In May 2015, Shawn Shi and Vera Hu, researchers from HBI Lab, presented the Green Commitment Pledge Form (GCPF) Expansion Program in Centretown Citizens of Ottawa Corporation (CCOC) annual general meeting. For the past 6 months, Shawn and Vera, under the supervision of Professor Liam O’Brien worked to expand an already successful GCPF program of CCOC, a local non-profit housing organization with several thousand residents, in order to effectively engage more tenants in sustainable behaviours. The expansion program embeds various community-based social marketing elements and incorporates statistical methods and hard evidence to quantify the impacts of tenants’ lifestyle choice. The new system is also fully automated with a database and user entry interface.
CCOC AGM presentation about HBI Lab’s tenant engagement program
CCOC has a long history of being environmentally progressive. Since 2013, all new tenants were asked to voluntarily complete a Green Commitment Pledge From during their lease signing session. With the pledge form proven to be effective to promote sustainable behaviour among tenants, CCOC decided to expand the program with the funding from Ontario Trillium Foundation. In Nov 2014, the proposal submitted by HBI Lab was selected to complete the contract.
In developing the expansion program, the pledge form is redesigned. All the behaviour selected to be on the form were screened first for their penetration, probability and impact, following the method developed by Canadian leading environmental psychologist, Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr. An annual personal report card is developed for the expansion program to provide personalized feedback to each tenant. The tenants are able to learn and interpret their impacts by equivalences and comparisons, and the embedded social marketing elements will also encourage them to take on more challenges next year. The team also develops a software tool for CCOC staff that can be used to manage all the pledge forms, generate personalized report card and to monitor program statistics.
Engagement program user interface
The roll-out of the expansion program started in June 2015. Five pilot buildings were monitored for program evaluation purpose. The HBI Lab is also looking forward to studying tenants’ behaviour change from the data. If the expansion program proves to be successful, CCOC will share their experience and the tool with more community partners. The vision is to make a turn-key package that can be readily adopted by any Canadian housing organization and to create a web-based platform where housing organizations could upload and share program data and information to provide more social benefit and research value.