Can I interest you in this 10-minute survey?

Do you live in Edmonton? Can you spare 10 minutes to grow an environmentally sustainable transportation alternative? Please take the People's Pedal survey.

For some time I've talked about social marketing (the "old" meaning of "social marketing" that convinces people to take up environmentally sustainable behaviours, care about social causes, and so forth, not just word-of-mouth buzz on Facebook and similar sites) as something that activists, advocates and educators could find to be more valuable than a website itself. Barriers to website creation are getting slightly lower, while the competition for our attention gets more intense.

It's not that the custom-built website is obsolete by any means (nor is it any less fun to make cool stuff for grassroots groups). What I found, however, is that advocates do not use their sites as effectively as they could, even when their sites are decked out with cool community-based features. A gap that grassroots advocates, activists and educators really need filling is in social marketing. Mind you, I think most folks who work grassroots already have pieces of this knowledge. What a "community-based social marketer" needs to be is a facilitator — one who brings the grassroots group together to come up with what is the most important unknown aspect to our/their work. As a group, we sit down to challenge the assumptions that we might all bring to the group's activities — especially those assumptions related to others' perception of our work.

I have come to feel that community-based social marketers are needed because there is a consistently missing piece between what grassroots advocates do and our goals. Imagine that activists are in charge of building staircases, for example. At the bottom of the staircase is the identification of a social need or problem that brings together the group. At the top of the staircase is the accomplished desired social change. You could say that the way we grassroots advocates currently go about our business, there is usually a "missing stair" somewhere in the middle of the staircase. We hold teach-ins, show films we've made, bring in speakers, hold conferences, all for the sake of awareness. But we rarely understand how information and awareness translate into action.

Largely, this choice is because of time issue and the need to focus on one kind of activity. Changing laws is difficult to do from our social position, making films and holding conferences is more likely within our grasp. But still, a gap remains. The gap is this: there is not really an understanding, once people leave the conference, leave the theatre, leave the website, about what people do with their new-found awareness.

Thus, enter my first effort with bona fide foray into community-based social marketing, with People's Pedal. The People's Pedal is a bicycle sharing society located in Edmonton, Alberta. They provide bicycles at hubs around the city for the use of their members. Once you purchase a really dirt-cheap membership ($25 for a year), it's easy to use—just pick up a bike from a hub, ride around, and then lock it back up at the nearest hub. You can get yourself on to one of their bikes for a mere $25, or if you're visiting Edmonton, for $5 a month.

I got a contract with the Pedal last semester to do social research for them several months ago. I began with brainstorming with them what they wanted to know. After much discussion, we decided on social research that would elaborate the links between barriers to cycling in Edmonton, how people in Edmonton solve or work around those problems (or don't), and what they knew about People's Pedal— and if people think access to a 24/7 bike network can solve some of their commuting problems and lack of cool date ideas. After this, I moved on to readings on bicycle research (to find out what had already been covered), did a schwack of reading on social marketing, pulled out all those old textbooks from required sociology courses on survey and focus group design.

The first public manifestation of this work is this survey (click to take it). It's recently been finalized, after much crash testing, and is now live on their site. We used surveymonkey for its cool tools. I'll be conducting the survey via the web this way, but spending a number of hours doing a telephone survey version, as well as conducting in-person surveys and focus groups.

It's funny how when you're doing a survey "embedded" in the community as such, your own assumptions get in the way. Consistent with the non-profit sector generally, the rotating board of the Pedal is composed of highly educated people. All of my other friends on Facebook, who I had crash-test my survey, are mostly in the same demographic. We made minor changes. When my friend Mark crash-tested my survey as I had written it, he was frustrated with it, and said that it sounded "like a law school exam!" His work was invaluable in crunching my questions down to what they really were after, phrasing them more simply, and brutally cutting other questions as irrelevant — an amazing skill to have. Many of the questions wordings you see are a result of my collaboration with him.

Stay tuned for the results, which will be posted in July.

“All those birds on a wire gonna say we’re liars…”

Remember the old joke about always being able to tell which car is the mechanic's car because it's the most beat-up, broken-down one? The mechanic is so busy making other people's cars look and run pretty that there's no time to fix her own. We know, we know, oxygensmith.com has been a mechanics' website for a little too long. Weeds may continue to grow up through the floorboards for the next few weeks on this site, but really! Look for some changes soon.

“Courts and government legislation are controlled by persons who personally benefit from extraction”

Our good buddy Cosanna Preston wrote an article for Z Magazine that's a good introduction to the plight of the Lubicon Cree in Alberta, just in case you were unfamiliar. Check out Friends of the Lubicon Alberta for more info. FoLA got some good coverage on the national day of action June 30 which is captured in a video here.