Senior Marketing and Community Engagement Strategist

Cara Gurney is a Senior Marketing and Community Engagement Specialist at the San Francisco Department of the Environment where she has led several successful, envelope-pushing outreach and marketing campaigns for the City. She started in Zero Waste fifteen years ago while working at a local supportive housing non-profit where she designed an environmental education program for formerly homeless residents. Cara holds a Master’s in Environmental Management from USF and BA in Sociology from Earlham College. She lives in Oakland, CA with her wife, Melissa, and enjoys photography and trying to keep up with her 8 year old son, Dylan.

SF’s snail mail campaign, a strategy for engaging apartment residents

SF’s snail mail campaign, a “new” strategy for engaging apartment residents

Every community faces the challenge of connecting directly with apartment dwellers. We often have property manager or owner contact information; yet reaching residents directly in a meaningful way, is difficult. San Francisco accepted the challenge and designed a unique mailing campaign to reach nearly every San Francisco apartment dweller, resulting in huge increases in awareness and usage of existing programs. San Francisco’s Department of the Environment (SFE) will share lessons learned and strategies applicable to any community attempting to reach multi-family residents for participation in zero waste programs.

Program changes in mid-2017 meant the need to communicate with every resident of San Francisco about new accepted materials. During a two-year roll-out of updated curbside collection containers, Recology and SFE collaborated to pilot new outreach methods, targeting the large proportion of multi-family residents.

SFE tested three prototypes with the public to be sure that the mailers would be opened and successful in motivating behavior change. Once deciding on the most well-received design, the mailers went to every door accompanied by a separate message and outreach to property managers.

Pre and post market research revealed some significant successes, including:

• 21% increase in zero waste information awareness
• 10% increase in composting frequency
• 24% increase in bulky item pickup program awareness
• Increase of 300 bulky item pickup appointments per week

Attendees will leave the session inspired to apply the simple tactics to reach their own multi-family communities.

Analyst

Ms. Gibbs has conducted community outreach for recycling programs and participated in social marketing research projects. She has conducted set out surveys and gathered data for assessing participation in recycling programs.  She has strong analytical skills and is currently working on data input for a state collection modeling project. She also spends time updating one of SERA’s large databases including conducting literature reviews.  She has spoken at conferences from Washington state to Idaho to New York and provided public outreach through speaking engagements in New Mexico and other areas.

CLEANING UP THE STREAM –WHAT WORKS AT THE LOCAL LEVEL

Can low-cost social marketing interventions “clean up the recycling stream”?  …Or get people to recycle more?  Two recent projects in suburban Colorado used pre / post / control group methods to explore the effectiveness of a set of social marketing approaches on behaviors in recycling, contamination, and sustainability.

One grant project focused purely on increasing residential recycling, and reducing recycling contamination.  Targeted messaging was informed by a “pre”-waste sort and focus groups with area residents.  The targets were problem materials (including plastic bags), preparation, and wishful recycling.  After several rounds of education, and some prizes and contests in the test area, the post-waste sorts (control and test) allowed examination of changes in disposed and recycled materials.  The “post” survey tested for changes in knowledge and behaviors for target materials. 

The second project included both residential recycling and sustainability behaviors.  Pre-, during-, and post- data were collected on recycling behaviors and energy use.  Pre-surveys were conducted, and collateral for each topic (recycling, water, and energy) was provided in turn.  The collateral directed households to a web survey, and passing the associated quiz or commitment entitled households to prizes.  The pre-, during-, and post- data and a follow-up survey were analyzed for control/test area differences.

Results and costs are presented, along with the collateral and methods used.  We demonstrate the effects that can be obtained from very low-cost efforts – and that some prizes are better than others!   Budget was allocated for follow-ups on both projects to examine retention of behavior changes.