This week TCC delivered two presentations to the UK Social Marketing Conference, an annual event for those involved in social marketing and behavioral outcomes within public policy to share good practice. As is the custom these days, the event even had its own Twitter hashtag which was #wsmconference, so people could also contribute to it online in real-time.
The TCC contribution was about some of the more challenging areas in the field: Status Dogs and Community Cohesion.
TCC Managing Director David Evans and Justine Pannett of the RSPCA delivered one of the six seminars on ‘My Dog Ain’t no Pussy’ – insight about young urban dog owners. The project sought to understand the key motivations, values and behaviours of young urban dog owners. The project aimed to gain insight into the role that bull breed dogs play in the lives of young people. It is informing the design and delivery of interventions to improve animal welfare in areas that have previously been unreachable. The detailed conclusions of the research has already been blogged about here.
David Evans and Matthew Wood of Brighton University also delivered one of the closing keynote presentations to the entire conference entitled Social marketing engagement to address Big Society challenges. Social Marketing has the opportunity to address new challenges around the Government’s Big Society programme including the new Public Health arrangements and Social Care re-ablement. In particular it can address engagement, to enable new behaviours and social norms to secure greater personal and community involvement and build more social capital and community resilience.
The presentation drew from work in social marketing on community cohesion for the Capital Ambition programme in four London Boroughs and explains how a methodology combining deep insight, psychographic motivational values segmentation, social network mapping, training for staff, the development of lay ‘Community Communicators‘ and a strategy of actions that match communications can be used to address these new challenges. More information is here. The centrepiece of the presentation featured a video about the collaboration between the Police, Council and local ‘Community Communicators‘ to reassure the public following a tragic murder at Thamesmead in Bexley.
David Evans said after the event, “It was very worthwhile to engage with both practitioners and commissioners delivering in this field of work. Social Marketing faces new opportunities in the coming years. This includes creating value for money programmes to improve communications with the public at a very local level, strengthening Civil and Big Society capacity at a time of budget reductions as well as helping deliver the new local government public health agenda.”
Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.