A Strategic Messaging Campaign to Improve Residential Water Conservation

• In Event: Strategies to Promote Conservation

Abstract

Public managers and policy-makers often grapple with how policies can be devised to promote desired public behaviors. While they can turn to regulations that prohibit and penalize undesirable actions, these can be viewed as politically controversial and an overreach by government into the lives of its citizenry. Even in the case of less value laden activities such as water or energy usage, members of the public, and subsequently elected officials, generally oppose rate hikes, taxes, and other restrictions on usage. Thus, managers can turn to incentives or find additional ways to motivate individuals to voluntarily pursue pro-societal behaviors. Specifically, this research tests how framing water conservation in terms of gains versus losses affects household water consumption across subpopulations.

With the ongoing drought remaining a significant concern for central and southern California water districts, many districts have initiated messaging campaigns to encourage household water conservation. The majority of districts have focused their messaging primarily on providing information to consumers about the drought and detailed advice on behaviors that decrease consumption; however, we argue that information and efficacy are not necessarily sufficient to change behavior (for review see Ehret, Kuehl, Brick, & Hodges, in progress). Prior work in health and environmental behavior suggest that gain-framed messages helps to encourage behavior change among those who have yet to change whereas loss-framed messages encourage individuals to continue to a new behavior over time (Kuhberger, 1998; Cheng, Woon, & Lynes, 2011). In the case of water consumption, we predict that gain frames will in particular decrease consumption among high users (those who have been most resistant to change) and loss frames will help to solidify reductions in consumption over time.

In collaboration with a water district of 87,000 customers on California’s Central Coast we administered a field experiment in the winter of 2017, when concern over the drought was low due to recent rainfall events. Post-cards were mailed to 1,500 water district users twice during the study period. Water meters were read immediately before commencement of the study, three weeks after receiving the post-cards, and three weeks after that. 1/3 of those received general information pertaining to the drought (the control condition), 1/3 received the following statement ‘Conserving water increases our water supply and saves you more money,’ (gain-frame), and 1/3 received ‘Failing to conserve water worsens our water shortages and costs you more money’ (loss-frame). Included in the post-cards were ‘conservation tips’ including a phone number to call in to get a free conservation check-up by the district and receive a rebate for a new washing machine, increasing our opportunities to measure behavioral change. In addition a follow-up phone survey was conducted to better understand specifically how users changed their behavior over the study period.

Heterogeneous treatment effects and management implications are discussed. In particular, we address how framing shapes not just behavior change, but retention of conservation behaviors. Also, given their high impact on this issue, we specifically focus on how messaging affected disproportionately high users. Broadly the results have implications for public managers and other policy makers interested in shaping desired public behaviors.

Authors

• Heather E. Hodges, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Colin Kuehl, Northern Illinois University

• Sarah Anderson, University of California, Santa Barbara