What's wrong with this picture?
The Bromsgrove Litter Watch finished on Monday 20th April, having had a month to achieve the aim of promoting cleanness in my small town by examining certain areas. So now I’m looking back and evaluating – did I achieve my goal or not?
Armed with my five online tools, Twitter, Flickr, Pledgebank, Facebook and of course the lovely WordPress, I set myself the time limit of a month and used the pledge “I will dispose of waste correctly and help clear up Bromsgrove” as a timeline.
I’ll be measuring my success by the amount of feedback on Twitter, names on the pledge and comments on blog posts.
This proved to be my best resource for gaining feedback for ideas and signatures on the pledge. I would tweet comments such as “Opinions needed – does Bromsgrove need cleaning up litterwise?” and “Anyone want to help me pledge for a better Bromsgrove? http://bit.ly/zryJj“.
I found that the best way to gain feedback etc was by following people that live in Bromsgrove. I did this by using Chirpcity and using the search engine on Twitter.
A large portion of my blog hits came from posting links on Twitter.
Pledgebank
Posting general Tweets asking people to sign the pledge proved to be unsuccessful – a better method was messaging people personally, asking “Hello, I was wondering if you could sign up to my pledge to clean up Bromsgrove? http://bit.ly/TWbtH Would be very grateful!“
I found that asking for fifteen people to sign my pledge was very ambitious, and that it would have been easier and still effective to ask for a smaller number. To achieve the full number I resorted to using other methods (see below) to communicate with people.
The way that the pledge is phrased is purposefully ambiguous – it does not say that they will clear up other people’s litter, only that they will not litter themselves. However they could take it to mean that they need to actively clear up Bromsgrove.
I used a Facebook status with the link to the pledge because this was my biggest online resource to contact people in Bromsgrove. As I already had personal relationships with these people, they were perhaps more inclined to join my pledge than strangers would have been.
Blog/Flickr
I made good use of being a multimedia journalist and took my camera phone to places around Bromsgrove to examine the litter in the areas. It certainly made me want a better camera on my phone!
Looking back, I only had the time and facilities to examine two places in Bromsgrove – more would have been better but I covered the two main parks in the area.
I used these photos to create a Flickr album and used tags so that people interested in Bromsgrove would be aware of the situation.
Comments wise I did not receive comments on my blog like the Feedback I received on Twitter.
Other methods
To help with my numbers, I printed an A4 leaflet that could be cut into eight and handed them out to residents in Bromsgrove using my resource of a part-time job in the town. Again, it proved successful when I had prior personal relationships with these people.
Overall Evaluation
The big question is – will my pledgers stick to it? I sent them all a message after the pledge was successful thanking them for their support and stating that I hoped that they would stick to their promise.
There is nothing to say that they will but hopefully the fact that they were informed that the pledge was successful will make them feel binded to it.
On the whole, I hope that I raised awareness of the state of Bromsgrove and convinced even a few people to be more active with their actions about waste.
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