The Challenge
Live for Less is an initiative of CitySmart, the Brisbane City Council’s sustainability agency, which was developed to help the Brisbane public reduce their cost of living while assisting residents to live more sustainably. In order to get the message out to the public, CitySmart required the strategy and tools to create a social movement that would initiate and drive positive behaviour change.
Our solution
To become a voice that spoke to the diverse range of interests and opinions of the Brisbane community, we first needed to understand their individual opinions and motivations. We began by developing audience personas which were refined through a series of workshops that identified interests, behaviour, motivations and challenges around cost of living and sustainability. These would eventually lay the groundwork for the content strategy, tailoring material that catered to these unique interests.
With an understanding of the audience segments, we set about unifying them, developing a manifesto centered around the shareable hashtag ‘Let’s #liveforless’. From this, we created a suite of assets to launch Live For Less, tailored to the identified personas, and driving awareness around the benefits of living sustainably. These assets included social media, email, exhibition stands and a website.
We sought to further build a community of interested users and foster behavioural change through building out a set of user journeys that involved personalised welcome emails and automated follow up emails. The scope of the project also saw the proposed implementation of emailed challenges and rewards to build up loyalty among users.
The heart of the campaign was a website that engaged the community by providing a range of ‘how to’ articles and videos, downloadable recipes, and user profiles as well as a content submission area that reinforced the message of community participation. The addition of an interactive community map that utilised geographic data gave users the ability to search and discover crowdsourced community events within Brisbane that focused on sustainable living across the categories of ‘see and do’, ‘food and produce’, ‘community’, ‘services’, ‘family’ and ‘recycling’. Additionally, users had the ability to save events and locations of interest to them.
To maintain the momentum of living for less, we launched a competition titled Live for Less for a Year. This saw us create a social media campaign that drove traffic to a dedicated landing page we built, with an entry mechanism and a social share feature. This competition heightened engagement across an even broader audience and provided an ongoing boost to the Live for Less community.
The outcome
After the first six months of being live, the site had already achieved nearly 24,000 sessions. Since then, the content hub has been regularly maintained and a significant database of crowdsourced events has been built up in the site’s ‘go local’ mapping feature.