Global Cool
Measuring climate change campaigns: What’s the relation between online and offline behaviour?
Monday, September 12th, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
At Global Cool we have rigorously measured our climate change campaigns and published the results in detail here.
We also measure our online campaigning activity in great detail, which provides a gold mine of data about how many people we can reach, where and how we can reach them and - perhaps most interestingly for us as an organisation trying to persuade people to change their behaviour – how deeply they do or don’t engage with our ideas.
But, whilst all this online data is great in terms of helping us understand how best to communicate with our target audience, it doesn’t really tell us very much about how our audience behaves in ‘the real world’ once they have interacted with us online. (N.B. Our digital activity has focused on engaging and educating the public with specific actions, rather than building tools that might, for example, measure an individual’s carbon footprint, which we think would exclude the very audience we’re trying to reach.)
To some extent, the surveys and focus groups we do can tell us whether our campaigning is actually changing people’s behaviour, and we have seen some positive results, for example the number of people who said they would wear woolly jumpers at home rose from 12% to 18% following our Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat campaign. Nevertheless, it is still useful to see other evidence that online engagement is an effective way of persuading people to change their behaviour.
Therefore we were pleased to liaise with Michele Mazza from Imperial College recently, who has done some excellent work into the relation between online and offline behaviour. Essentially what we wanted to know from Michele was: If someone likes us on Facebook, or retweets us on Twitter, or signs up for our newsletter, does this mean they will then go on to adopt the behaviours that we are promoting? Michele reported back as follows:
Assessing whether individuals online engagement with organisations influences offline behaviour has proven a very interesting but particularly challenging aspect to evaluate.
While in the case of private sector this issue is less problematic, since the sale of a product can be seen as a ‘primer’ to measure the effectiveness of an online campaign, for public and NGO’s organisation the task is trickier.
However recent studies by Cugelman (Cugelman et al. (2009), (2010)) involving meta-analytical techniques used to assess the impact of online interventions in influencing individual’s offline behaviours, depict a positive picture.
Cugelman first distinguishes between Macro-behaviours, described as primary behaviours targeted by an online intervention; and micro-behaviours describes as routine behaviours that people perform online, intended to lead to the macro-behaviour. For example, a micro-behaviour would describe when a person registered for a weight-loss intervention, while the macro-behaviour would be dieting.
He demonstrates how Microsuasion, i.e. small persuasive tactics used to encourage the performance of minor online tasks, such as signing up for a newsletter or clicking on a hyperlink (Fogg, 2003), are very effective in driving micro-behaviour change. More importantly he also founds correlation between micro and macro-behaviour change, since ” online behaviour outcomes can be seen as a process that includes a small number of online activities leading to significant impacts later on” Cugelman (2010).
This is particularly true when the number of online features in an intervention, i.e. the number of micro-behaviour to perform, is high. (Vandelanotte, et al., 2007). Add to this in another study (Cugelman et al., 2009) Cugelman suggests how the web site credibility, in terms of expertise, trustworthiness and visual appeal is also a key component in effectiveness of online behavioural change interventions.
Finally he also shows how online interventions can match and sometimes outperform interventions distributed over traditional media.
Of course these studies do not fully solve the problem of being able to isolate the effects of Global Cool online activity from the myriad of other influences on people’s ‘green’ behaviour. But they demonstrate how online micro-suasion can lead to micro-behaviour change and how many micro-behaviour changes can lead to macro-behaviour ones.
So they can be seen as a further justification of your approach, and are good selling points!
Many thanks to Michele for this useful research, which would seem to reinforce our approach to online climate change campaigning. We’d be interested to hear from other organisations on their views about the relationship between online and offline behaviour in the comments…
Using music, celebrities and books to promote public transport
Monday, July 4th, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
Personal car travel accounts for over 25% of the average Brit’s carbon footprint. Global Cool’s Do It In Public campaign taps into our audience’s interests in music, being social and having fun to promote public transport as an alternative to driving. The campaign focuses on the adventures you can have on buses and trains as well as the ‘me-time public’ transport gives you to read, relax, listen to music, chat to friends or meet someone new!
Throughout 2009 and 2010 Global Cool attended music festivals up and down the country to talk to bands and artists about their adventures and ‘me-time’ on public transport. All the films were distributed online and continue to be published weekly revealing new top celeb stories. To connect directly with festival goers in 2009, we took the Global Cool Bus on-site and also worked with Vice Magazine to create an insert booklet full of musicians’ stories of public transport journeys. In 2010 our campaign focused on the ‘me-time’ that travelling by public transport affords to read, relax and meet new people. Global Cool launched a book club on Twitter that encouraged people to catch up on the latest releases while on the move.
This year we are using Spotify to create the ultimate playlists for every major music festival this summer. On the website for each festival we have published travel guides, links to the playlists and a travel light tip to help make Doing It In Public on the way to a festival as fun as possible for our readers. Global Cool have collaborated with Fairshare Music, to create weekly Music In Public top 10 lists available for download. We have also continued our Books In Public segment on the website with weekly book recommendations and reviews.
What do you think about our Do It In Public campaign?
Using music festivals to promote Traincations
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
Air travel represents 10% of an average Brit’s carbon footprint. Global Cool encourages our audience to consider a flight-free holiday when planning their next short break. We created the Traincation as a hot travel trend and showcased it by taking celebrities to Barcelona, Amsterdam and Munich – exciting destinations that Brits wouldn’t think to reach by train. We filmed our celebrities’ experiences to show our audience that Traincations are a fun and easy alternative to flying.
The celebrity Traincations really caught the imagination of the media. Stories and video appeared in print and online in The Sun, News of the World, Hello, Company magazine and Now Magazine. We used social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to run competitions, talk about the campaign and establish the trend. In fact there were over 132 million opportunities for the public to see the campaign messages.
The campaign positions holidaying by train as aspirational, fun and exciting. The weekly articles not only demonstrate the range of exciting destinations that can be reached by train from the UK but also showed how the train journey can become part of the holiday.
As part of our Traincation campaign this summer, we recently ran a competition to win tickets to Gurten Festival in Bern, Switzerland. The prize also includes train travel to the festival courtesy of Rail Europe, TVG Lyria and Eurostar. Entrants told us – on the Global Cool Facebook page – which artist and song they would like to hear on Traincation and then votes were cast for the best suggestions.
All in all we had 130 entries and the campaign generated a 50 per cent rise in people viewing our Traincation content on Facebook and a similar rise in visits to our website.
What do you think of our Traincation campaign?
How we measure web activity and define online success
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
Our most recent web statistics have shown yet more impressive growth since our last update. Highlights from May’s results included:
- Most ever number of monthly unique users on globalcool.org
- Most ever monthly page views
- Highest number of repeat visitors
- Highest percentage of people opening our newsletter
- Most number of interactions on the website, Facebook and Twitter
Global Cool’s online activity has three main channels: the Global Cool website, our weekly newsletter and social media activity (mainly on Facebook, Twitter and You Tube, but also increasingly on Flickr and Four Square). In each of these channels we measure the reach of our activity and also the depth of affinity and engagement with our message.
As a campaigning organisation seeking to change the general public’s behaviour by making green lifestyles more attractive, clearly it’s important for us to communicate with as many people as possible, as frequently as possible. However, we also recognise the importance of monitoring how people respond to our messages.
Reach is relatively straightforward to measure: how many people visited the website, how many people opened the newsletter, how many followers do we have on Twitter etc etc. Affinity and engagement measures are more complicated and nuanced. Deciding what type user behaviour demonstrates affinity with your message and what demonstrates engagement is not an exact science. Some examples of affinity we measure include repeat visitors to the website, searches for our brand name, opens of our newsletter etc. Examples of engagement include commenting on a blog post, entering a competition or a retweet on Twitter.
It’s also worth noting that affinity and engagement measures will not always be positive. Some comments, tweets, Facebook messages will be from people telling you you’re doing it wrong, or that they hate you. Some people might view several pages on your website because they are so outraged by how dumb they think your article was that they want to make sure the rest of your content is just as disagreeable to their particular sensibilities.
In terms of the former, we do take a measure of how much negative feedback we get and it regularly comes at less than 0.5% of our total audience. The highest it’s ever been in a single month is 1%. For the latter it’s difficult to ever know what motivates someone to look at two, three, four pages on your site. However, given the tiny amount of negative engagement we get, we are willing to take a leap of faith and assume the vast majority of affinity-like behaviour we see is also motivated by positive rather than negative sentiment.
All in all, Global Cool is now reaching in excess of 70,000 people per month across all three of our main web channels. Of those people, around 22% are demonstrating affinity with our message and 11% are engaging with us.
We are keen to know how you measure your online activity and how you define your success indicators, particularly if, like Global Cool you are seeking to encourage behaviour change or promote green living. Feel free to leave us a comment below…
A lesson from Tom Cruise on promoting green via the power of film
Saturday, April 2nd, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
The Global Cool Foundation are now working with the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) to encourage the placement of green behaviours in films. Placing these behaviours in films is an attractive prospect for Global Cool as it normalises the actions (or products) for the viewer.
Getting people to change their behaviour to reduce carbon emissions is the aim, not getting them to be interested in climate change.
An example of this sort of placement is the use of BMW’s chic new i8 plug-in hybrid in the new Mission Impossible film. Tom Cruise will use the electric hybrid car in the new film, The Ghost Protocol.
Behaviour placement is particularly effective in action films like the Mission Impossible series as cars are an important part of the film and, so it’s very positive that this film will be promoting an eco-friendly vehicle.
Using an inflential, sexy actor like Tom Cruise also promotes the use of green products and behaviours as “normal”.
Global Cool web activity: How we measure, why we measure and the results
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 | Global Cool | 1 Comment
The performance Global Cool’s online activity has been showing some impressive growth in recent months.
Global Cool uses several online channels to communicate with our audience: the Global Cool website, our weekly email newsletter, social media (mainly Facebook, Twitter and You Tube) and the Global Cool Foundation website. As with all our work, we rigorously measure the performance of our online activity, both on a month by month and on a campaign by campaign basis.
Since relaunching our website last June (with the focus on it acting as a hub for all of the channes listed above) we have seen significant growth in our online reach across all channels. The number of unique users coming to globalcool.org and page impressions have trebled in the last eight months. We have also seen a trebling of our audience on Twitter too, with the launch of three new accounts: @Traincation, @BooksInPublic and @GlobalCoolFDN. Our total online reach across all channels was 72,357 in February 2011, up from 37,883 in July 2010.
Increasing our online reach was one of our major goals this time last year, but we recognise that it’s not just about hitting as many people as possible. It’s also extremely important to engage those people with our campaigns and key messages in order to achieve our overall goal – geting people to take up green behaviours in order to prevent climate change.
In addition to reach we also closely monitor a series of affinity measures (mainly different types of interaction across the various channels we use) in order to assess how receptive the public is to our campaign messaging. These include both positive and negative interaction, and we’re delighted that whilst 12% of our audience across all channels are demonstrating positive sentiment towards our campaigns, less than 1% are showing negative sentiment.
You can read more about the impact of Global Cool’s campaigns here.
How are you measuring your online performance? We’d love to hear about what you’ve learnt…
Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat radio feature
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
Global Cool produced an audio feature for Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat before Christmas. Featuring Michelle Shipworth, a researcher in Energy & Social Sciences at the UCL Energy Institute, it encouraged people to wrap up warm at home and turn down their heating to reduce their carbon footprint – the same message that has run throughout our home energy campaign this winter.
Over 20 stations all over the UK aired the feature over the Christmas period, reaching an audience of 1.1 million people.
Listen to the radio feature in full here
Listen to the Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat Global Cool radio feature
You can see the rest of the coverage we’ve had for Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat here
The King speaks: Colin Firth on greening film
Monday, January 17th, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
We announced our partnership with the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) towards the end of last year. Among the people we spoke to about ‘greening’ film at the BIFAs was Colin Firth (see the video below).
With Colin picking up a Best Actor award at the Golden Globes last night for his most recent role, in the British film The King’s Speech, and with the film tipped to go on to great success at the Oscars, this seemed like an apt moment to reflect on Global Cool’s role in British film.
Global Cool is extremely pleased to be working with the British Independent Film Awards to help deliver advice for films makers about green behaviour and lifestyle placement in films. The concept of behaviour and lifestyle placement has grown out of the success of product placement in TV, films, books, music and celebrity culture in influencing brand popularity and shopping habits. Brands routinely ‘place’ their products in films, often paying large amounts for this. An example of this is seen in the film Valentine’s Day and Blackberry phones. It may be that products littering our screens, newspapers and radio waves soon become part of societal norms or that people aspire to be part of celebrity culture, either way, people emulate what they see and brands reap the profit returns.
The advantage of using ‘placement’ isn’t confined to brands and companies anymore. Treating pro-social and pro-environment lifestyles as a product, recently the NBC network has ‘placed’ and incorporated green living into its TV programmes, with group bike rides, recycled shopping bags, cardboard recycling obsessives and an Al Gore appearance as some examples. More recently than this, the charity Drinkaware has released research highlighting the excessive role alcohol plays in British Soaps. It is calling for healthier lifestyles to be demonstrated in British Soaps, as well as the negative impacts of drinking to be portrayed. It is believed that normalising the negative consequences of drinking will change social acceptance of excessive drinking.
Global cool agrees with “greening” our TVs and films and the positive impact it will have on viewers. The power of persuasion for living pro-environmentally should be harnessed, and Global Cool is excited to be a part of this in the British film industry.
What do you think about the idea of “greening” film and television?
BIFA and Global Cool join forces to harness the power of the screen to promote greener living
Monday, December 6th, 2010 | Global Cool | 1 Comment
Global Cool is delighted to be working with the British Independent Film Awards to promote green living. Over the coming year we will be working together to develop an initiative that will deliver essential advice and information to film makers on how they can harness the powerful influence of their films to inspire their audience to take positive steps towards a greener lifestyle.
In 2009, the UK Film Council reported that UK cinema attendance had reached a seven-year high, with 173.5 million box office admissions. We want to leverage the potential of that reach and empower film makers with the knowledge and insight that can make a real difference in helping to create a more environmentally friendly society.
This doesn’t mean developing films that specifically focus on the climate and sustainability agenda, but a more subtle approach that introduces green behaviours seamlessly within the narrative of the picture; for example by showing people riding bikes or simply recycling at relevant points within the film. Reference points such as these help to normalise pro-environmental behaviour in a non-preachy way, making the action more socially acceptable to the viewing public.
US television shows such as 10 Things I Hate About You and Desperate Housewives are great examples of this type of approach. With the women of Wisteria Lane regularly using shopping bags that carry the recycling logo, and the lead character in 10 Things…, Kat Stratford, running her car on vegetable oil. We are keen to see how we can translate this approach to the UK film industry, to create a positive environmental impact that has the potential to go above and beyond solely reducing the carbon footprint of the production itself.
Ralph Fiennes and Global Cool CEO Caroline Fiennes (yes, they are related)
Jointly, Global Cool and BIFA want to furnish film makers with the necessary tools and insight to make these highly impactful decisions, and through the power of the screen, showcase the simple actions that individuals can take to live a greener lifestyle.
Look out for our activity over the coming year and if you are interested in being a part of this, please do get in touch. Together we can make a difference.
Global Cool wants people to travel by train
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 | Global Cool, Our Philosophy | 2 Comments
So much so, that we run two campaigns which promote it – Do It In Public, which is about everyday travel within the UK, and Traincations, which is about holidaying by train.
Through these campaigns, we’ve noticed that the way Global Cool promotes trains is quite different from how the rail industry normally does it. Train companies normally talk about two things: how fast the journey is and how cheap the tickets are – that is, how the journey won’t cost you much time, and won’t cost you much money. It’s not very inspiring – just about how the trip won’t disrupt your life. Nobody markets football matches as ‘only very short, so won’t cost you much time out of your busy life’.
And so, having not been encouraged to think that rail travel is fun, most people don’t. In a survey for Global Cool earlier this year, only 10 per cent of respondents said that they were excited about rail travel -that is, 90 per cent aren’t.
But Global Cool thinks that train journeys themselves are something to love – something to celebrate, rather than just endure.
People want to have fun. Two good illustrations of this are these. First, on Facebook, the main group of the massive French rail company SNCF has a paltry 4000 members, whereas the group wanting SNCF to use Homer Simpson’s voice for its announcements has 65 times that – 250,000 members. And second, we notice that the “auto”biography of the GoCompare meerkat – a probably quite-funny nonsense – is outselling this year’s other big autobiography from Tony Blair.
Train travel can provide that fun. Global Cool’s campaigns have focused on this, for example:
· Time to read: so we handed out a load of free books at railway stations and started a bookclub on Twitter (with the hashtag #BooksInPublic) where people talk about what they’re reading on trains
· Opportunity to meet new people: we taught people how to talk to strangers on trains and buses (which Brits generally don’t know!)
· Time to listen to music: so we got the public (and celebrities) to nominate songs from their favourite travel playlists
· The inspiration which comes from the journeys: many bands told us of songs or books or lyrics which have been inspired by journeys on trains and buses
From Murder on the Orient Express to The Railway Children to JK Rowling’s platform 9 1/2, trains are ripe with mystery and romanticism – strong and positive associations which we can use to get people onto trains. People DO have these positive stories: our website is awash with comments about people’s adventures and fun on train and bus trips – if we just ask people to focus on them.
The positive approach is effective: after just three months of Global Cool’s campaign this year, there was a 50% increase in people being excited about rail travel.
Rail marketing could focus a lot more on how the journey itself – the core product – can contribute to people’s lives, through giving fun and adventure, and less on how the journey is just an inconvenience to be minimised.
- Caroline Fiennes and Will Daunt
Innovative Green Lifestyle Content
Global Cool Foundation runs the Global Cool campaign, an online green lifestyle magazine. Our innovative approach to creating green lifestyle content has redefined how to communicate sustainable behaviour. The site regularly attracts over 30,000 unique users per month - visit GlobalCool.org, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or watch our You Tube videos.
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