Behaviour Change Campaign of the Year

GOLD

Hubbub: Cats or dogs? #PickYourSide: Using behavioural nudges to tackle litter.

Cats or Dogs? Barbie or Oppenheimer? Liam or Noel? These might not sound like environmental questions, but it turns out they can have a real environmental impact if you stick them on a voting bin.

Our #PickYourSide campaign was a collaboration with KFC, Manchester City Council, Southampton City Council, Instrument Industries and Ellipsis Earth, testing whether new, solar-powered voting bins could tackle litter and get people talking rubbish.

Through an 8-week campaign in Manchester and Southampton last summer, we saw how a creative approach to litter could cut through the noise and change behaviours around a usually mundane topic. We made waste management cool (well, almost…).

After our bins went viral online, nationally representative polling in October 2023 showed 15% of people in the UK alone (10 million people!) had seen them, but they weren’t just a gimmick – they were 2.5x more effective at reducing litter than normal bins according to independent surveying by Ellipsis Earth.

So, now what? We’re refining the design and looking to spark more debates on streets near you as we look to scale up, big.

SILVER

Keep Britain Tidy and Barley Communications: Buy Nothing New Month

Keep Britain Tidy’s inaugural Buy Nothing New Month campaign encouraged consumers aged 18-44 to buy nothing new during January 2023, inspiring them to consider alternatives to buying new, sowing the seed that buying less is positive in many ways.

Barley Communications developed and implemented a highly successful integrated communication campaign that aimed to shift the public narrative from the environmental impact of what people throw away to that of what people buy.

The campaign led to:
• almost 120,000 impressions and over 750 new followers for the organic social media campaign
• almost 4 million impressions and 27,000 clicks for the paid social media campaign
• >700,000 impressions and almost 465,000 video views generated by influencer content
• opportunities to see/hear of 2.6 million from the trade and consumer media campaign.

This resulted in 65% of those who took part buying nothing new during the month and 70% reporting they will think more about what they buy in future.

BNNM is now Keep Britain Tidy’s annual consumer waste prevention campaign and the first of its kind from a mainstream, consumer-facing organisation in the UK.
The 2024 campaign ran in January and saw participation increase by 6000%.

BRONZE

Suffolk Waste Partnership and Barley Communications: #ShakeItOut

In 2021-2022, 28% of recycling was rejected across Suffolk. Residents adding recycling to bins in plastic bags is a common issue, causing up to 100 tonnes of recycling a month to be rejected.

Barley worked with Suffolk Waste Partnership to develop an integrated behaviour change campaign that would engage Suffolk households and raise awareness of the need to recycle rubbish items clean, dry and loose instead of bagged.

We named the campaign #ShakeItOut and created a piece of hero content – a playful and engaging animation accompanied by a jingle to the soundtrack of the ‘Hokey Cokey’. We chose a catchy and nostalgic tune that would be easy to remember.

Communications channels included social media (paid and organic), a traditional media campaign and out-of-home adverts in bus shelters and supermarkets. The animation was also broadcast in cinemas.

The digital campaign ran for eight weeks with two two-week bursts of paid social media advertising at the beginning and end to maximise impact among digitally engaged audiences.

The campaign performed strongly across all channels, with 4.8m opportunities to see and hear. Most importantly we hit the target of 15% less recycling contamination due to plastic bags.

ONE-TO-WATCH

Renewi UK Services & Valpak: The Baa-ttery Campaign

Most people don’t think anything of putting a few batteries in the bin, not realising the dangers or even that they should be recycled. On average, over 3.2 million batteries in are thrown away in Cumbria alone.

3.2 million is a huge number of batteries but unless you can visualise the scale of the problem it means nothing. 3.2 million batteries equal the weight of over 3650 Herdwick sheep. What is more Cumbrian than a sheep to represent the scale of our problem!

Introducing ‘The Baa-ttery Campaign’; a creative solution to encourage more battery recycling across Cumbria. Baa-ttery Boxes were delivered to every school in Cumbria and asked to help us ‘save baa-tteries from the bin’.

By highlighting the importance of battery recycling, Renewi aims to increase the number of battery recycling points across Cumbria and make it more convenient to recycle household batteries and reduce the environmental impact of battery waste.