Changing behaviour – takes a long time?

In an interesting post by Tom Watson on the Dummyspit blog, he writes about the difficulty of changing behaviour through PR campaigns – in this case to encourage better eating habits in UK schools (staying away from hamburgers for example). He also notes the rather depressing statistic that PR campaigns normally have only a 0.04% success rate of changing behaviour! In setting campaign objectives, I encourage organisations to be realistic about the targets they set – for example, a modest 2 – 10% behaviour change for public health campaigns is cited as being a realistic target (Rice & Paisley 1982).

But before you abandon your PR activities in despair, we have to be clear about what we define as “behaviour change”. Changing eating habits is a long-term behaviour change. PR campaigns often focus on trying to change long term behaviour and don’t consider setting goals in terms of immediate responses – what can people be expected to do when reached by the campaign? In PR terminology this is called “outtakes” (different from long-term behaviour which would be “outcomes”).

Following are some practical examples of “outtakes” or immediate responses (which are short term behaviours) that can be measured. I believe that the percentage of change desired amongst a target audience can can be set at higher than 10% for many of these:

- % of people that sign a petition
- % of people that refer a web page to a friend
- % people that go online to participate in an online discussion
- % of organisations/individuals that publicly support a campaign
- % of people who report undertaking a new initiative as a result of a campaign

Glenn

Output or outcome?

I did appreciate the following quote from Alberto Gonzales, US Attorney General who when defending the work of his department said:

“Good, if you look at the output”

Regardless of what you think of Mr Gonzales and his department’s performance, I find it interesting the use of the word output – it has sneaked in from management-by-objective speak… but output is usually a poor measure for performance, as it represents the products or services produced. It is just like..

A press officer judges her performance by the number of press releases she writes
A training office judges his performance by the number of people that attends his training sessions

What is far more important are outcomes – the effects and changes that are a result of the outputs:

A press officer should judge her performance by how her press activities change the knowledge and attitudes of audiences
A training officer should judge his performance by how the people he trains uses what they have learnt

Like Mr Gonzales, most people prefer to look at outputs to judge performance as they are much easier to control and monitor compared to outcomes, which I’ve written about previously. But increasingly activities are assessed on what they achieve (outcome) rather than what they produce (output).

Glenn