Love Your Forest I 2016 impact report I Hubbub

LOVE YOUR FOREST 2 0 1 6 I M PA C T R E P O R T Testing new approaches to tackling rural litter.

Registered charity number: 1158700

Love Your Forest | Impact Report

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A RY Litter is an on-going and stubborn problem. Polling by Hubbub UK revealed that 86% of the public believe that dropping litter is an anti-social behaviour but litter levels have not dropped in the last 12 years. There has been a 20% increase in fast food littering in the last year. Chewing gum and cigarettes remain on-going and expensive problems. The impact to the public pocket is £850 million annually.

Reducing littering requires effective behaviour change campaigns. A piece of packaging goes from being useful to being litter only if it is discarded inappropriately. Hubbub UK is a charity that uses the latest thinking backed by academic research to explore new ways to run behaviour change campaigns.

Lucozade Ribena Suntory is a committed to creating stronger links with local communities around their factories and reducing environmental impact. The company has a significant factory in Coleford in the Forest of Dean.

Love Your Forest is a collaborative project between Hubbub UK and Lucozade Ribena Suntory designed to reduce littering in the Forest of Dean by actively engaging with the local community to run creative new behaviour campaigns. Each year 250 tonnes of litter are removed from the Forest of Dean. The cost to local tax-payers for keeping the area clean is over £400,000.

Lucozade Ribena Suntory invested £40,000 in Love Your Forest which ran for a six-month period from April 2016 until September 2016 testing a range of new approaches to reduce urban littering.

Following local consultation, a series of campaigns were developed targeting littering at hotspots in the forest, roadside littering, littering in towns and routes to school. These campaigns including creating the UK’s first litter shop, running an art installation project in the forest, delivering education campaigns in local schools, installing voting bins and creating a roadside gallery.

The campaigns generated a high level of local engagement. 30 organisations contributed to the initial stakeholder discussions, 14 primary schools and 2 secondary schools participated in anti-littering educational activities, at least 2,850 local people were actively engaged in the campaign and the Love Your Forest Facebook Group secured 1,107 likes and had a reach of 63,200.

Surveying on completion of the project revealed that 82% of respondents would like to see similar projects in the future, 75.6% of participants stated they would like to see the expansion of the Love Your Forest campaign, 41.5% would like to see the creation of a Love Your Forest group to deliver new campaigns, 56.1% of people would like to see more collaboration of existing groups to create a strong local network and 43.9% of people would like local companies to invest in more anti-littering initiatives.

Love Your Forest | Impact Report

Nationally the campaign secured 16 broadcast features, 12 mentions in press media and 4 in trade press. This secured a total reach of 12.8 million and had an advertising value equivalent of ÂŁ184,000. Coverage included BBC Inside Out, BBC World News, BBC Radio 5 Live, Heart FM, the BBC main news site, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Mirror and Huffington Post The evaluation methodology was not as robust as Hubbub would have liked. The ability to undertake effective evaluation was limited due to the size of the area concerned, a lack of baseline data, ever-tightening resource constraints faced by the local authority and the limited time available to develop the campaign. Two pieces of evaluation were undertaken.

This suggested that the Communitrees installation reduced littering by 30% whilst the measurement of the impact of the Roadside Gallery proved inconclusive.

Love your Forest secured significant community engagement, generated a desire for further campaigns to be developed and increased awareness of the impact of littering in the forest.

Insufficient data was collected to see whether this engagement changed behaviour to decrease litter.

There are sufficiently encouraging signs from the first months of the campaign for Lucozade Ribena Suntory to make a further local investment for year two. Key activities in this year will be to create a more robust evaluation framework, to embed the campaign into local community organisations, to expand the most successful elements by engaging more stakeholders and testing a new campaign.

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Love Your Forest | Impact Report

CONTENTS Executive Summary ................................................................................................................... 2 Context ....................................................................................................................................... 5 Aims ........................................................................................................................................... 5 The Approach ............................................................................................................................. 5 The Campaign Activities ............................................................................................................6 Evaluation Methodology .......................................................................................................... 10 Impact ...................................................................................................................................... 10 Budget ...................................................................................................................................... 13 Future Plans ............................................................................................................................. 14 Further Information ................................................................................................................ 14

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Love Your Forest | Impact Report

C O N T E XT The Forest of Dean is one of the UK’s few surviving ancient woodlands situated between the Rivers Wye and Severn. The Forest has three main towns of Cinderford, Lydney, and Coleford.

Each year 250 tonnes of litter are removed from the Forest of Dean. The cost to local taxpayers for keeping the area clean is over £400,000. Volunteers dedicate time litter-picking the forest to help safeguard wildlife and to support the tourist industry, collecting on average 40 bags of rubbish each year.

The major employer in the Forest of Dean is Lucozade Ribena Suntory which has a factory in Coleford employing 600 people. The company has a strong commitment to investing in the local community and provided funding of £40,000 to deliver Love Your Forest.

The Love Your Forest Campaign was created and delivered by the charity Hubbub UK. The charity takes a fresh approach to environmental communication seeking to engage a main stream audience.

Love Your Forest ran from the period from April 2016 to September 2016 and aimed to reduce littering in the forest - it did not address the issue of Fly Tipping.

AIMS Love you Forest was designed as a social experiment that sought to: 1.

Reduce the amount of litter in and around the Forest of Dean including paths, popular areas within the forest and on the road-sides.

2. Raise awareness about the issue of littering 3. Engage with the local community and encourage discussions about the impact of littering.

4. Unite various players in the community to work together to tackle the litter problem.

THE APPROACH With support from the Forest of Dean Council extensive consultation took part with local stakeholders, community groups and volunteers to gain an understanding of the litter problem in the forest. Four areas of concern were highlighted; littering on routes to school, litter around leisure events in the forest, roadside littering and night-time littering in the towns.

A local person was identified and recruited to be the paid co-ordinator for the project building on their local connections and knowledge of the forest.

Building on the consultation phase a series of campaigns were created that could be delivered within the available budget. These were:

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Love Your Forest | Impact Report

1.

An initial awareness raising activity highlighting the extent of the littering problem in the Forest of Dean.

2. A series of school campaigns designed to reduce littering by children on the routes to school.

3. A community engagement campaign seeking to reduce littering at identified hotspots within the forest.

4. A roadside awareness raising campaign 5.

New voting bins in the towns

T H E C A M PA I G N A C T I V I T I E S 1.

Awareness Raising

To raise awareness in the area the UK’s first litter shop was created. The litter shop or CONvenience store was an art installation built in collaboration with Brighton-based artist’s Dirty Beach situated on St Johns Street, Coleford.

The shop was open to the public three days a week for two months. It contained litter collected from the forest floor; cleaned, rebranded and displayed to create a thoughtprovoking museum of waste. The display included packets of crisps that were over 33 years old through to legal high canisters. It demonstrated to people the amount of litter found hidden in the forest and highlighted how long littered items remain intact once discarded.

The shop succeeded in raising local awareness. Of the people we surveyed 70% thought the shop effectively raised awareness. It was visited by 500 people and 3 primary schools. 200

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Love Your Forest | Impact Report

postcards, 2,400 badge stickers and 100 car bumper stickers promoting anti-littering messages were taken home by visitors.

A short video of the Litter Shop was created and posted on YouTube. The video secured 9,141 views and can be viewed at https://youtu.be/0pKqVOmHaUw “There was loads of talk about what the shop was going to be… Kids walking past thought it was going to be a sweet shop. We’ve absolutely loved having it across the road from us. Please do it again!”

Moot Furniture Shop.

2. School Campaigns

Two campaigns involved school students. Litter Angels is a campaign developed by Gordon Henderson MP for schools in his Kent constituency. We used the Litter Angels approach and materials to work with 14 local primary schools. The children took part in a ‘Litter Angels’ poster competition, designing an anti-littering poster for the Love Your Forest campaign.

Bin It! is a national secondary school education programme funded by Wrigleys. It is an interactive performance that communicate the anti-litter message to young people. Bin It! visited two schools in the area.

“I loved getting involved with the children and visiting the schools. Prevention is better than cure and the children were enthusiastic about it - it was lovely" Local Volunteer

3. Targeting litter hot-spot in the forest

There is research to suggest that people are more likely to act in a socially responsible way if they feel they are being watched. For instance drawing a pair of eyes above an honesty box in a coffee shop increased the amount of money donated.

The Communitrees campaign aimed to test this theory on littering in the forest. Local school children were invested to design and create 50 faces that could be installed at 15 litter hot spots throughout the Forest of Dean. The faces were created from reclaimed materials by local artists. In partnership with the Forestry Commission a map was created that displayed the location of each Communitree and challenged visitors to the forest to find them all, whilst reminding them to take their litter home.

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Love Your Forest | Impact Report

A total of 250 children entered local design competition. Over 2000 maps were taken from across 25 sites. Pre and post measurement at 7 sites indicated a 30% reduction in local litter levels.

A Communitree installation was made in collaboration with Clearwell school and paraded on a float at the Coleford music festival.

A short video of Communitrees was created and posted on YouTube this video 25,001 views and can be viewed at https://youtu.be/JreFLEZQGkM As with the Litter Shop, Communitrees also attracted wider national interest.

“We’ve had people asking why the Communitrees were coming down they’ve loved them. The maps for the Communitrees were very popular with adults and children alike” Forestry Commission

4. Raising awareness in towns

Cigarette butts are the most littered time in urban settings. The cigarette ballot bin has been designed by Hubbub and has been shown to reduce cigarette littering by up to 46%. The bin asks people to vote with their used cigarette butts answering an ever changing list of topical questions.

Two cigarette ballot bins were installed, one in Coleford town centre at one at Lucozade Ribena Suntory. Positive user feedback was received from the Lucozade Ribena Suntory.

The town centre bin was emptied too frequently limiting the amount of time for a public ‘poll’ to build up and reducing the bins effectiveness in this setting.

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Love Your Forest | Impact Report

“We’ve noticed a significant difference in cigarette litter since installing the ballot bins… we’ve had people knocking on the office door asking us to change the question” Lucozade Ribena Suntory spokesperson

5.

Roadside Littering

Roadside littering is a particular challenge in the Forest with a significant number of rural roads making it tempting for motorists to discard their litter. Cleaning up from the roadside is expensive and has safety challenges for those doing the litter pick.

This challenge was addressed by attempting to build a sense of pride in the beauty of the forest. The roadside gallery was a display of outdoor posters installed on 15 A and B roads around the forest featuring members of the local community holding up signs which shared their love for the forest message. Over 100 members of the local community were photographed for the campaign. Posters that were not displayed on the roads were displayed in businesses or shared on social media.

The posters could only be displayed for limited periods due to planning constraints which hindered their impact as is shown in the evaluation data. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that they did have a short-term impact and were popular. Next year we will need to create a rolling programme so that the posters are displayed more frequently throughout the posters creating greater awareness and impact.

"It seems a shame that the roadside gallery had to come down" Local Resident

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Love Your Forest | Impact Report

E VA L U AT I O N M E T H O D O L O G Y The evaluation methodology was not as robust as Hubbub would have liked. The ability to undertake effective evaluation was limited due to the size of the area concerned, a lack of baseline data, ever-tightening resource constraints faced by the local authority and the limited time available to develop the campaign.

In the second year, Hubbub is planning to work within these constraints to create a more robust data gathering process which will give a clearer indication of impact.

Data was collected in a number of ways •

The Forest of Dean District Council measured the amount of litter picked from the road as part of their routine litter measurements. This measurement was not confined to the areas covered by the community gallery and can only serve as an indication of ‘the areas near’ the community gallery. The statistics were recorded as average bags of litter per km for each roadside.

•

Litter monitoring was undertaken within a 50ft radius around 7 Communitree sites. Three litter-picks were conducted for this measurement. The first pick was designed to completely clean the area so that our measurements started at an equal baseline. The second pick took part at the beginning of the Communitree’s installation. The final pick was conducted on completion.

•

Hubbub undertook a local online evaluation survey investigating the overall impact of the campaign on awareness raising and public engagement.

•

Hubbub monitored the wider reach of the campaign by measuring press and social media reach.

I M PA C T Using the above methodology, Love Your Forest achieved the following results: Litter Reduction •

Litter monitoring around the Communitree installations indicated a 30% reduction in local litter levels.

•

The evaluation of litter reduction around the roadside galleries was inconclusive. Littering reduced over the first couple of months but then increased in the subsequent two months.

Community Engagement •

A total of 55 people from 30 organisations participated in the initial stakeholder engagement.

•

14 primary schools and 2 secondary schools participated in anti-littering educational activities.

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Love Your Forest | Impact Report

•

At least 2,850 local people were actively engaged in the campaign (500 visited the shop, 2,250 participated in Communitrees and 100 took part in the roadside gallery)

•

The local Love Your Forest Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/LoveYourForest secured 1,107 likes, had a reach of 63,200 of which 74% were women. The group generated 7,631 views of the campaign videos.

Local Awareness •

The local survey of 44 people revealed that the most recognisable campaigns were the litter shop and Communitrees with 75% and 72% recognising the elements respectively. The other projects; ballot bins, community gallery, and an all other community events were known by 22%, 28% and 37.5% of people respectively. The majority of those made aware of the campaign had seen it in person (66%), with most other people hearing of it on Facebook (56%), in the local newspaper (53%), and through word of mouth (38%).

•

The campaign secured 6 pieces of regional coverage including ITV West Country, BBC Points West and BBC Radio Gloucestershire

National and International Awareness •

Nationally the campaign secured 16 broadcast features, 12 mentions in press media and 4 in trade press. This secured a total reach of 12.8 million and had an advertising value equivalent of £184,000. Coverage included BBC Inside Out, BBC World News, BBC Radio 5 Live, Heart FM, the BBC main news site, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Mirror and Huffington Post.

•

The Love Your Forest pages on Hubbub’s website secured 2,000 page views with an average of 1.37 minutes spent on each page.

•

The Communitree project has been featured in an educational book for Greek students, 25,000 of these books will be printed.

Impact of Project The local survey gave a snapshot of what local people thought of the impact of the campaign.

The amount of litter around the local area has decreased in the last four months

Strongly Agree

Agree

Neither Agree nor Disagree

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

2.4%

26.8%

56.1%

12.2%

2.4%

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Love Your Forest | Impact Report

Strongly Agree

Agree

Neither Agree nor Disagree

Disagree

Strongly Disagree

The Love Your Forest campaign has 14.5% helped me become more aware of the impact of littering

51.2%

24.4%

7.3%

2.4%

The Love Your Forest campaign has 17.1% made me more aware of my own actions and behaviour

34.2%

29.3%

12.2%

7.3%

The Love Your Forest campaign has 22% made me feel more pride in my local area

58.5%

12.2%

7.3%

0%

The Love Your Forest campaign has 17.1% helped the local community more aware of the impact of littering

61%

17.1%

4.9%

0%

The Love Your Forest campaign has 12.2% helped the local community more aware of their actions and behaviour

58.5%

22%

7.3%

0%

The Love Your Forest campaign has 14.6% helped the local community feel more pride in their local area

41.5%

41.5%

2.4%

0%

The Love Your Forest campaign has 17.1% encouraged discussions about the impact of littering in local area

51.2%

24.3%

7.3%

0%

We asked participants to indicate how effective they thought each element of the campaign was. •

CON-venience store - 68.3% rated it as effective or very effective, whilst 17.1% said they were uncertain, and 0% said not effective. The remainder were not aware of this part of the campaign.

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Love Your Forest | Impact Report

•

Communitrees - 65.9% rated it as effective or very effective, whilst 19.5% said they were uncertain, and 0% said not effective. The remainder were not aware of this part of the campaign.

•

Ballot Bins - 29.3% rated it as effective or very effective, whilst 43.9% said they were uncertain, and 0% said not effective. The remainder were not aware of this part of the campaign.

•

Community Gallery - 41.5% rated it as effective or very effective, whilst 31.7% said they were uncertain, and 0% said not effective. The remainder were not aware of this part of the campaign.

•

Community events - 51.2% rated it as effective or very effective, whilst 22% said they were uncertain, and 2.4% said not effective. The remainder were not aware of this part of the campaign.

•

Online campaign - 56.1% rated it as effective or very effective, whilst 22% said they were uncertain, and 2.4% said not effective. The remainder were not aware of this part of the campaign.

BUDGET The budget for the campaign was £40,000 provided as sponsorship by Lucozade Ribena Suntory. This has been allocated as follows:

Payment of the local co-ordinator

£8,000

Creation of the Litter Shop

£7,900

Communitrees

£8,400

Roadside Gallery

£4,000

Stakeholder events

£500

Marketing and promotional materials

£5,600

Ballot Bin

£450

PR activities

£4,000

Project Management

£1,150

Total

£40,000

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Love Your Forest | Impact Report

FUTURE PLANS Love Your Forest was a social experiment seeking to explore whether a range of new approaches could effectively engage the local community in anti-littering activities.

Encouragingly there is a real desire for the campaign to continue and further develop.

When asked what they would like to see happen next: •

82% would like to see similar projects in the future.

•

75.6% of participants stated they would like to see the expansion of the Love Your Forest campaign, 41.5% would like to see the creation of a Love Your Forest group to deliver new campaigns,

•

56.1% of people would like to see more collaboration of existing groups to create a strong local network

•

43.9% of people would like local companies to invest in more anti-littering initiatives.

Lessons have been learnt from the first year and will be incorporated into the second year of development. Specifically: •

A more rigorous evaluation framework will be created from the start to ensure we are better able to measure impact especially on the reduction in litter.

•

The Love Your Forest brand and anti-littering message will be strengthened so that people can make the connections between the individual campaign activities and the overall objective to cut litter.

•

We will seek to embed the campaign into the activities of a relevant local community group in order to strengthen the campaign and build long-term sustainability.

•

We will further develop those elements that have proved most successful such as Communitrees.

•

Closer links will be built with key local stakeholders to increase the reach and impact.

•

A new campaign will be developed linked to important events within the forest such as the arrival of bluebells.

•

The campaign will be extended to areas in the local community which were not heavily involved in the first year.

F U RT H E R I N F O R M AT I O N For further details please visit Hubbub’s website for the project http://www.hubbub.org.uk/Event/love-your-forest or our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3rwhLVFx8OCgZ6Ara9qxa28c1_ax7DkB For information please do contact Trewin Restorick trewin@hubbub.org.uk

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