You’ve probably heard this one before.

“If people just knew about it, then things would change.”

“If people only cared more, things would change.”

Then comes the next bit — “Let’s create a project-startup-campaign-book-documentary-app-NGO-conference-festival to EDUCATE people on this very important issue and get them to CARE more!”

I see it happen over, and over, and over again.

If you are trying to change the world, then it’s likely that you have fallen prey to one of the most prevalent, yet little-known mistakes that thousands of nonprofits, governments, and activists have made before you.

I call it “The Biggest Mistake” and it starts with an innocent and seemingly logical hypothesis: that knowing about a thing, motivates people to do a thing. Most people who are trying to change the world make the mistake of assuming that instilling a new-found knowledge and emotional concern in others, motivates all these concerned citizens to do things that would drive a landslide of change.

“The Biggest Mistake: thinking that knowing about a thing, motivates people to do a thing”

It’s an easy mistake to make, but the hypothesis is wrong. Let me explain why.

​Mistake 1: The Value-Action Gap

​This pesky problem is called The Value-Action Gap. It means that there is very little relationship between educating people on an issue and that education leading to people engage in any behaviors or actions that support your cause.(1)

This phenomenon is easy for behavioral scientists to test. One simple experiment involves getting a group of students to watch a documentary or attend a class about energy efficiency and climate change.

When the students are asked about how they feel about the issue, they claim to be concerned about climate change. The educational efforts are effective in eliciting emotional concern. But when the students were observed for any change in their behavior that would save energy, such as switching off lights, using heaters less, or closing windows, there was no observable effect whatsoever.(2)

No one actually did anything.

The same phenomenon is seen in the purchasing of ethical or sustainable items. Just because someone is concerned or educated about an issue like fair trade wages or pesticides used on cotton, bears little impact on any lifestyle change, purchasing choice, or civic action that person might engage in.(3)

It’s because the intellectual exercise of learning something about the world isn’t a direct door into the gearbox that governs human behavior.

It’s called the Information Deficit Model. You’d think that giving people information can turn a light bulb on in their mind and that their actions are forever guided towards the light to do more good things. But no cigar.

Think of the human psyche as a house with a motivational core that sits at the center like a glowing warm fireplace. There are several doors you can enter to get to that core. Education is one door, but it’s not an efficient door to get there.

The master key to bridging the gap starts with this understanding: a behavior project is an entirely different beast to an education project. We don’t need to educate people in order to change the world, but we do need to get people to change their actions and their habits.

This doesn’t mean that education is not important in a social change campaign. Education is important. But your campaign needs to be targeted primarily around promoting a specific behavior or action — and that involves a totally different design toolbox. It’s using design tools like disclosure of data, feedback loops, psychological rewards, behavior mapping, pledges, social imitation, color, social comparison, leaderboards, storytelling, and identity. There’s a lot to it — so much that I wrote a book about it.

Here’s a template of how I do it in my own projects. It starts with identifying the “God Metric” you want to change, and then the actor you want to influence.

I start with the turquoise box on the left called “First Contact” and ask the question, “How will your audience first see it?”

Then follow this with “What is the cue to get their attention?”

“What data are we working with?”

“What is the specific action we want them to do?”

Then we move into behavior nudges. “How can we nudge this behavior with a social norm, a pledge, a social comparison, or some data feedback?

And to tap into the brain’s reward system (a feature of gamification design) I ask, “How can we reward this behavior with positive feedback such as badges, smiley faces, compliments, or animations?”

And finally, to make sure every action does make a change, we ask the final question “What measurable change happens when the actor does the behavior?”

This process strips the value-action gap out of any project.

My favorite behavior technique that anyone can do easily (and should be doing) is using a pledge — it means just asking someone to write down a promise to do the action. It’s remarkably effective.

When we sign up new members to my latest startup, Energy Lollipop, we ask people to make a commitment to reducing their CO2 emissions by 50 percent in six months. You know what happens? At least half of our new members actually reduce their CO2 by 50 percent in the first week. A high number like that is unheard of. Most energy efficiency campaigns are considered a boon if they get people to reduce by five percent.

That big change we got in real behavior didn’t happen because our users read a book on climate woe or learned to recite the parts per million of carbon dioxide every year since they were born. We got this big change because we started the project thinking like a behavior designer.

Education design vs behavioral design

Let’s look at an example of a project to get people in a large office building to use fewer disposable plastic bottles. If we make the mistake of thinking that education leads to change, we might design an educational strategy like these initiatives on the left.

The Value Action Gap theory indicates that the six educational initiatives on the left will have a weak effect on getting people to change their plastic bottle use habits. Getting people to care isn’t the most important thing in creating change. The behavior initiatives on the right aren’t focused on trying to get people to care. They are focused on getting people to act.

Mistake 2: Effort vs Results

​There’s another mistake that people make when evaluating their involvement in a cause. People conflate the effort they put in with the actual impact they are making on the world that is measurable with a number.

It goes something like this, “I’ve been attending events, talking about this issue to everyone, posting about it on Facebook. I wrote a blog post about it. I painted a banner for the annual protest. I wear a T-shirt about it and read everything I can on the issue.” This person is clearly engaged, and it seems they are putting in regular hours of work trying to change the world. But let’s not confuse all of this effort with results.

Imagine there are a group of people at school who start a committee to reduce waste, but they never consider how to measure how much waste the school creates, or what the waste is made up of. They might design and distribute an educational flyer to students and staff.

Over years, the committee will keep on meeting, keep holding workshops, and keep making flyers, with little-to-no measurable effect on the amount of waste the school creates. This committee may well live in an illusion that because they are putting effort into the cause, the effort is a result in itself. It is not.

The key question to ask is,

“Where is the evidence that your efforts have made a measurable result?”

Ask it of yourself and of any social change project you are involved in. When we’re trying to change the world, all that matters is that we make an impact that is measurable, not in clicks, meetings, or shares, but in real-world data you’ve shifted by the end of the day.

Mistake 3: Ideas first, data second

​It’s common for people to come up with an idea before they investigate the data about their cause. A studio comes with an idea for a game to stop climate change, without looking into the data about the many places carbon dioxide emissions come from. A couple comes up with an idea for an anti-food-waste app, without studying the numbers of where the food waste comes from. An artist comes up with an idea for an art photography project about marine pollution, without studying any research papers about the quantity of plastic in the ocean. Don’t do this.

The problem with coming up with ideas before you research your data, is that it’s possible that the ideas you come up with might have a minimal effect on creating measurable change. You can also become emotionally attached to a not-so-good idea, making it hard to pivot to a better idea that really will work to shift the numbers.

Failing to take a deep dive into the data first up, robs you of profound insights for new ideas that you would not have thought of otherwise. Data will unleash your creativity and help you uncover those extra special ideas that will really push the impact you can have.

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References

1. Kollmuss & Agyeman (2002). Mind the Gap: Why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behavior? Environmental Education Research.
2. Kowalska-Pyzalska, Maciejowska, Suszczy ski, Sznajd-Weron, Weron (2014). Turning green: Agent-based modeling of the adoption of dynamic electricity tariffs. Energy Policy | Gadenne, Sharma, Kerr, Smith (2011). The influence of consumers’ environmental beliefs and attitudes on energy saving behaviours. Energy Policy.
3. Chatzidakis, Hibbert (2007). Why People Don’t Take their Concerns about Fair Trade to the Supermarket: The Role of Neutralisation. Journal of Business Ethics.
4. Boulstridge, Carrigan (2000). Do consumers really care about corporate responsibility? Highlighting the attitude — behaviour gap, Journal of Communication Management.

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