Audience: Environmental 'Base'

Consider the range of motivations that bring people to climate protests when designing events and outreach. Interviews with 64 attendees at the September, 2019 climate strikes in Europe and North America revealed a great deal of variation in their knowledge levels, emotions and motivations. A surprising number were not very knowledgeable about climate change, only half had been involved in previous climate protests before, and a substantial minority were motivated by a general sense of solidarity and desire to be part of a protest movement, and not necessarily specific concern about climate. Among a diversity of emotions regarding climate change, fear and hope were the most common. The authors therefore developed a typology of climate protestors: Frontline, Responsible, Latent, Disengaged, Opportunistic, Parallel, and Sceptical.
 

From June 2018-May 2019, PennEnvironment conducted a test on how personal phone contact (when layered on top of email and SMS contact) affects volunteer recruitment rates with the goal of maximizing staff time efficiency. In particular, they were interested in finding their organization’s break-even point in which their traditional model of personal phone contacts (which is effective, though time-consuming) is matched by digital-only contact (which yields participation, though at lower rates). With a subject pool of 37794 individuals drawn from inactive past supporters and newly recruited volunteers, which were then randomly selected into one of the two experimental groups, PennEnvironment found that the base rate for volunteer sign-ups from electronic contact was 0.002 shifts per contact sent. Layering in phone contact increased this rate to 0.3 additional shifts per call.

Negative framing consistently outperformed positive framing in email and on Facebook in motivating supporters to take action as part of a campaign around San Diego’s utility agreement.

While previous research has led to significant progress in our understanding of how to effectively communicate the existence and seriousness of climate change—and how to motivate people to behave in ways that help mitigate it—relatively little research has investigated the factors that lead to enduring change. This paper highlights three promising areas of research that can inform efforts to answer the question of how to generate enduring change—deep engagement, general mental models, and social norms—and proposes a research agenda aimed at generating enduring motivation to act on climate change.