Speaking with Roya Kazemi

I spoke with Roya Kazemi, a behavior change specialist and marketing professional who founded Vision Flourish. She was the first director of GreeNYC, a startup marketing program dedicated to helping the city achieve its ambitious sustainability goals. She’s worked on many marketing strategies to help NYC residents live more sustainably.

My goals for speaking with her were:

1. Crafting messaging and campaign design
2. Identify target audiences — my personal research and conversations have revealed there are many millennials who are eco-minded but don’t know where to start. Are my instincts correct?
3. Should I be using negative consequences or positive motivators?
4. Should I start with benefits (less smelly trash), or education?
5. When people are time conscious, dirty conscious how do you move them?

Ultimately, it was a very helpful 30 minute conversation. I confirmed a lot of my hunches, the direction I was going in (hyping up positivity, social norming, community efforts), etc. I also received some guidance on how to parse out messaging into digestible quantities and takeaways. I especially am happy to find the GreeNYC behavior impact study that delineates my target group and their behaviors. Progress!

Below are my notes:

Messaging Questions:

• Your food is already in your trash. Just put it somewhere else.
• There are lots of things to learn. How to sort organic waste, what’s accepted, where to go. Remembering to go.
• CTA: Find your nearest drop-off. Go to this website.
• Attitude: Positive vs. negative
• Convincing: Start with benefits (less smelly trash), or education?

Who’s my audience:

• Appeals to a small subset of the general public
• Conveniences, financial savings, health benefits
• It’s valid, green minded urban youth who want to be green and aren’t sure what to do. Messaging around the environment to that targeted demographic would be a good step. Look at demographic info for relevant zip codes. Identify what % of the zip codes are where the 18–34 year olds live. How would I reach that group?
• Policy keeps changing — leads to confusion.
• Thinking about driving people to existing resources. Grownyc doesn’t have capacity to handle all those efforts.
• Some actions don’t have obvious benefits, and they can often be waste related. Amotivator to connect with people (going after people who self-identify as responsible, green thinkers) is to focus on social norming, pride. We’re doing this as a community. Showing that’s been achieved in a way that evoked pride. Make it something people want to pitch in on.
• NYC tap water, water bottles that say Idrink NYC tap water (mascot birdie)
• O-power case study, smiley or sad face
• Hotel towels — the wording on the card in the bathroom saying “most guests don’t request to have their towel changed” actually decreases the number of towel changes.
• Hype up how much we collect. LES composts at a rate 10x other neighborhoods, let’s keep that up.
• Take the complexity of the scene and break it up into ways that are easy to understand. Appeal to where people are stuck and what their values are. What are the most common questions and concerns that people would have?
• Make the takeaways really obvious for each of those sections. Don’t go overly technical.
• Prioritization exercise of what to get people to do.
• Are these posters I’m thinking of just a flyer under their door, vs. something that people are just picking up. The context and intention is very different.

Signage

• Simply counting and sharing that data with passerby
• Making it positive
• Showing them where the compost goes
• Showing them how much methane they mitigated

My Target Audience