Community-Based Social Marketing (CBSM)
Introduction and Purpose
Community-Based Social Marketing (CBSM), McKenzie-Mohr (2014) presents a 5-step behaviour change approach, which blends social marketing principles with the psychology of behaviour change. The method directs attention to practical actions and everyday practices, identifying barriers and benefits to behaviour within a specific community and designing targeted interventions that make sustainable choices easy, convenient and rewarding. CBSM relies on direct engagement, local participation and continuous feedback, ensuring that behavioural shifts are both practical and socially supported.
CBSM has been used in a range of contexts to promote pro-biodiversity behaviour. Key to this approach is selecting impactful behaviours such as planting wildflowers, reducing single-use plastic, reducing energy use, participating in biodiversity events, etc., which feed into the organisation's overall mission. Case studies are presented on Doug McKenzie-Mohr’s CBSM website.
Examples include:
Seattle Children’s Hospital used CBSM to increase the number of employees who share lifts to reduce car use.
AT&T implemented a successful teleworking initiative to reduce the need for employees to travel to the office, whilst enhancing productivity and job satisfaction, using CBSM.
Virgin Atlantic increased the fuel efficiency of air travel through CBSM.
Key Features
Timeframe:
- A CBSM could take between 3 months and 1 year+ to run, depending on the size of the organisation, the number of employees to be engaged, and the behaviour promoted.
Materials Required:
- Guidelines, policy, procedures and incentives for participation
- Internal communication platform, including feedback channels
- Survey tools (e.g. SurveyMonkey)
- Focus group prompts
- Ethical consent forms and participant information sheets for any data collected, to ensure informed and voluntary participation
- Behaviour observation checklist
- Analysis software (e.g. NVivo, Excel)
- Presentation software (e.g. PowerPoint)
- Monitoring software (e.g. Teramind, Hubstaff)
- Forms/pledge cards, etc. to indicate commitment to behaviour
- Prompts (e.g. stickers, notices)
- Success stories/leaderboards/videos etc to communicate norms
- Budget to deliver the programme
- Posters, flyers, newsletters, social media, press releases, etc. to externally promote the initiative
- For any data collected with people, ethical consent forms and participant information sheets to ensure informed and voluntary participation
Skills Required:
- Project management and leadership – to plan, coordinate, and oversee the design and implementation of the CBSM programme, ensuring objectives, timelines, and resources are effectively managed.
- Research – to collect, analyse, and interpret qualitative and quantitative data, conduct literature reviews, and produce clear and evidence-based reports.
- Financial and budgeting – to undertake cost–benefit analysis, allocate resources efficiently, and monitor expenditure throughout the CBSM programme.
- Interpersonal and communication – to promote the CBSM initiative and target behaviours, engage employees, build commitment, facilitate open dialogue and feedback, and communicate progress across the organisation.
Potential Impact:
- Enhanced protection and restoration of biodiversity through measurable improvements in habitats, species presence, and ecological management practices linked to organisational activities.
- Transformation of employee behaviours towards consistently pro-biodiversity actions that are maintained over time and embedded into everyday workplace routines.
- Development of a strong organisational culture of environmental responsibility, where sustainable practices become social norms shared across teams and departments.
- Positive spillover effects as employees extend pro-biodiversity and sustainable behaviours beyond the workplace into their homes and communities.
- Increased employee empowerment, enabling individuals to take initiative, contribute ideas, and act with greater confidence in support of biodiversity-related goals.
- Improved staff morale, productivity and collegiality, resulting from shared purpose, collaboration, and visible organisational commitment to environmental values.
- Strengthened Environmental, Social and Governance performance, demonstrated through improved reporting metrics, compliance, and stakeholder engagement.
- Enhanced internal and external reputation of the business as a responsible and forward-looking organisation that actively supports biodiversity and sustainability.
Instructions
To implement CBSM within an organisation, use the following steps as a guide:
Select the behaviour to be promoted
- No behaviour on the list should be reducible to more specific behaviours, i.e. each behaviour identified should already be at its most specific, actionable level. For example, composting food waste in the office is specific, while reducing waste could be broken down into several separate actions such as recycling glass, avoiding single-use packaging, or buying in bulk.
- Each behaviour on your list should be an “end-state behaviour” (e.g. planting a wildflowers meadow is an end-state behaviour, whereas supporting biodiversity is a general goal).
- Compare these behaviours to one another to work out which are worth promoting. Base the comparison on:
- How much impact will the activity have?
- How likely is it that my target audience to engage in the action?
Identify the barriers and benefits of the behaviour by:
- Reviewing relevant articles, reports and case studies to understand existing evidence on what enables or constrains the behaviour in similar contexts
- Gathering qualitative insights through focus groups or informal observations to explore how the target audience perceives the behaviour, including their motivations, challenges and everyday routines.
- Conducting a survey with a representative sample of staff to quantify key patterns, test assumptions and identify which barriers or benefits are most influential across the group.
- Seeking ethical approval for any data collection involving staff participation – consult a relevant ethics expert or knowledgeable colleague to ensure confidentiality, informed consent, and responsible use of findings.
Develop a strategy to address the barriers and promote the benefits through tools such as:
- Public commitment to a small request (use the Foot-In-The-Door technique),
- Visual and auditory prompts, which must be:
- Noticeable
- Self-explanatory
- In close proximity to the audience
- Encouraging of positive behaviour
- Develop norms which are:
- Visible
- Communicated through personal contact
Pilot the strategy by:
- Creating at least two groups and randomly assign staff members to each of these groups
- Group 1 receives the behaviour strategy
- Group 2 as a control group that does not receive the strategy
- Observe/measure behaviour change using direct observation, digital tracking tools – for example, energy meters or participation logs; or physical audits – for example, checking recycling bins or attendance at activities (such as an iNaturalist BioBlitz).
- Revise strategy if needed and re-pilot
Upscale the implementation:
- Continue monitoring progress through behavioural observations, feedback surveys, and biodiversity impact assessments
- Share outcomes transparently across teams or community groups to maintain engagement and accountability
- Reinforce shared goals and collective learning through regular communication and reflection sessions
- Encourage long-term adoption of biodiversity-supportive behaviours by celebrating achievements and visible impacts
Rationale
CBSM Moves beyond information-led campaigns by focusing on direct engagement and practical action. Its rationale lies in a bottom-up approach informed by psychological research, which shows that behaviour change is most effective when initiatives operate at the community level, remove barriers and highlight tangible benefits In doing so, CBSM can offer not just the ‘why’ protecting biodiversity is important, but also the ‘how’ to contribute to it (McKenzie-Mohr 2000).
Benefits
- A sense of personal and organisational responsibility for biodiversity
- Cost-effectiveness, as it is based on small, scalable change
- It is a highly adaptable strategy
- Minimises risk as change is piloted before roll-out
- Creation of a sustainable workplace culture
- Long-term behavioural change across the workforce
- Meets Corporate Social Responsibility and biodiversity goals
Links to Resources
Community-Based Social Marketing Website.
McKenzie-Mohr, 2018 offers instructions on creating and implementing a CBSM strategy.
TEMPLATE offers a behaviour observation checklist.
