At Uptown Studios, we live by our motto of “Designs for Social Change” and use social marketing and human-centered design to facilitate discussion and engage our target audience in order to achieve our end goal.
Both are based on the knowledge that in order to bring about behavior and long term change, you must go beyond merely providing your audience with information. In order to remove possible barriers and get the biggest return on investment, you must reach out to the community you are marketing to. They need to be part of the discussion from the beginning and it is important to continuously ask for their guidance while you are developing an effective strategy.
This past summer, Uptown Studios developed a campaign around river safety where we focused on creating behavior change around wearing life jackets on the American River. Before we could hope that people would pick up a life jacket and wear it while they were on or near the water, we needed to understand the barriers for why they weren’t doing it.
In conducting outreach and interviews with individuals and families, we learned that many didn’t have life jackets, others didn’t know that there were free life jackets available to them by the Department of Regional Parks, and others didn’t realize how strong the current can be on a river and felt they would be safe. These were just a few of the barriers we discovered that would potentially impact our efforts to change behavior.
Once we identified barriers, we focused on addressing them by testing a wide variety of strategies including education and making the free life jackets more prominent and visible with bright billboard signs.
All of this was supported by our more traditional marketing efforts like social media and digital advertising. We wanted to bring about awareness while also making sure that we provided the community with the tools they needed in order to get into the habit of wearing life jackets.
By using social marketing and human-centered design techniques, we aim to better our world one campaign at a time. We pride ourselves in taking on clients that want to better their communities, help their neighbors, and start a movement. You can count on Uptown Studios as your partner for all your needs.
