Green Gown Awards 2016 – Student Engagement – University of Brighton – Finalist

c-change: creating a sea change at the University of Brighton

‘c-change’ is our bespoke carbon reduction campaign, especially designed to engage, inspire and support University of Brighton staff and students to cut carbon.

The c-change campaign uses fun and innovative ways of engaging with students, co-designing projects with students, based upon in-depth research (to ensure a full understanding of student behaviours and attitudes) undertaken by students as part of their final year dissertations.

The campaign has seen a significant increase in engagement over the past academic year, particularly through our newly developed ‘Big c-change Pledge-thon’, halls recycling competition, and halls ‘Energy Guru’ campaign, with the number of students shifting their behaviours as a result of our campaigns on the rise.

Top 3 learnings

1 Working with students to carry out research into student behaviours and attitudes as part of their dissertations can help to identify the most effective messages/approaches for a campaign/project

2 Holding focus groups with students when developing projects helps to ensure that they will engage with the initiative when rolled out

3 As behaviour change initiatives can be hard to monitor, building in evaluation processes such as pre- and post-project surveys can be very useful in identifying the extent to which behaviours have shifted as a result.

Videos

• c-change: creating a sea change at the University of Brighton (click to hide)