Can you help think up a slogan, or a couple of concise sentences, to quickly convey the aims of the One Person Can project?
Those who take the time to look over the One Person Can website "get" what it is all about, but I'm still struggling to find a really short and effective message that grabs busy people's attention and makes them stop long enough to read the Home page and take the OPC survey.
The premises behind the project are simple and logical, and the visibility concept is not rocket science, yet it is devilishly hard to get across the importance of safe-climate action visibility in just a sentence or two (the amount of space typically available for promoting OPC in e-newsletters and on websites). The logic goes something like this:
- In order to act on climate change, people need to think they are capable of solving it.
- The average household can eliminate their own GHG emissions if they give that high enough priority.
- If most households did that, the problem could be solved.
- However, no household will feel capable of solving climate change if they think nobody else is eliminating emissions.
- Despite the above, numerous householders are already reducing/eliminating their GHG emissions, but these actions have very low visibility.
- If everyone could see all these existing actions, collectively solving climate change would seem possible.
- If a collective climate change solution seems possible, more people would take action, and people would take more action.
Key problems:
- We tend not to realise how invisible most safe-climate actions are.
- People who have been living sustainably for years and are surrounded by like-minded friends might forget the wider public does not know what they do.
- Even if people "get" all the above, in order to invest 10 minutes in taking the OPC survey, they need to think the OPC project itself can become visible enough to have the intended effect.
OPC is designed for the general public, but the first step is to get LOTS more survey results to show in the graphs. That would be easy to achieve if I could reach all the 'already converted' and persuade them to take the survey.
Hundreds of heads are better than one. If you have suggestions, please comment or email me!
