Thread by @DavidPerrott_

Summary of the main points from my recent post on overcoming #DayZero and what behavioural practitioners can learn from the water crisis here in Cape Town.
(Thread)

You can read the post here: medium.com/@DavePerrott/w…

1/n On the 7th of March it was announced that CT will not run out of water this year.

2/n Reasons for the good news include:
- The transfer of agricultural water supplies to the city
- A healthy amount of late summer rain
- New water augmentation systems coming online
- *importantly* a massive shift in the way citizens consume water

3/n Citizen water consumption has dropped by almost 100 million litres per a day in 6 weeks (from 610 million liters in mid-January to 514 at the beginning of March).

4/n Looking back over the last two months, allows us to do two important things:
- Understand what worked and what we can improve on going forward
- Synthesise and share broader learnings that practitioners can think about when dealing with large-scale behaviour change

5/n What worked:
- The DayZero campaign (simple, shareable messages that aligned the high-level mission to daily actions)
- The efficiency at water collection points (making it easy, timeous and safe to collect spring water)

6/n What worked:
- Leveraging off trusted influencers within the citizenry to carry key messages and best water practices to individuals within their social networks
- Group collaboration (both online and offline, local and global)

7/n What could be improved on:
- Management of second-order effects (e.g large increase in the consumption of plastic bottles)
- Avoiding unintentional applications of negative social proof (e.g communicating that most citizens are not still not saving water)

8/n What could be improved on:
- Giving more care to the impressions statistical stories create (e.g comparing average household consumption to other cities)
- Implementation of real-time feedback systems (better visibility, impact of changes in behaviour, goals, comparisons)

9/n Putting our learnings into practice (a @gravityideas initiative)

The biggest challenge we identified: An idea-adoption gap (lots of ways to save, not a lot of motivation to do so + staying top of mind, forming habits)

10/n The intervention:
- We worked with young school children to take the key messages in suburban households (biggest consumers) and put the ideas into practice.
- Inspired by the Ikea effect we created a design thinking workshop allowing pupils to co-create solutions.

11/n The intervention:
- We got pupils to handwrite their 3 favourite water saving ideas on a commitment card
- They signed this card along with a commitment buddy who checked-in weekly
- The teachers took photos of the students with their cards and put them up in the classrooms

12/n The intervention:
- We open sourced the workshop content and shared it with teachers at the targeted schools
- Student leaders were trained on how to facilitate the workshop (having already gone through it) and conducted sessions with the younger grades (creating scale)

13/n Hopefully there are some learnings here you find useful. Again, I go into a lot more detail in the post, but happy to discuss the points here too.