A successful climate outreach campaign starts with a plan. Doing the work to develop an effective plan up front will help you meet your objectives, capture successes and promote behavior change.

There are eight main steps in developing a campaign plan. Many of these are outlined in greater detail in the “Get Started” section of the Climate Action Toolkit web site.

Step #1: Goals and Objectives

• Goals are long-term and broad – e.g., “Empower residents to impact climate change in our community”
• Ask yourself, “What does success look like for this campaign?”
• Objectives are measurable ways to see how you’re meeting each goal
  
• Objectives should be as specific as possible and should tie directly to one or more of your goals – e.g., “See a [X%] reduction in [city]’s climate footprint by [date].”

Step #2: Research

• Ask yourself, “What information do we need, and how can we get it?”
• Review the latest climate change and environmental behavioral research available for your area – studies, polling data, etc. Good data can be found in a variety of places:
  • Academic sources, such as Yale’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
  • Environmental organizations and foundations, such as WWF, NRDC, Pew Charitable Trusts, Sierra Club, etc.
  • Media organizations, such as Time Magazine, ABC, Wall Street Journal, etc.
  • Local sources, including other city departments, state agencies, and mission-driven non-profit organizations
• Determine whether you need to conduct your own primary research (focus groups, surveys, etc.) to find out how your community members view climate change and their ability to make a difference
• Use a variety of research types:
• Quantitative: Creating a statistically relevant profile of your audience through online, mail or phone surveys. This is ideal for identifying and compiling audience demographic data (demographics = who they are, by the numbers– age, income, etc.). This type of research can also be done to track campaign objectives
  • Qualitative: Research to delve deeper into an audience’s beliefs/values or to test messages/concepts. Usually done with a smaller number of target audience members via means such as focus groups, interviews, intercepts, etc.

Step #3: Identify Target Audience and Behavior Change

• Brainstorm all audiences, then categorize each audience as follows (note: it’s possible to have an audience fall into more than one category):
  • Primary – Those whose behavior you are trying to change
  • Influencer – Those that can influence the primary audience to change their behavior
  • Gatekeeper – Those that can prevent or facilitate access to the primary audience
• Based on your research findings, identify your “Priority” audiences – the group(s) of people most likely to act quickly and efficiently help you reach your goals and objectives
• Narrow down your ‘ask’ – For each priority audience, identify the specific behavior you’d like to change

Step #4: Target Audience Profile

Find out as much as you can about your priority audience groups:

• Demographics – Who they are based on age, income level, gender, geography, etc.
• Psychographics – What they feel, their attitudes, values, lifestyles and opinions

Do an audience analysis to determine what motivations and barriers exist that affect your audience’s ability to take action.

• Motivations – Reasons the audience would take action on behalf of climate action
• Barriers – Things that would stand in the way of taking action – reasons the audience would not act. These are things that your campaign messages will aim to overcome

Step #5: Create an Effective Message Strategy

Create a value proposition for your program:
The goal of this statement is to succinctly describe what you want your target audience(s) to feel/believe about your program.

The typical value proposition structure is below, with an example:

“If [desired action/behavior change], I will [reward/benefit] because [supporting evidence].”

“If I use an alternate mode of commuting just 2 days a week, I will feel good because I know that I am helping to impact climate change while also setting an example for my family/friends/fellow workers.”

Create a message platform that expands upon your value proposition. Try to:

• Find a ‘key insight’ that will drive behavior change
• Be simple – can the audience understand the main message in 3-5 seconds?
• Create an emotional connection with the audience
• Sell benefits to your target audience, not the features of your program

Step #6: Build Partnerships

• Look for partners with complementary mission, goals and target audiences
• Look for partners with a history of collaboration and community involvement – and consider public, private and/or non-profit partners
• Identify potential local media partners that could provide added exposure to the program

Step #7: Develop a Communications Plan

• It’s tempting to start with this step – but it is important to lay the foundation for effective strategies and tactics by completing steps #1-6 first
• Strategies and tactics should help to achieve the program goals and objectives
• Strategies are broad (how you will do it), tactics are specific (what you will do):

Strategy: Use media outreach to raise awareness of and build support for the city’s climate action campaign

Supporting Tactic: Hold a kickoff media event and invite reporters to learn about the collective climate impact of taking action

Step #8: Create an Evaluation Plan

Evaluation is an important part of climate action campaign planning.  If you possibly can, take the time to develop an evaluation/assessment strategy that ties key measures of success to the major goals and objectives included in your campaign work plan—this will make it easier to track progress and celebrate successes, both during the campaign and after your campaign is complete.

Evaluation Planning Tips:

• Create your evaluation plan before starting implementation
• Decide what to measure to track your progress for each objective – the ideal is to measure the top level outcome you are trying to achieve (greenhouse gas emissions prevented, energy conserved). In addition, it is useful to measure the behavior changes needed to achieve these outcomes (sales of energy-efficient products, car trip miles avoided, people signing a pledge to reduce car trips etc.)  The closer your indicator is to your desired outcome, the better information you will have about how well you are achieving your primary goals.
• Determine if you have baseline data.  If you know where your metrics are before the campaign starts, it becomes much easier to measure change and impact.
  
• Set an evaluation timeline and include a corresponding data collection schedule – e.g., “I want to make this much progress towards this objective by this date.”
• Look for trends in the data and be willing to course correct if the data is pointing you down a different path.

Downloads

To download a copy of this information:

Creating Campaign Work Plan.pdf

Creating Campaign Work Plan.doc