Social Norms Message Creation Guide

Social Norms Message Creation Guide - A step by step guide to creating catchy, positive, data-based social norms messaging

1. Use Social Norms

In order for your social norms campaign to be effective and create the change you wish to see, 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.

2. Use a Majority Message

The consistent piece in the definitions of the two categories of social norms is that they concern the majority of a group or population. 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! For example, if 10% of students reported that they don’t stay with a group of friends when they partied (not a majority message), this could mean that 90% of students do stay with friends when they party (which is a majority message)! Some additional examples are listed below to help you out. If you’re creating a message targeted towards students at X University:

• NOT Social Norms: “30% of X University students approve of drinking to the point of passing out”
• Social Norms: “70% of X University students disapprove of drinking to the point of passing out”

3. 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. While you certainly want to catch the attention of your audience using visual features, you want these features to supplement your social norms message rather than the other way around.

4. 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.

5. Use Data Correctly

Ensuring you’re using your data correctly is a key step to producing the results you’d like to see, and being able to properly evaluate your campaign later. In order to correctly use survey data to produce a social norms message, your message should use whole numbers. For example:

• DO Use:
  • “80%”
  • “8/10”
• Do NOT Use:
• 
  
  • “79.7%” → You’d want to round this number to “80%”

When using survey data to produce a social norms message, you should also follow the exact verbiage included in the survey you pulled the data from. For example, if you used a survey item that stated “Do you approve of getting medical help for a friend who has drunk too much alcohol?”, your social norms message might look like this: ” 94% of MSU students approve of getting medical help for a friend who has drunk too much alcohol.”

6. Cite a Credible Source

Using a credible source can make or break whether your target audience is accepting of your social norms message. You need to ensure that your source is relevant to the information you’re including in your message and used proper research protocol. Additionally, you need to know how to cite your source correctly within your campaign materials.