee on the go- this didnt exist before the development and usage of plastics and disposable cups - these are now a sign of affluence, health and a disposable income and socially acceptable.

To change these behaviours you need to address the infrastructure to replace those social meanings. So for water bottles this means making tap water available everywhere bottled water is (check out the Refill campaign which does just this Refill.org.uk) and also making it attractive and a sign of health to carry a reusable bottle

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I like that Livvy. I always think they should place coffee cup and sandwich wedge bins about 5 mins walk away from the coffee shop.

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