Water conservation messaging effectiveness during California’s ongoing drought.
Chapman University has published the results of a state-wide study on the communication campaigns California has been employing to address its ongoing drought.
"What we learned was counterintuitive to what we expected," said Jake Liang, Ph.D., assistant professor in Chapman’s School of Communication, and lead author on the study.
"Conservation campaigns, regardless of the strategy — in general — led to participants having an attitude change in a negative direction — meaning they were less inclined to take action to conserve water after seeing the messages.
The first phase identified 12 strategies of ongoing water conservation messages in California.
The most common strategies were conservation tips, which refer to messages that directly provide the individual with any type of content, tips and/or strategies to save water; and referrals and redirection, which refers to messages that aim to direct a person to another source of information about conservation.
In phase 3 participants’ attitudes were assessed before reading a water conservation message and again afterward.
In this phase the researchers focused specifically on three strategies: loss aversion, evidence of drought, and conservation tips and how effective they were individually and used in combinations.
Given this finding, campaign practitioner may need to reconsider using these strategies or at least monitor if their use indeed leads to the well-intended results.
Although their study did not test directly for the specific reason for the negative effect, they discussed some possibilities: People feel that conservation messages threatened their freedom to choose, Which message strategy is used, The possibility that an individual simply cannot conserve water, The source’s credibility is questioned.