A few people have asked me since my last blog ‘what’s wrong with awareness-raising campaigns?’

I certainly didn’t mean to give the impression that they don’t work – they most certainly do. But my point is that they won’t generally work on their own.

Here’s an example: over the past 12 weeks one of my colleagues and I ran a sustainability challenge to encourage everyone in our office to be more sustainable at home (we’re very good at work – but that’s another blog entry).

emma [at] ideasshop [dot] co [dot] nz (Emma) and I relied solely on raising our colleagues’ awareness of the problem, relying on the assumption “surely if they know there’s a better way, they’ll behave differently”.

The results speak for themselves. While everyone agreed with the sentiments of the challenge, there were varying degrees of participation. Those who were already behaving sustainably did even better; and those who weren’t failed to make long-term changes.

In other words, all we did was motivate the group who were already open to change to do more. The rest agreed but many couldn’t quite make the change.

The psychology of why we behave the way we do is complex – it’s not as simple as ‘raising awareness will change behaviour’ (although there are some exceptions). Many of us are aware of the problem but we all have reasons why we’re an exception to the rule. And that’s why awareness-raising campaigns generally won’t work on their own.

That’s why we need lots of different approaches, all happening at the same time – including awareness-raising campaigns – if we are to see real behaviour change.

It’s also worth noting that agreeing what success looks like at the beginning is vital – how will you know if you’ve been successful without it? But that’s another blog topic…