Category: Environment

The aroma of red Sandia chile peppers slapped me across the face as I filed into the greenhouse. Looking around, many of the same hands I’d seen swatting at bugs above the muddy Acequias earlier today were now covering noses, attempting to tolerate the sweltering heat while marveling at the expanse of tables layered with drying peppers. Gratitude swept over me for the love of spice, the opportunity to learn about the Urban Greening and environmental justice movements and plant the seed of storytelling.

Empowering Grassroots Organizations

This year, the Bezos Earth Fund (the Earth Fund) launched the Greening America’s Cities (GAC) initiative, which will award $400M to 30 community environmental justice organizations through 2030. Recognizing that grassroots organizations have expert knowledge of their communities, GAC provides funding to organizations in Albuquerque, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and Wilmington, Del. Beyond financial support, GAC is building a network to connect these organizations. It aims to empower them with resources and tools to further their missions. GAC engaged Fenton to help these organizations tell their stories, leading a digital storytelling training during its Fall 2024 Greening Convening.

Understanding the Urban Greening Movement

As the location of the Fall 2024 Greening Convening, Albuquerque, New Mexico, is one of many cities across the country experiencing “green deserts,” or a lack of access to green spaces like public parks or community gardens resulting from historic underinvestment, environmental degradation and systemic racism. During the opening plenary, GAC’s lineup of speakers helped contextualize this challenge, including President and Earth Fund CEO Sir Andrew Steer, who highlighted our need for nature. Many studies connect physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being to the outdoors. Improving city dwellers’ health can unlock 20-25 billion years of higher quality life; that’s five extra years for each urban resident, according to the McKinsey Health Institute.

Following the plenary, I was privileged to tour urban farms and educational and cultural centers to learn about the work of these organizations and explore the deeper purpose of the Urban Greening movement. Intertwined in this movement are calls for environmental justice, the reclamation of public land and the liberation of historically oppressed communities. As the future of the Environmental Protection Agency is uncertain and we prepare for rollbacks of already insufficient protections, maintaining momentum for the Urban Greening movement is more imperative.

Digital Storytelling as a Tool for Change

In two sessions with over 60 grantee leaders, we highlighted that digital storytelling is a necessity in today’s social media landscape and an effective method to convey the importance of Urban Greening. Effectively leveraging storytelling on social media can expand an organization’s reach, whether to policymakers, potential donors or the Urban Greening community nationwide. Digital storytelling can also:

Humanize complex information: Stories that distill jargon, center people and use empathy can build understanding of issues.
Drive awareness of key issues: Good stories command attention, especially when they engage our senses.
Build relationships and grow communities: Stories can generate brand awareness and encourage call-to-action engagement.
Showcase organizational impact: You are the protagonist! Stories can inspire hope, and action, and generate momentum within your movement.

Compelling stories lead with emotion, use an authentic tone that will resonate with audiences and follow a simple structure. They must include arresting visual images or videos and fit the unique needs of each platform.

Digital storytelling doesn’t stop after you hit “post.” Community management is crucial for movement-building. During our training sessions, we stressed the importance of building time daily to scroll your feed. Liking, commenting and engaging with your peers and fellow changemakers expands the reach of your movement’s message and harnesses social media algorithms. Equally important is monitoring how your stories perform. Are specific messages going viral while others haven’t received a single like? Trial and error is a key part of our day-to-day as digital storytellers, and each post tells its own story for how you can improve your strategy and content.

Carton Council of North America (CCNA) is an industry organization committed to growing carton recycling in the U.S. When CCNA first started, only 18% of U.S. households had access to carton recycling. Now 62% of households – more than 78 million – can recycle their cartons via local recycling programs. Despite a significant increase in U.S. households’ access to carton recycling, many families are still unsure whether they can recycle their cartons.

In 2023, Fenton partnered with CCNA to facilitate two message tests to deepen our understanding of consumer behaviors and attitudes toward carton recycling. Online focus groups that surveyed consumers who live in areas where carton recycling is accessible were used to determine the most effective messaging for increasing consumers’ likelihood of recycling and their trust in recycling centers and systems.

Some of the findings from these message tests surprised us. For example, we know from our many years working on elections that social pressure is incredibly effective for moving voters. However, we learned through these tests that the opposite is true when moving consumers to recycle their cartons.

We learned this through our first test, which sought to determine the most effective messaging in increasing audiences’ favorability towards carton recycling. The tested messaging was developed using consumer research studies, which indicated that an emphasis on the simplicity of recycling and the social pressure to recycle are key behavioral insights and motivators for consumers to recycle their cartons.

The results of this initial message test indicated a clear winner. The “simplicity” message, emphasizing the ease of recycling, increased audiences’ favorability towards carton recycling more effectively than the “social pressure” message, which encouraged audiences to recycle because everyone else around them is, too.

Additionally, this test indicated a general distrust of recycling systems from consumers, with several survey responses sharing disbelief that carton recycling is effective or that cartons are recycled once picked up.

We developed a second message test to determine the most effective messaging in increasing audiences’ trust in recycling centers and systems to address consumers’ indicated barriers to carton recycling.

We developed the two messages for this second test using insights from our first test, including consumers’ preference for messages of simplicity or the ease of recycling and the fact that many consumers reported not being aware of how carton recycling works. Our hunch was that by clearly showing either 1. how cartons are easily transformed into everyday products or 2. how carton recycling works, we would see a shift or increase in the trust consumers reported towards recycling systems.

This test indicated the importance of educating consumers on the carton recycling process and that this awareness correlated with increased trust in existing recycling systems. Ultimately, the second video “How Carton Recycling Works” which explained the process of recycling cartons, was the most effective for increasing consumers’ trust in recycling centers and systems.

Both message tests generated statistically significant results, at a 90%+ confidence level, with a majority of positive responses from all the videos used in both tests across potential (those who don’t currently recycle but likely could) and current carton recyclers. They each provided key insights and learnings that Fenton has successfully utilized to inform our strategy for growing the movement of avid carton recyclers, including:

Audiences are eager to understand the process of carton recycling and when consumers are educated on this process, they are more likely to trust and participate in recycling their cartons.
Emphasizing the simplicity and ease of carton recycling is essential for increasing consumers’ likelihood to recycle their cartons.
Explaining the intricacies of carton recycling increases trust across the board, especially among those who never recycle or dispose of cartons in the trash.

Lastly, we learned that testing and online focus groups continue to provide insightful findings on the messaging that moves target audiences.

Environment

A Story is a Seed: Weaving Narratives of Environmental Justice and Urban Greening

The Power of Message Testing: Crafting Effective Messaging to Boost Consumer Carton Recycling Habits