Plan Outreach Campaign

What do you want to achieve by participating in the Campus Race to Zero Waste? Raise awareness with students in the residence halls? Raise the profile of the recycling program with campus decision makers? Draw attention to a new food composting program? Take the time to define one or two primary goals to guide the planning process.

Set a specific challenge or goal(s) that you want students, staff or the entire campus to achieve during the competition. Make sure it achievable during the time frame of the competition. Just because your school may be officially ranked in a multiple categories doesn’t mean you can’t narrow or refocus the specific challenge you communicate publicly. If your school is unlikely to rank highly in the national rankings, consider other ways to frame success. Examples:

• Compete against a specific rival(s) you are competitive against.
• Subgroupings such as other schools within your state or athletic conference.
• Focus on categories you’re most competitive in.
• Compete Against Your Own Record – If beating other school isn't a big motivator, ignore the rankings altogether and frame a challenge around a previous benchmark of your school’s recycling or composting efforts. Example: increase the average amount of recyclables collected by 10% from week one and week eight of the tournament.

The most successful examples of school participation in the Campus Race to Zero Waste comes from those that build teams with stakeholders across campus. Involving students and staff from other areas of campus can help to ensure buy in and support from those areas and be a means to leverage additional resources to promote the school’s involvement. This acts as an advisory group to help plan the campaign and to coordinate their respective department’s involvement supporting the program. Separately, you may have a core team of student volunteers or education staff that is involved in the day to day activities.
Some potential groups to include in your team planning:

• Facilities or physical plant dept.
• Student environmental clubs
• Residence hall council
• Student govt. association
• Dining facilities
• Athletics dept.
• Bookstore

• Develop clear and concise messaging that relays what the competition is, what your campus plans to accomplish and how students/staff can help
• Emphasize positive messages over messages that criticize people for not doing better.
• Don’t automatically lead with the environmental benefits of recycling. Incorporate the economic advantages of recycling, or highlight the many products we use every day that contain recycled content.
• Relate recycling back to your specific school instead of talking about it broadly.
• Coordinate your activities to fit your goals and messaging. For instance, if you’d like to decrease the amount of recyclables ending up in the trash stream, engage in some dumpster diving and do a waste audit in a highly visible area.
• Involve students in crafting the message. They are often full of creative ideas and may even know what will work better than you do.
• Don’t put out all your messaging at the beginning only to let it peter out throughout the competition. Think strategically about timing messages so that your audience maintains interest and becomes curious about what’s coming next.
• Portray recycling as a normalized behavior conducted by everyone. We are social creatures after all and while we may not always admit it, we do like to feel included by participating in what’s popular.