Showcasing Solutions
Showcasing solutions is a function within the field of social change that can motivate people to change their behaviors of social irresponsibility to others of social responsibility by giving them a practical, attainable result of that change.
The topic entitled "Understanding and Preparing for Change" discussed how people will readily accept a theory that offers the solution to a widely-known problem without doing anything personaly to inculcate it into their own lives. This phenomena is called social inertia, or resistance to change.
The problem of social inertia can be worked and resolved by a strategy of social marketing. Social marketing consists of affirmative actions taken to negate social inertia by bringing the affected persons along for the ride and working beside them to implement the solution. This involves offering easily-attainable, practical, and useful incentives and positive motivation for people to make the change. An important final goal of social marketing is to establish a permanent and sustainable change based on the new behavior and solution.
For example, some Guilford College students recently performed an energy conservation initiative in a student dormitory where the residents of three floors were placed into competition, one floor against the others. While getting them to conserve electricity by cutting off extra un-necessary lighting proved difficult, the students running the initiative then tried a social marketing strategy of offering a pizza party for the floor that would achieve the highest rate of energy conservation in a specified time.
Somehow by throwing pizza into the study, the students were able to motivate all three floors of residents to compete against each other in greater efforts to conserve energy, and actually saw unexpected gains beyond what they were looking for in the scope of their study. Not only was electricity and energy conserved, but massive quantities of pizza were consumed by the student resident winners, and the theory of social marketing had proved its value.
