Convenience
Convenience is the act of increasing motivation to engage in a behavior by making the desired behavior easy and more appealing. Behaviors can be made more convenient by removing external barriers or by creating structural changes to the surrounding environment. Convenience can vary based on peoples’ perceptions, so strategies that are based on convenience need to be uniquely crafted based on individual situations. Keep in mind that convenience strategies can be labor-intensive (like building a footpath) and costly (like supplying leashes), but can be adapted based on your resources and capabilities.
Guidelines for Using Convenience as a Strategy:
- Identify the external barriers and constraints that exist around the desired behavior.
- Assess whether it is realistic to overcome the external constraints to the desired behavior, such as the convenience of walking through flocks of birds. Is it feasible to offer alternative routes around shorebird areas?
- Determine if there is a way to discourage competing behaviors by making them less convenient and more costly, such as issuing higher fines for breaking beach rules and regulations.
- Eliminate the perception of competing behaviors being convenient by making the desired behavior appear to be less troublesome and time-consuming.
- Combine convenience with other behavior change strategies, like commitment or norms.
Why is Convenience a Good Strategy to Use at My Site?
Your campaign will likely be unsuccessful if the behavior you are trying to promote is inconvenient, time-consuming, or unpleasant. Convenience can help change peoples’ perceptions or increase familiarity with the desired behavior if the actions they should take are visible and clearly defined.
This is a great strategy to use because it is adaptable, implemented with a wide range of resources and capabilities, and increase the likelihood of the behavior being adopted.
Convenience is an important strategy to consider because people will not adopt behaviors that seem time-consuming and troublesome.
Convenience in Action
Finding a Dog-Friendly Site Near You
Implementers at Lido Beach designed a campaign to reinforce the beach rule that dogs are not allowed on the site. To do this, they encouraged people to take their pets to alternative dog-friendly locations by combining prompt and convenience behavior change strategies. By placing these signs at beach entrances, visitors were reminded that their dogs were not allowed at this site, but could conveniently scan the QR code in the bottom right of the sign to find nearby beaches to take their dogs. In this case, visitors were provided with information that makes it easy for them to identify and visit dog-friendly areas the next time they go out.
Time Your Visit With the Tide
Implementers in Connecticut designed a campaign to encourage people to visit the beach at low tide to accommodate the narrow space between the waterline and the nesting area. When visitors come to the beach at high tide, it is nearly impossible to give birds space, but understanding the tide schedule can be inconvenient. Upon arrival to the beach, staff provided visitors with their own tide tables while communicating about the importance of giving birds space. This makes it easy for people to understand when the right time to go to the beach is for their next visit.
