With the “Designing for Behaviour Change” project scaling4good is scrutinizing the behaviour change topic. This is the first blog of a series on this topic.
Changemakers: the “Designing for Behaviour Change” project is for you!
Changemakers: this is for you! But, who are the Changemakers? A Changemaker is a person that does not only dream of improving the life and well-being of people and other living beings but is actively working towards turning her or his vision into reality.
People caring for the “common good” and driving social change – the Changemakers – used to be our policymakers, activists, scientists or educators. Nowadays however, you don’t need to become the new Mandela, join Greenpeace or become a professor to make a difference.
There are numerous new paths to change the world: many Changemakers found startups and social businesses (like those supported by the Impact HUB, Ashoka or the Echoing Green networks) or are intrapreneurs, revolutionizing existing organizations from “within” (like those of the League of Intrapreneurs).
Everyone can be a Changemaker. Not only professionals with many years of experience are making a difference. Today – thanks to the internet and the accessibility of knowledge and technologies – many young passionate people are coming up with new ways to solve the challenges of the world and shape the future even before finishing their formal education. The global Ocean Cleanup initiative was started by an 18 year old, also the numerous projects catalyzed by the Global Changemakers or Euforia are great examples of the young generation taking action.
Are you a Changemaker? Would you like to be one? Or do you know Changemakers? Then the scaling4good “Designing for Behaviour Change” project is exactly for you and your peers.
My name is Majka Baur and when I co-founded the social business WeAct in 2011 I struggled to find out how to engage people in changing their behaviour for sustainability. Our team did learn-by-doing, but today I know that we could have been much more effective. I recently joined the scaling4good team and would love to share my experience and that of many behaviour change experts I met and keep meeting with you. I’m looking forward to connecting and explore whether I can support you on your own journey.
Why does behaviour change matter to changemakers?
As a Changemaker your heart is on fire for a cause. You apply yourself fully to find ways to improve the life of people, protect and regenerate the environment. To achieve your goals you start or join an organization, find resources and identify your unique way to address a challenge by developing a service or a product – a lever for change.
You can care about promoting freedom by fighting slavery in supply chains (Made in a Free World), promote gender equality through information (GirlsGlobe) or reducing CO2 emissions from food by providing reliable data to consumers and working with canteens (Eaternity).
Independent of what you do at some point you will have to catch the attention of your target audience, raise awareness and may want to motivate people to take action – be it sharing your facebook post, use your app or switching off the lights.
Through every interaction with you, your services and products, you aim at changing the way your users, clients or readers see the world and how they respond to it compared to what they knew before meeting you. You want to trigger new thoughts, discussions, but also concrete actions. You want them to change.
No need for magical powers to support behaviour change: it is a science
As you may already have experienced, the interaction with your target audience may go totally wrong: nobody shares your post; despite the great design of the app after a few days most people stop using it; and the lights keep burning despite your poster on the wall.
It can be frustrating to see that regardless of your effort, people still “don’t get it”. Sometimes you may feel that supporting people to change their behaviour is a “mission impossible” that can only be achieved by using magical powers.
If you don’t have magic skills don’t worry, there are some good news for you. There is a lot of high-quality research about how the mind and behaviour of people work. In the last few decades new disciplines, like behavioural economics or positive psychology, as well as some striking books like “Think, fast and Slow” or “The Tipping Point”, came out.
Furthermore many applied scientists and professionals developed strategies and frameworks that can be used by Changemakers to understand their target audience and design effective solutions. There are tools widely applied in the startup scene, like “The Lean Startup”, “Value Proposition Design”, and approaches helping to understand how to design for behaviour change, like “Switch”, “The Power of Habit” or the “Tiny Steps” method.
Become a Behaviour Change Designer
There is a lot of good information and reading out there. But what if you don’t have the time to read all of it, as your organization is running and has the urge to have an impact now? And even if you start reading, which strategy should you choose to design your solution? How will all pieces come together?
Right now designing a service that will be used by your target audience to address the problem you care about may feel like entering a jungle with a machete. Opening up a way to come forward will be quite a fight and may cost you a lot of energy and time.
With the “Designing for Behaviour Change” project, we aim at providing you directions, tools and resources in order to learn how to find your own path in the jungle – be it by taking a boat along the river or learning to climb on trees.
We will develop a compact e-book for Changemakers, with a step-by-step guideline on how to design services and products to support behaviour change. During the development of the e-book, we will interview several experts with scientific and practical experience and will share lighthouse examples and common pitfalls on blog posts.
Join our community of Changemakers!
The next Blog post will be about: “What is behaviour?”. Stay tuned by signing up to our Newsletter.