#DONATEDONTDUMP

The Problem

The legal definition of homelessness accounts for situations other than sleeping-rough, incorporating experiences of individuals and families “who are hidden away out of sight but without a home of their own or certainty as to where they will be sleeping in the near future” (Shelter, 2019).

The homelessness crisis in the UK has seen a rise of 13,000 incidences in 2017, with over 300,000 people currently being recorded as homeless, equating to 36 more people facing homelessness every day (BBC News, 2019).  As a result, there is a considerable amount of pressure on local authorities; their duty to rehouse homeless households is becoming increasingly difficult, as the number of people in temporary accommodation waiting for a permanent home in the last 7 years has increased by 43%, with the term ‘temporary’ being meaningless due to 35% of households still remaining in temporary arrangements for a year (Shelter, 2017).

Despite this knowledge of the problem of homelessness in the UK, plenty of people still continue to waste food and throw away clothes rather than recycling them for others who need them. In 2016, UK households disposed 300,000 tonnes of clothing (Smithers, 2019). In 2015, the UK threw away 7.3 million tonnes of food, and of this food thrown away, 4.4 million tonnes was deemed to be "avoidable" waste. An average UK household wasted £470 worth of food which could have been put to use and eaten but instead was thrown away (Smithers, 2019).

In response to this, our intervention focuses on aiming to persuade the University of Warwick students to donate to LWS Night Shelter in Leamington Spa. With 101 different guest through the door of the night shelter since the start of this year, we believe this is a big issue in our local area and thus it is important to tackle. Due to these shocking figures concerning the waste of food and clothing in the UK, it is important to raise awareness about the more productive and proactive ways in which such items can go to better use and help homeless people who would be grateful to receive them.  We aimed to raise awareness of this issue, as well as advertising small actions to help, in order to make a change and support the LWS Night Shelter.

Target Audience

Our intervention was aimed at students at the University of Warwick. Young adults under 25 years old are most susceptible to persuasion and behaviour change (Krosnick, 1989), and thus we hoped that by targeting this age range we would be successful in our intervention. As university students are known to be heavy users of social media (Lau, 2017), we placed a large emphasis on social media in our intervention.

Our Intervention

In order to implement various acts to support charities in their work to help those who are either homeless or facing homelessness, we began our intervention with a poll on each of our Instagram accounts, hoping to engage our target audience of students, asking “do you see homelessness as a big problem in the UK?”, “do you wish you could do something to help homeless people in the UK?” and “are you interested in taking part in our food and clothes collection for Leamington Night Shelter?”. The purpose of this was to engage our audience and evoke personal reflection and consideration of the homeless. Cialdini (2007) proposed commitment as a principle of persuasion arguing that people like to be consistent in their decisions and because of this, getting a consumer to make a small initial commitment can decrease their resistance to change. We hoped that getting our audience to agree that homelessness was a big issue would make them more likely to donate.

Petty & Cacioppo’s (1986) Elaboration-likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion was incorporated in our intervention. The ELM is a dual processing theory that argues that there are two different routes to persuasion; the peripheral and central route. The central route to persuasion is dependent on the persuasive message content and quality (Petty & Cacioppo 1983). The central route is favoured when the message is personally relevant to the agent and there is high motivation.  Peripheral route processes, on the other hand, do not involve elaboration of the message through cognitive processing. It is a mental shortcut which judges a message based on its external cues and not the content of the message itself.

To spread awareness of our intervention, we put up posters around campus and Leamington Spa advertising the food and clothes collection for the LWS Night Shelter.

Our poster was designed to persuade via the peripheral route of processing.  Although the topic of homelessness is important we took into account that our target audience of university students may not find the matter personally relevant to them and so would probably not be willing to exert a high amount of effort to elaborate on a message regarding it – especially as they are cognitive misers (Stanovich, 2009) who have a preference for reducing mental effort. To do this, we made our poster visually attractive and colourful. We used a black background with red and green contrasting text as studies have shown that those colours attract the most attention (Firdaus & Zukjufky, 2014).

Research shows that consumers are more likely to respond to a persuasive message in a peripheral manner if they are hurried or stressed, or if the product or issue has little importance to their personal lives (Petty & Cacioppo 1983). We noted that our target audience of university students are not likely to have the time to stop and read highly informative and complex posters. Because of this, we decided simplistic posters with a straight to the point message would be more impactful.

A Facebook event was also created. This platform was used to provide all information on our behaviour change implementation, including more communication regarding the issue of homelessness. This page focused on the central route to persuasion. On this page, we included more information on the cause including statistics to strengthen our message, as well as the exact steps our audience needed to take to contribute to the collection. A list was provided of most needed items by the night shelter. This may have increased the likelihood of people donating due to the ease provided by exact items, which takes away some effort of people deciding what to donate. We believed Facebook was an appropriate platform for our main source of information as it is the most used social media platform by university students (Cheung, Chiu & Lee, 2011).

The fact that out intervention appeals to both routes of persuasion in different ways increases the chance of there being a long-lasting behavioural change. Research has shown that although attitudes formed through the peripheral route may be created in a shorter time they are very temporary and not highly predictive of behaviour (Petty & Cacioppo 1983).

In our polls on Instagram, poster, Facebook event and Facebook posts, we used the hashtag “#DONATEDONTDUMP”. The mere exposure effect suggests that repeated exposure to a stimulus enhances an individuals attitude towards it (Zajonc, 1968). Thus by repeatedly using this hashtag, we hoped that the increased familiarity would lead to more favourable perceptions of the idea and an increased likelihood of our audience complying.

Once we were satisfied with the number of people aware of our intervention, we conducted the collection and delivered the items to the LWS Night Shelter. We collected the items from donors’ houses directly, reducing the effort needed from them.

Discussion

The polls on Instagram had high rates of interaction, with around 350 votes in total across our three Instagram accounts. A high percentage of people saw homelessness as an issue and wished they could do something to help, however slightly fewer people were interested in actually taking part in our donation. This drop in percentage may have been due to the fact many of those viewing the poll were not from Leamington Spa so it was not actually possible for them to take part in the donation.

The poster incorporated many ideas supporting behaviour change, but unfortunately, it was put up around campus on the same week as elections were carried out. This meant that it was surrounded by or covered by many other posters and thus probably did not have the desired effect. It is also difficult to directly measure how successful the posters were at implementing behaviour change.

The Facebook event also gained relatively high levels of interaction, with 15 people clicking ‘going’ and 15 people clicking ‘interested’ in the collection, having followed the link to the event through accessing our profiles, prompted by the Instagram polls.

In total, we went to 10 houses in Leamington Spa and received donations of food, clothes and shoes for the LWS Night Shelter. To measure the long term effects of our intervention, we gave those who donated more information about how they could donate again in the future, as well as a questionnaire asking “are you more likely to donate to LWS Night Shelter in the future?” 100% of donors said that yes they are, suggesting our intervention was successful at implementing behaviour change on a small scale.

Future Work

In order to see if our intervention has long-lasting effects, it would be interesting to find out if those who donated to the cause through us have continued to donate in the future, or whether their attitudes have changed towards the homeless in terms of having more empathy for their situation, and offering more consideration of the little things everyone can do to make a difference. Further polls and questionnaires could be distributed investigating these possibilities.

References

BBC News. (2019). Homeless population 'rises to 320,000'. [online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-46289259 [Accessed 10 Feb. 2019].

Cialdini, R. B., & Cialdini, R. B. (2007). Influence: The psychology of persuasion (pp. 173-174). New York: Collins.

Krosnick, J. A., & Alwin, D. F. (1989). Aging and susceptibility to attitude change. Journal of personality and social psychology, 57(3), 416.

Cheung, C. M., Chiu, P. Y., & Lee, M. K. (2011). Online social networks: Why do students use facebook?. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(4), 1337-1343.

Lau, W. W. (2017). Effects of social media usage and social media multitasking on the academic performance of university students. Computers in human behaviour, 68, 286-291.

Petty, R., Cacioppo, J. and Schumann, D. (1983). Central and Peripheral Routes to Advertising Effectiveness: The Moderating Role of Involvement. Journal of Consumer Research, 10(2), 135.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In L.Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology. (Vol. 19, pp. 123-205). New York: Academic Press.

                                           

Shelter England. (2019). Donate to Shelter. [online] Available at: https://england.shelter.org.uk/donate?reserved_appeal_code=20180401-DF-10&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&gclid=Cj0KCQiAtP_iBRDGARIsAEWJA8hTcIrUL99Iz59Vp33lOQJ36A2jqZF5VADuI3SfcsTVs1MgwxE_t4QaAtA0EALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds [Accessed 10 Feb. 2019].

Smithers, R. (2019). UK households binned 300,000 tonnes of clothing in 2016. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/11/uk-households-binned-300000-tonnes-of-clothing-in-2016 [Accessed 4 Mar. 2019].

Smithers, R. (2019). UK throwing away £13bn of food each year, latest figures show. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/10/uk-throwing-away-13bn-of-food-each-year-latest-figures-show [Accessed 4 Mar. 2019].

Stanovich, K.E. (2009). What intelligence tests miss: The psychology of rational thought. New Haven: Yale University Press.

                                           

Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of personality and social psychology, 9(2p2), 1.

Zulkifly, H. Z., & Firdaus, N. (2014). Persuasion and the online consumers: Investigating copywriting strategies in native advertisements. International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, 4(6), 430.