Engaging Residents: Connecting with Residents Who Don’t Recycle

In this two-part series, we’ll be looking at ways to connect with new residents and build long term relationships that help increase your compliance rates. This week, we’ll focus on residents who don’t currently recycle and find ways to convert them into engaged citizens.

It’s hard enough maintaining recycling education and awareness programs that speak to residents who are already on board with recycling.  But what about that group who either don’t really care or can’t be bothered? If you’re talking to people who aren’t engaged, then your education efforts may fall on deaf ears, and both your time and budget will be wasted.

So, how do you get the attention of people who aren’t actively interested in recycling? Spending more money on educational materials likely won’t change people’s minds, and everyone is so overwhelmed with information these days, it’s easy for your message to get missed or, worse, ignored.

There are several ways to convert residents disinterested in recycling into engaged ones.

We find the most effective are:

1. Tapping into your residents’ networks and get them to do the work for you,
2. Creating accessible systems that make information easily available with minimal effort, and
3. Providing a library of easily accessible, fun and useful information that takes the work out of learning.

Recycle Coach helps you achieve all three of these goals through a broad range of tools and features built into our platform.

The Power of Word of Mouth

One of the best ways to bring new residents into your recycling program is by leveraging the people who already participate. The numbers are clear – referrals from friends and family work. A recent Nielson poll discovered that a full eighty-three percent of online users trust recommendations from friends and family. Statistically, referrals are the most effective form of marketing by far.

The Recycle Coach Network was built with this objective in mind. Municipalities share Recycle Coach to their residents, who then tell friends and family in neighboring cities. In turn, those friends and relatives visit the Recycle Coach website, download the app, call up the Facebook chatbot, or ask Google Home or Alexa about it. Since their first interaction with Recycle Coach likely came from a trusted source, they are more likely to jump on board and begin exploring our many recycling-related resources. These actions will continuously connect you with more and more residents.

Making it easy

Recycle Coach is dedicated to using all the latest technology to make recycling easy and accessible for everyone. In the dark days before in the internet, we were creating print calendars and posters to help cities communicate with their residents. Today, we offer web plugins that are easy to add to your website and even easier for residents to use. Our mobile apps put information directly in the hands of the people who need it, and now Recycle Coach is fully integrated with digital assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant, which means answers are now available everywhere, hands-free.

Quizzes: Our “What Type of Recycler Are You?” quiz challenges residents’ knowledge of a wide range of recycling topics. It both educates the user, showing them areas where they can improve their recycling habits, and invites them to challenge friends and family to compare scores. A large amount of the word-of-mouth awareness we generate comes from this quiz.

Interactive Databases: Our “What Goes Where” feature contains a comprehensive list of items and instructions on how to recycle them. The feature is not only handy, but our web plugin means residents can access the information without even downloading the app.  And every item is shareable, which makes it easy to spread the word.

To take things to the next level, users can also access the “What Goes Where” directory through Alexa or Google Home.

Blog Posts: A steady stream of helpful tips and tricks brings your residents to our website every day. While most of these visitors are already interested in recycling, they’re also keen to share what they know, and every time they post an article on Facebook or send a link via email, they become part of your education network.

Recycle Coach is designed to maximize the connections between your engaged residents and their less motivated friends and relatives. This means we’re doing most of the heavy lifting for you, leaving you free to concentrate on other priorities. And because we’re doing all this as an integrated part of our widely used system, we can help you reach more residents for less.

About us

We save people time and energy with intuitive digital tools that make recycling easy. Our goal is to be in every city, on every device, empowering communities to work together to waste less and recycle more. We’re recycling simplified.