Main Findings:

• Understood that it was a problem, but did not understand the severity

• Didn’t think they could do anything worthwhile on their own, believed that government needed to step in

• “We’re all doomed anyway, what’s the point” mentality - the cost/inconvenience of changing their lifestyle was greater than the positive impact they could make

Overall:

• Students were much less concerned about climate change, since it hasn’t impacted their individual lives too much.

• They were also unhopeful and skeptical that they could individually make a difference, and instead expect the government to take full responsibility.

• They felt that the personal cost of changing their lifestyle was an exercise in futility, especially if everyone else continued to live the same, carbon producing lifestyle.

There was an obvious disconnect between the perceived and actual threat of climate change between experts and students, and we wanted our design to help close the gap.

Persona

We target our design towards people most affected by climate change & to those who are on the political edge of swaying either direction.

Michelle fits our target audience:

• Homeowners in climate change threatened areas have personally felt the negative impact

• Parents want the best for their children, and should worry about what the future world will look like if we do not make drastic changes now

Design & Implementation

Key Questions

How can we…

• Align environmental goals with market forces/demand?

• Evoke activism throughout a community or society to promote change?

• Keep in mind the values of the target audience?

• Measure the effect and impact of our campaign?

Ideation

Our primary goal was to find impactful design spaces that could effectively address societal awareness and action regarding carbon footprints, energy and resource usage.

We individually came up with about 20 ideas then came together to combine ideas and spark new ones.

After reviewing 80 ideas and brainstorming additional ones, we chose 6 to delve in deeper.

1. Environmental / Social Capital System

2. Reusables Delivery Services

3. Working from Home Policies

4. Rebranding Public Transportation

5. Awareness Campaign on Social Media

6. Coffee Fast Pass

We moved on with the Awareness Campaign on Social Media because it is easy to implement, has high audience reach, and is relatively low cost compared to other green solutions.

Design Concept

Our design is a Facebook advertisement and web campaign targeting specifically to homeowners in Santa Rosa, Florida.

1. Advertisement

   1. Facebook is home to 2.2 billion users (large reach)

      • This is currently the largest social media site in the U.S.

   2. Through our campaign, we encourage people to take action through a variety of ways to combat the issue of climate change

   3. After doing research on the impact of climate change, we found that the residents of Florida are and were especially impacted by its harsh effects due to their geographic location

   4. Additionally, we chose to target Florida because it is a swing state, and the area has suffered much damage and devastation due to the effects of climate change

      • We specifically chose the Santa Rosa County because it was recently devastated by Hurricane Michael in October of last year (2018)

      • Homeowners faced lots of home destruction, homelessness, lack of resources in food and supplies

        • Our target audience reflect characteristics of homeowners

          • Families

          • Middle aged

   5. Our advertisement design is geared towards convincing citizens to take action to vote for candidates that support the climate change issue

2. Landing Website

   1. The advertisements include a call-to-action where people have access to local resources and can learn more about their situation on our landing page, LiveWell Resources

      • Our website includes resources to educate about climate change, and actionable ways for specific communities to get involved with protecting their home by signing local petitions, voting, and making donations

      • We focused on the local resources for Santa Rosa County

        • We provided a platform of collected information that are relevant to their needs and aligns with their values

      • The goal is to provide them with easy access to every environmental-related sources they need

        • Resources that they…

          • Want/ need

          • May not even know exist

Storyboard

Low Fidelity Prototypes

Physical Printouts

GIFs

A/B testing found that the personalized ad campaign (right GIF) did better in keeping the audience watching the entire video.

Mid Fidelity Prototypes

Advertisement

View Advertisement Here

This mid-fidelity prototype ad built off the initial prototype landing page findings, and we decided to test if a Draw-My-Life styled video would garner more attention from the crowd because of visual motion.

This 45 second video prototype…

• Performed well in that it gathered more views

• Performed poorly in that it had decreased 100% watch rate to half of the initial prototype’s

• May have been too long to keep the attention of its viewers

Landing Website

View Landing Website 1 Demo Here

User Flow (Website V1)

Results

• Although there were resources available, the call to action was not very strong

• The design of this website does not encourage action from the public

  • Elements (such as buttons) did not “shout out” to be interacted with because they were all uniformed and thus did not stand out.

• We also did not have a “brand” for our organization, making our campaign less credible in the public’s eye.

Final Prototypes

Advertisements

View Final DML Video Here (Left)

View Final Stock Video Here (Right)

In these two high-fidelity prototypes shown above, the primary goal was to incorporate the ad-findings in the past two prototypes to create a new video prototype set that would hopefully garner the most attention/reach.

We found two notable things:

1. The Draw My Life Version 2 Campaign performed the best, with the most clicks to our call-to-action website.

2. The Draw My Life Version 2 Advertisement had the highest percentage of 100% Video Watch, which was 3.36% of those who watched.

With these metrics, we determined that viewers respond to personalized, location-targeted drawing ads more-so than the other prototype signs.

Landing Website

View Final Landing Website Here

User flow (Website 2)

EvaluationS

1. Advertisements

We evaluated our advertisements based on their success:

• Success defined as…

  • What is the percentage of people that watched our advertisement?

  • Number of link clicks (in terms of our personal progress in making an advertisement)*

    • *As discussed with experts, there is a possibility that on social media, people will just scroll past and ignore the advertisement, especially if it is not what they are looking for

Between each advertisement, we compared the following metrics:

• Amount Spent

  • Amount spent per advertisement was $10 ($5 per day)

  • We kept this a constant as to not affect our dependent variables

• Reach

  • The amount of people that retrieved our advertisements

  • Reached relatively the same number because amount spent was the same

• Link clicks

  • The amount of people who clicked onto our landing page

• % of video play throughs

  • The amount of people who viewed the advertisement at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of its contents

2. Landing Website

Visual Elements - First Website Design

The first site was not tested* with users. Instead, we focused on polishing visual design elements.

*We looked at the site’s analytics and realized that our call-to-action was not strong

Usability Testings - Second & Third Website Designs

We evaluated our website in terms of usability:

• How easy is it to navigate through the site?

6 students* were recruited to test the flow of the site’s navigation.

• *3 students per website

• *Since we did not have direct access to advertisement viewers, we examined random students on campus.

• *The actual audience is not necessarily needed because we are solely looking at the ease of use.

We asked them to…

• Role-play as a Floridian homeowner, seeking help after being affected by a nasty storm

• Complete 3 tasks while using the think-aloud protocol

3 Tasks:

1. The primary elections are coming up soon. Learn more about a candidate you’re interested in.

2. Hurricane Michael did some damage to your property. Find disaster relief for your home.

3. You were frustrated on the busy roads the other day. Sign for change on traffic congestion.

Results

1. Advertisements

Here is a table comparing all advertisements:

Findings Summary:

• Viewers watched the most when the advertisement was short, personal, and not static

  • Longest advertisement performed the worst

  • Videos performed better than static images

  • Personalized, direct messages performed better than general advertisements

• Viewers preferred to watch non-stock content advertisements

  • Draw My Life style advertisements had more video engagement than GIFs

• The best performing ad (Draw My Life V2) had the most link clicks

2. Website

After usability testing with the second website design, we found:

• Multiple access points for resources made it easier for participants to find resources

• The link and call to action for donations was particularly strong because participants were reminded to do so on every page

• Participants positively commented on our brand, and how it clearly fits with the website’s goal of providing a collection resource platform

  • The mission helped to state the platform’s intent and goals for its target audience

Pros & Cons of Design

Advertisement

• Pros

  • Short, message gets to the point

• Cons

  • Message needs to be quick and clear, otherwise people will lose interest

  • If deemed too political, Facebook bans the advertisement

Website

• Pros

  • Local resources are all in one place for easy access

• Cons

  • We are unable to measure activity within the site well

  • There’s lots of information so organization and structure is very important

Overall

• Pros

  • Advertisements are relatively easy to make and cheap to run*

    • *Compared to other solutions (more below)

• Cons

  • There was no real way to gauge if people actually engaged in political or environmental action

Discussions & Conclusions

Current Design Reflection

1. Problem space is very large and complicated

Reducing humanity’s carbon footprint is not an easy feat

2. Challenges of our design

• You can’t satisfy everyone with broad call to actions

• Outreach campaigns must target specific communities for effective results

• Our current campaign relies on social media

• Many people can be reached via social media, except the majority population tend to be younger — This is a problem because this age group is already progressive and they also believe the Government should hold more responsibility

3. Success and Potential of Design

Lots of reach on Facebook, which is 2.2 billion users strong

• With Facebook’s Ad Manager, we were able to…

  • Send personalized ads to people…

    • Who held specific interests (i.e. homeowners)

    • Who were affected by increasingly severe disasters

• Do A/B testing to test different advertisements and audiences

  • Comparing the effects between different advertisements on different audiences

Reflections

Poster Session

Summary

Key Questions

Let’s revisit the key questions:

How can we…

1. Align environmental goals with market forces/demand?

   • Market demands adapt to whatever the consumer wants

   • If we convince the consumer (the public) to push the market towards environmental goals, then the market will change accordingly

2. Evoke activism throughout a community or society to promote change?

   • Showing that change can only happen when a community acts together

   • Using social media platforms like Facebook, we can bring together communities who want to pursue the same goal of combatting climate change

3. Keep in mind the values of the target audience?

   • One goal is to get people to change without “changing” their values

   • We’re trying to bring awareness and to make environmental goals a part of their existing values

   • To do this, we need to understand what elements of the advertisement/ website catch the target audience’s attention — We did this with A/B tests

4. Measure the effect and impact of our campaign?

   • By looking at and comparing other solutions (Here are some…)

     • Solar panels

       • ~$14,500 upfront costs, annual ~$1,275 in electrical bills, and land resource

     • Going vegetarian

       • Massive mindset shift of meat eating lovers is infeasible and will fail to make lasting impact

       • Environmentally, livestock requires more water, energy, etc. to produce

     • Electric cars

       • Investment can result in zero exhaust emissions, but can cost between a range from $22,000 to $72,000

       • Electric vehicles have starting costs of $1500 and then $540 gas/year for 15,000 miles

       • Versus gas vehicles usually consume $1800 gas/year for 15,000 miles

   • Our social media campaign…

     • Can be less costly, as you can set how much you want to spend (you are paying for the amount of reach)

       • Even a $350 - $400 (per year) budget can give you a reach of 15 million people

     • Easy to implement & manage

       • Although we are amateurs in ad making, using the tools that Facebook had made it easy for us to reach our target audience

     • Can be analyzed and improved

       • Throughout the semester, we produced many A/B tests to adjust and readjust our advertisements and websites so we could have the best outcome

       • The Facebook tools helped us visually understand the data so we could continue to improve on the next iteration

Read more at: shorturl.at/qyFTU

Final Thoughts

The topic that we choose for this project was definitely not an easy one. While we had many brainstormed solutions in the beginning, our professor encouraged us to really evaluate on their potential impact. The goal is to find the solution that would take away a big chunk of our accumulated problems to try reverse the effects of climate change.

Most of the time, people do not believe that they can do anything about the effects of climate change because they are just a single person. One single person cannot change the effects alone, but they can convince others to change (and so on). Social media allows us to connect and communicate with each other way easier than it was ever before. We need to use this as an advantage to gather a community of people that really care and drive our government to change.

Finding that last push of what a community needs was our job. We concluded that the best way to get people to do something was to make it easier for them to do something and the advertisements needed to take in account of what the target audience needed in order to catch their attention in the first place.

Before getting to these conclusions, we failed a lot. We weren’t getting the results we wanted, but instead we were facing the reality that we needed better resources to “get the numbers we wanted”. As our results show, we did not get many click throughs throughout the research. While disappointed and frustrated, our professor advised to not give up and keep trying. I learned that failure teaches and informs our research as well as successes. It’s likely that you won’t succeed the first time.

With this is mind, we continued to experiment all sorts of formats for our advertisements which definitely pushed our creativity and patience. By the end of the term, even though our advertisements did not run so smoothly, I still learned about people’s online behaviors — like what catches their attention, about how to design an effective and usable website, and about how to run and analyze A/B testing.

THANK YOU FOR READING! 🌱