Friday, July 14, 2006

Bag to the drawing board?

One of the biggest hurdles 'we' (I'm lumping us in with the whole e-advocacy movement here) face is persuading everday folk to change their ways in the cause of environmental good practice. So, while perhaps no great surprise, this was a disappointment: Bag re-use campaign fails to win over shoppers 

But to achieve this less than spectacular result, I am now more than a little interested in the cost of "A range of public relations and marketing tactics were tried during the campaign, including local media coverage, road shows, leafleting, in-store promotions, competitions and work with local schools."

And I frankly plain don't understand these two statements: "WRAP's report revealed that it had proved difficult in a pressured retail environment, to sustain all of the activities throughout the trial period of 10 weeks. At the time, WRAP said the campaign was going so well, it was extended by a few weeks."

While I made a nice little living in my career designing the things, another thing I am also not convinced about is that a logo is going to make much difference on the back of this. 

Time for a rethink?

Support your local supporter


This one is interesting. There I was in my local community centre, and what catches my eye but a leaflet advertising Freecycle. 'Ello, ello,' I says, 'where did they get the promo budget for all this, and how?'

Well, on closer inspection the answer to where is in the logos at the bottom. A few nice councils and some NGOs with tasty budgets.

How, of course, is another matter. And especially as I see merit in seeing how we can get them to engage with Junkk.com in the same way.

This, of course, will be an adventure.

The key hurdle is contained within that phrase 'voluntary
international organisation'. Which is up there in largesse attraction from funders with 'not for profit' and 'charity'. Those on nice index-
linked salaries and gold-plated pensions prefer you to either not be
making any money, or better yet a living either.

Now Freecycle is dead spiffy. It's free and serves a great re-
function. Just like our very own JunkkYard, and of course all the
other additional re-features Junkk.com brings that can prevent waste.
But sadly, even though we don't charge anyone for anything, we are
'commercial' so I see certain obstacles already, even though we by
any measure are doing a lot of good and deserve equal support.

Worth a try though. Watch this space.