LIVE uses local youth data to challenge misconceptions about substance use. Through school posters, classroom presentations, and social media messaging, students learn that most of their peers are making healthy choices, correcting harmful misperceptions and reinforcing positive behavior.
it’s critical to make sure that the message you’re writing actually includes a social norm. There are 2 types of social norms:
Descriptive Norms: The behaviors engaged in by a majority of the members of an identified group or population.
Injunctive Norms: The beliefs held by a majority of the members of an identified group or population.
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Use a Majority Message, this means that when you’re analyzing your data to include your message, you should be using items that support your end goal and that over 50% of respondents chose the same option for. However, this doesn’t mean that you should completely avoid looking at items that scored low. You can still turn these into a majority message by flipping the verbiage and calculating the difference!
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Make the Social Norms Message Prominent and Focal
You can have the perfect social norms messages and still wind up with ineffective campaign materials if your messages are not the prominent and focal aspect of your designs. It is easy to get so caught up in creating flashy and attractive designs, that you forget that the whole purpose is to get your social norms message out to your target audience.
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Make the Message Clean and Simple
In addition to your social norms messages being the prominent and focal part of your design, they should also be clean and simple to read. If your audience has to work hard to understand the main point of your message whether it’s because of the verbiage of the statement, or conflicting design aspects, the message may not be received the way you want it to.
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Avoid Using Prescriptive Messages
It’s important that when designing your campaign, you avoid telling people what to do. Using phrases such as “do” and “do not” undermine the power of a social norms message. Survey data most likely won’t use those words, so if you’re using the data correctly by following the exact survey verbiage this means that these words should not appear in your message. If they do, you should double check all of your information and ensure you’re using the correct terminology in your message.
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Avoid Including Multiple Messages
Have you included more than one social norms data point? Displaying a graphic that includes several social norms messages/data points can weaken its effectiveness and make the evaluation of that message in the UCelebrate survey more difficult. Additionally, if your messages are rotated frequently, this could hurt the effectiveness and recall of the message in the long run. For the best results, you should stick to a single social norms message per design.
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Eliminate Competing Information
Social norms messaging should be cohesive and synergistic. Always pair a social norms message with related and appropriate information on posters/graphics. For example, if the social norms message talks about students drinking 0-3 drinks but is coupled with information on medical amnesty, it may undermine the social norms message.
