Update on Project Activities
This week, we met with Tom Kabat, who is highly involved with Menlo Spark and a current Green Challenge participant, to interview and feature him in our upcoming success story for the Green Challenge website. We created a to-do list for remaining tasks and divided up the work, ranging from organization of past notes, to continuing research for campaign strategies and finishing up our student project package. We also went back to Menlo Atherton to meet with Mr. Powell. His students had filled out our survey, and he had them ready for us. We collected them and gleaned over some of the student’s responses and thought they were varied and interesting. Lastly, we began work on our final presentation for next week. What We Observed and Learned This week, our social media research focused around Snapchat and potential features of the app that can be used to promote the Green Challenge amongst youth. Snapchat stories are a classic feature of the app, and allow users to post pictures and video that disappear from their profile after a 24 hour period. A newer feature of the “story” element is the ability to submit pictures/video to a collective “Story” that is comprised of multiple users or relates to a specific geographic location. For example, a few of Stanford’s dorms have Snapchat stories where members of the dorm can post footage from special dorm events or daily life. Menlo Spark could host a Green Challenge day designated by all schools participating in the Challenge and have students help create a public Snapchat story for the entire Green Challenge collective. For example, classes could create an assignment in which students post pictures or take videos of their climate actions to the Snapchat “Green Challenge” story throughout the day. Geofilters are filters that can be placed over pictures to show a person’s location, advertise a product or promote publicity for an event. In continuation, Menlo Spark’s Green Challenge day could have a specific geofilter for student and/or teacher use in order to publicize the event to their followers. There could be one geofilter that addresses the challenge as a whole, and geofilters that are specific to each participating school. We observed several trends in the survey responses. Many students are familiar with climate change and global warming and agree that it is relevant to their lives in Menlo Park. However, none of them were familiar with the Menlo Green Challenge. Nonetheless, the majority of the students that were surveyed have done some sustainable actions of their own and say that it made them feel better. Roughly half of the students stated that they’d like prizes or rewards for doing sustainable actions such as taking shorter showers and turning of the lights before leaving a room. Some said they wanted prizes for one action but not for the other, and others said they wanted no prizes at all. Nearly all of the students stated that Snapchat and Instagram were amongst their favorite apps. This places a great degree of importance on the MGC’s social media presence. We believe that it’ll be the best way to popularize the Menlo Green Challenge amongst students and the Menlo Park community. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward We have created a to-do list of things we’d like accomplish over the weekend. Each team member has taken up several tasks to complete by the end of the week. However, we will be meeting on Saturday afternoon to work together, discuss ideas and results, help each other, and finalize/practice our presentation. This week, we performed one more interview over the phone, analyzed the interview from the previous week, and came up with a plan for the next few weeks. We also were able to compensate for last week by finishing the Instagram writeup for our social media package.
On Monday, we conducted a phone interview with Ms. Thwaite, a middle school teacher in Menlo Park. Ms. Thwaite talked to us about her experience with the challenge and some of her concerns moving forward. One thing she mentioned was that she was unsure of the long term effects that the challenge had on the students. While they were motivated by prizes, she suggested that the kids probably would not continue “green actions” unless they felt emotionally connected to and moved by the plight of climate change. Another good piece of feedback that we were given was that it was pretty difficult to fit the challenge into the core curriculum. Her students had an ecology section where they watched An Inconvenient Truth, but it was difficult to motivate students outside of that particular section. One particularly useful suggestion was to look at each grade’s core requirements individually and come up with lesson plans that could be implemented for all three middle school grades at the same time. This would bolster the program and allow for more friendly competition and education amongst students. Like Mr. Powell, Ms. Thwaite emphasized that getting recognition for actions was a rewarding prize for kids. In addition, Ms. Thwaite continued to bring up the need for more internal motivation from the students. While prizes were fun, they did not necessarily result in long term behavioral change. Thus, we brainstormed together some ideas to get kids more motivated about climate change in general. One idea was to watch videos that motivated kids to do projects for their school. One year, students realized after watching a video on waste, that the paper trays used for lunch were incredibly wasteful and launched a campaign to lower the use of paper trays at their school dramatically. So, in essence, giving students the agency to decide how they will act and how they will make take action is very empowering and lead to a significant action. This is information we hope to use in developing our student project package. Through our Instagram social media research, we found two successful profiles related to environmental consciousness (Charity Water and General Electric) and analyzed their feed aesthetic and content to provide examples of Instagram engagement for Menlo Spark. A portion of our research related to feed appearance and photo quality. According to a study by Curalate, blue photos or photos with a higher proportion of background received more likes than reddish or multicolor photos. Photos that are more well lit and have a higher proportion of background space are also more favorable. We found all these techniques employed in both Charity Water and General Electric’s feeds. Instagram allows up to 2,200 characters per caption, or about 400 words total - however, shorter captions that have very clear intent and impact are more effective than longer ones. For example, Charity Water’s captions are extremely concise, corresponds with the images and showcases examples of how their cause affects individuals in developing countries. General Electric’s captions tend to be longer, which is perfectly acceptable as long as each sentence is written with intention and the captions are not too verbose or utilize complicated sentence structure and vocabulary. We then applied these principles to Menlo Spark’s current Instagram page and provided suggestions. Their feed is very white because the majority of the pictures are screenshots, meaning that they blend into Instagram’s white background and also blend into each other. This creates a lack of contrast and visual interest between images, and it is highly recommended that the posts do not have a white background in order to bring color into the feed. Many of their posts consist of pie graphs and charts, rather than showcasing an image related to the information (i.e. a picture of someone driving their car for a transportation emission statistic). Too much text in the images themselves detracts from the feed’s appearance, and because it is unlikely that users will want to analyze a pie chart and have to draw their own conclusions, they will skip over the post instead. Moving forward, we plan to use the information from both interviews to complete our student package and campaign strategy over the next two weeks. We are doing well on the social media and website suggestions, but will continue to work on integrating the green challenge into the core curriculum of various grade levels, creating lesson plans, and ways for students to be more engaged. Update on Project Activities
We are a little behind on our goals, as we have not completed the social media research or all the interviews, but we have a plan to get back on track. We were able to go to Menlo Atherton High School and meet with Mr. Powell, and are in the process of setting up a meeting with Ms. Thwaite for Monday. On Monday we also plan to meet for an extended amount of time to begin putting together our deliverables. We look forward to picking up the student survey results from Mr. Powell next week, which will give us more insight as to what students want out of a website, and what incentives would encourage them to take climate action. Mr. Powell shared a lot of information and ideas with us that we are excited to share with Diane and integrate into our project package. Ideas shared include: Anchoring the school work in the Next Generation Science Standards, and finding a way to integrate more data analysis. Having a scavenger hunt and/or photography contest. Getting people to stay engaged with the website by giving continuous point-earning opportunities, perhaps by having a sort of “snapchat streak” system that rewards you for logging in every so often. Another insight Mr. Powell shared was that it might be helpful to allow kids the chance to be acknowledged in a real way, such as being featured in the newspaper, given a certificate, or earning an honor cord for graduation. Also, as Menlo Spark builds its social media following, a feature on our Instagram, for example, will be very attractive to students who are active on social media. What We Observed and Learned With this process we are learning how important it is to interact with people in the community you are trying to serve. While we had good ideas on our own, Mr.Powell gave us insight and answered questions that we could not have gotten off of Google. It is one thing to know statistics; it’s another thing to know the students. We look forward to reading the student survey results and talking with Ms. Thwaite to further our understanding of the students of Menlo Park, to help our community partner, Menlo Spark, reach the most amount of people most effectively, because that is the only way they will reach their goal of a climate neutral city by 2025. Critical Analysis and Moving Forward Moving forward, we want to integrate the information we already have into rough drafts of the social media strategies document and student project package. These will be updated as we gather more information from students and teachers. We have also put a notice out in the Menlo Spark e-newsletter soliciting for a family to interview to update the ‘Family Success Story’ portion of the Menlo Spark website but have not located a family yet. One big take away from last week was that we were a little ambitious with our initial timeline, but we also learned how to work with unexpected challenges and create a plan that reflects our realities. As we are all excited about where this project is going, we look forward to our long meeting on Monday as a time to sit down, discuss, and write together about our project deliverables. Update on Project Activities
We had our weekly conference call with Diane where we updated her on our progress. We wrote up survey and interview questions for students and teachers as well as a blurb for the Challenge’s newsletter. We sent our questions to Diane so she could look over them and give us feedback. She thought the questions were great overall and gave us a few corrections to make as well. The team has been in contact with Ms. Thwaite from La Entrada Middle School for our teacher interview, and we are very close to locking a date for our meeting. Contacting Mr. Powell from Menlo Atherton High School has been a challenge, but we hope he’ll respond to us soon. What We Observed and Learned This week, we began to research social media strategies related to Instagram in hopes of revitalizing the Menlo Spark Instagram page. Creating and maintaining a recognizable color theme is important to drive traffic onto an Instagram account. Brands with a huge follower base tend to cultivate some sort of color scheme with their posts to create a mood and/or a sense of visual cohesiveness. For the Menlo Spark page, since the organization is concerned with the environment and sustainability, maybe using colors commonly associated with those topics, such as green (“going green”) and blue, could act as a starting point. When using hashtags, it is recommended to use a mixture of popular and non-popular hashtags; a single post will get lost very quickly on a popular hashtag page, whereas a post will get no exposure with a non-popular hashtag because few individuals will actually be checking the page itself. Additionally, researching banned hashtags is extremely important to prevent one’s account from being accidentally banned or marked as a spam account. Some common hashtags, including #tgif, and other random ones, such as #brain and #publicrelations, have been banned due to the nature of content posted on these hashtag pages (usually inappropriate or flagged). If an account accidentally uses a banned hashtag in conjunction with other hashtags, their post will not appear on any of the other hashtag pages, which drastically reduces engagement. When creating hashtag clusters for posting, changing up the hashtags used between each post is key to distinguish yourself from a potential bot or spam account. The first posts could use about 10-15 hashtags, for example, and in the future be increased to about 20-25 (never going over 30, which is the maximum allowed). It is also useful to post hashtags in your caption rather than in a separate comment, which can be perceived as bot-like behavior. The teacher interview questions are focused on how the teacher felt running the Challenge in their classes, how to increase student engagement in sustainable behavior, finding what motivates students to participate, and what areas of the Challenge need improvement. Diane felt that asking teachers to see if they could get us in contact with a family for our success story would be asking them to overstep their boundaries. Therefore, we won’t ask Ms. Thwaite or Mr. Powell to do that. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Moving forward into next week, we plan on having at least one teacher interview. We are planning on meeting Ms. Thwaite on Monday afternoon, and we’ll know if the meeting time and date are definitive once she gets back to us on her availability. We also hope to hear back from Mr. Powell. By now, we’ve sent three emails asking to see if he’ll meet us, but we have received no response from him yet. During our conference call on Wednesday, Diane said she could help in arranging that meeting. We also plan on using the what we have learned from literature on fostering sustainable behavior when we go out on the field in the coming weeks to survey students and families in Menlo Park. Update on Project Activities
Last Friday, our team met in Palo Alto with Diane and Lisa, one of the main leaders in creating and managing the Green Challenge websites for multiple Bay Area cities. During our meeting, we learned about Lisa’s specific vision behind the Green Challenge and used Lisa as a sounding board for our website suggestions. In addition, we began to discuss social media strategies and methods to motivate users to stay engaged with the site in the long term. This week, we began formulating survey and interview questions for students and teachers. We were able to have our weekly conference call with Diane, and were able to talk with her about the type of information that would be most useful for her to have. Areas of importance, to be focused on in the survey, include: residents’ familiarity with climate change and the Menlo Green Challenge, actions that are feasible and attractive to complete, features that make websites appealing and easy to use, and prizes that motivate users to take on the Challenge. We also began preliminary work on the Household Success story by creating interview questions and writing a brief newsletter for Diane to send to the site mailing list early next week. What We Observed and Learned Before going over our suggestions, Lisa outlined her previous work with the Palo Alto Climate Action Plan and how it contributed to the creation of the Green Challenge. Specifically, she discussed how she channeled her passions for activism and climate policy to lead a neighborhood sustainability effort and the strategies she tried during this period. For example, she advised us to promote discussions regarding the impacts and actions people choose in order to help them visualize their carbon footprint and encourage competition between teams. As these discussions became more prevalent in her neighborhood, it became difficult to track their process without a metric. Therefore, Lisa created an online platform to gage a city’s specific carbon footprint and estimate personal energy use while also involving an aspect of competition. Since Lisa crowdsourced her website through each stage, she wanted us to give feedback on a few of her future updates for the site. First, she mentioned the addition of new options to sort the grid categories by preference, such as allowing users to filter out actions they would never pursue. Her two largest proposals, however, were the addition of a student-specific action category for students and younger participants, and the rollout of a community submission page with a status feed and like/comment features. The goal of the latter is to prompt people to post pictures of their own actions, encourage friendly competition amongst household teams and facilitate the creation of a Green Challenge mobile app. Next, our team was able to make thoughtful recommendations to improve the user-friendliness of the site. Lisa explained to us that the difficulty levels combine time and money considerations, and that the survey is missing some energy and travel averages that would facilitate the process for students unable to contact their parents for help. We believe that these clarifications and tools should be made available on the site in the form of a question mark or alternative pop-up bubble. Unfortunately, we realized that a few of our suggestions are not feasible. For example, adding source citations to all the action pages, or filtering actions based on the survey answers provided would require structural changes to the website that are extremely time intensive. Unfortunately, Diane also alerted us that the City of Menlo Park does not necessarily endorse Menlo Spark’s 2025 target for climate neutrality, and that the goal cannot be publicized on the Green Challenge website. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward As this week comes to a close, we assess that we are in a good position in our task timeline heading into Week 6. We have come up with a draft for surveys we’d like to hand to students and residents of Menlo Park. We also came up with important questions for the teachers that have run the Challenge before in their classrooms, and we’ve reached out to these teachers to set up interviews. Moving forward, we’ll send the survey and interview questions to Diane so she can look over them and give us feedback, and we’ll look forward to setting concrete dates to meet with teachers at La Entrada Middle School and Menlo Atherton High School. |
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