Community-Based Social Marketing
If you have ever heard the phrase "community based social marketing," you probably know the work of psychologist Doug McKenzie-Mohr. His little book, Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing, and popular listserv are mandatory reading for local and regional environmental planners. Now these materials - articles, cases and listserv threads - are organized for browsing at an online repository. Highly recommended for anyone seeking to, as they say, foster sustainable behavior.
This online book details how to uncover the barriers that inhibit individuals from engaging in sustainable behaviors. Further, it provides a set of "tools" that social science research has demonstrated to be effective in fostering and maintaining behavior change. Each of these tools in and of its own right is capable of having a substantial impact upon the adoption of more sustainable behaviors. Collectively, they provide a powerful set of instruments with which to encourage and maintain behavior change. This online guide also details how to design and evaluate programs. The strategies detailed here, and the methods suggested in order to implement and evaluate them, form the basis of an emerging field that I refer to as "community-based social marketing."
