El Paso Water: Illegal Dumping Behavior Change Campaign

The Project

We recently sat down with our local water utility to discuss a big problem in our community, namely illegal dumping in our waterways, storm drains and canals. While it’s not only an eyesore, it can block important drainage networks and even lead to dangerous flooding. And if you’re familiar with our past work for El Paso Water, you know the hazards posed by flash floods. 

When it comes to the safety of our community, we’re always on board. So to tackle this behavior change campaign, we knew we’d have to get our hands a little dirty and take out the trash!

The Approach

In any behavior change campaign, insight and education play a critical role. That’s why our first step was to understand why our community had an illegal dumping issue.

We held several focus groups to dig deeper into the pesky problem of illegal dumping and learned that it simply boiled down to a lack of awareness. Believe it or not, many of our community members didn’t understand exactly what illegal dumping was, or its potential negative effects. Once we had this insight we moved on to messaging.

To gain our community’s attention, we first began by educating them to the fact that in the past year over 140,000 pounds of trash had been illegally dumped in local waterways. We also provided an easy to understand relative comparison and shared that this number was the same as the weight of a herd of elephants! This surprising fact provided a visual context that was too large to ignore. To underscore this point, we commissioned local artist Jason Brewer with Jackrabbit Trading Co. to create a large-scale model elephant built entirely from illegally dumped trash sourced throughout our community. The “trashy-derm” was then premiered at El Paso Water's media kick-off event. Now we were truly addressing the elephant in the room!

Next we launched a full-scale, multimedia awareness and education campaign. Our message tier was clear and focused; first we defined illegal dumping, then outlined its consequences and finally provided a call-to-action in the form of a hotline where residents could call to report illegal dumping. While the city at large received our message, we also hyper-targeted problem areas within the community for even greater impact.

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Through paid placement, social sharing and unpaid earned media, our campaign rollout was a success. The campaign is still active, but we’re anxious to share its results once it’s completed.

Check back soon!