Waste Aware North East Limited

Working Together

DEFRA – Rewards and Recognition

• Timing• 2 Phases – December 2011 to July 2012• November 2012 to September 2013 • Funding• DEFRA• Valpak• SIG Combibloc• LAs: Durham, Newcastle, Northumberland, South

Tyneside and Sunderland (SAICA)

Objectives

• Could we pull together partners with different collection facilities, different commodities collected and different demographics to create a successful cohesive campaign for the benefit of all?

• Could we influence behaviour on a large scale by working together?

• Could we gain some recognition as a region, rather than as individual household waste collection bodies?

Objectives

• Could we increase recycling tonnage by 5-10% from the baseline?

• Could we raise awareness more generally about the merits of recycling and specific commodities, regardless of participation in the rewards campaign?

• Could we increase recycling of goods for which collection facilities are available, but under-utilised?

• To reward residents who recycle the highlighted commodities.

Achievements• Proved that collaborative working is possible• Economies of scale achieved• Cross boundary campaigns can work• Education regarding aerosols and collection facilities for other

specific commodities• Positive feedback from residents• 15,000 residents signed up (2.28%) but a greater number will

have seen the communications, making them aware of local facilities/collection services.

• Increased recycling tonnage by 6.1% compared to periods before the campaigns.

• 95 winners received prizes of £250

Activities

Schools (Not Northumberland)£500 prize per authority per term (3 terms) Calypso offered free drinks to pupilsAssembly presentationSchool leaflet designedData inputSchools emails/extranet/headteachers meetings

Supermarkets/BusinessesContacts/helpPop up stands PR – WANE/Valpak

ResidentsCampaign websiteCampaign Facebook and TwitterPR – Council - Comms plan to includeCouncil web sitesCouncil Facebook and TwitterPop up stands – alternative placementsStaff emailsLarge employer emailsCouncil publicationsChristmas plansLocal PR re-launchCouncil Housing providerCouncil plasma screens

Durham Ph 2 Competition Entries

Sunderland Ph 2 Competition Entries

Total Registrations

CouncilTotal Registrations to Date

Durham 3,297

Gateshead 1,362

Newcastle 2,409

Northumberland 2,444

South Tyneside 2,180

Sunderland 3,137

Total 14,829

Lessons learnedIn Phase 1 the awareness-raising relied mainly on the following methods:• Agripa panels on recycling vehicles• Council websites• Council magazines• Council communications via other waste services eg garden waste calendars

etc.• Traditional press advertising and editorial• Social media advertising including Facebook, Twitter etc• In Phase 2 the above activities were supplemented with more focus on face to face engagement such as:• Supermarket roadshows• Business roadshows• Community roadshows• School visits.

Engagement• Phase 1 - 5,938 registrations - equivalent of 742 registrations per month• Methods of engagement were considered to see if this could be improved.

– Relying on people seeing an advert for the scheme, then proactively remember the contact details and go online or ring the telephone number to register was not addressing the immediacy needed, (although social media did allow for this).

• 2nd phase looked at ways of doing more face to face engagement, giving participants the chance to fill in their details and take away sticker sheets there and then, enabling them to start taking part immediately. – Roadshows in supermarkets, a regional lifestyle show and stands in large businesses, such

as call centres with a large footfall. • Staff were on hand to engage with people, telling them about the campaign, taking

their name and address details then providing them with a sheet of stickers to take away with them and start using immediately. This also allowed an opportunity to talk to people about any general recycling issues they may have had, correct errors and dispel myths.

• Result – Phase 2 - 8,891 registrations –equivalent to 808 registrations per month.

3,977 (45%) of these came through face to face engagement.

Compositional Analysis

• Similar recycling compositional analysis was carried out at the beginning and end of the campaign

• Additional analysis of residual waste would have been useful. – This would have shown whether items not being recycled

were being discarded with residual waste, or whether there were none to be discarded at all.

– Have buying trends changed?• It would also have been useful to select different socio-

demographic addresses to analyse, rather than a random sample and delve deeper into residents’ behaviours

Schools

• The number of schools signing up for the scheme was initially dependent upon Council staff making introductions, promoting and endorsing the scheme.

• Some Councils had specific staff working with schools which resulted in more schools being contacted personally and signing up to the scheme.

External Project Manager• There is no longer the LA internal resource available to project

manage a campaign of this size and complexity with many partners. Utilising an external project manager allowed more focus to be given to running a campaign with a large number of potential residents spread across many councils, for more than 2 years.

• If individual Councils had run a similar campaign on a smaller scale, they would have had to employ/allocate someone part-time to manage it. – Costly– Lost outsider’s view– Cross region not possible– Difficult to take on many aspects of different ways of working.

Possible and beneficial to work as partnership

• Even with differing collection services, it has been proved that several Councils can work together to benefit from economies of scale. This scheme showed that there were enough elements of similarity to promote a scheme, albeit with slight differences in artwork, website banners etc.

Economies of scale

• Buying in greater quantities (eg sticker sheets, school leaflets, pull up stands, Agripa panels) was possible by working together.

• Working individually would not have meant simply a 5th of the costs, as discounts were available because of the quantities ordered.

Commitment from Partners

• Asking for a defined level of commitment from Council partners as a pre-cursor to being part of the campaign would have been useful. This should have included "buy-in" and project input from communications staff from the outset and a defined amount of time/exposure agreed.

• Joined up thinking from a whole Local Authority, and not just waste management, identifying the potential impact on recycling tonnage for each family that signed up and the resultant savings in landfill tax and gate fees, for example, could have been more than offset against communication spend.

Commodity choice

• Even though we believe behaviour has changed and residents are now recycling aerosols, the tonnage of this is negligible.

• In addition to the recycling compositional analysis, a residual waste composition analysis to find out which commodities are lost would be useful and the carbon impact measured rather than tonnage. Plastic bottles would also be better measured using the carbon impact criteria

Reward Value

• Lower value – Higher impact?• Each Council had a monthly prize to the value of £250 for 1 resident.

Initially considered to be a significant enough amount to make people want to enter the competition., Survey indicates that, whilst an incentive was welcomed, it was not the most significant factor. If this had been reduced to 5 prizes @ £50 there would have been 5 times as many people telling their friends and family.

• As the largest barrier to the success of this scheme was the low number of registrations, it would have been great to have been able to test this theory. As all promotion was based around the opportunity to win a prize worth £250 this was not possible within this scheme, but may be worth considering for any subsequent reward scheme.

Prizes/Partnership/Choice

• Giving winners a choice of anything from a particular website (www.thehut.com) was very time consuming to coordinate. A lot of time was taken up by managing the orders, deliveries, out of stock items etc. Taking away this choice and giving £50 vouchers which could have been bought in advance, potentially with a discount would have saved time and therefore costs.

• Partnership with a supermarket (spending £24,000 on prizes) would have given an option of presence in all local branches, potentially used their communication channels too, tying our marketing to their existing marketing.

Winners as ambassadors

• Anecdotal and survey information indicates that people respond better to word of mouth than reading something.

• Useful to utilise winners or participants as ambassadors for the scheme to pass on sheets of stickers to distribute to friends with further incentives available if those friends registered .

• Facebook went some way to do this with “recommend a friend”.

• Logistically not possible.

Opt in/Opt out

• This scheme required people to opt-in after seeing or hearing about the scheme. As raising awareness was very difficult, an alternative view would have been to focus on a smaller geographic area and deliver details of the campaign along with stickers ready to use, perhaps printed with a postcode and house number.

• This arguably may have had a greater impact than asking people to opt in. This was initially considered to be a potential waste of more expensive stickers and other paper due to the number of people who would not engage with the competition and throw away the pack, but this could have been offset against the potential greater success of the scheme and resultant increase in recycling of targeted commodities.

What Next?

• The traditional methods of in-house campaign management are not necessarily the most cost effective. Sub-contracting specific campaigns, or elements of a campaign to a focussed project manager can be more effective. WANE have a team of experienced road-show/public engagement staff, in addition to project management staff.

• There is an option to build upon experience gained in this campaign to achieve your waste management goals. That may be in a smaller more highly concentrated way (entire Council area or smaller targetted area) or as a region/part region again.