Making Shift Happen: Designing for Successful Environmental Behavior Change

The changemaker's guide to catalyzing environmental behavior change for a healthy future

An engagingly written, scientifically grounded treatment of what specific steps we each can take to combat the specter of climate change and its toxic effects. Count me impressed.
- Robert B. Cialdini, author, Influence and Pre-Suasion

Brilliantly reveals that the only way to make meaningful progress on complex environmental issues is to understand that they must be addressed as human issues.
- Steve McCormick, managing director, Draper Richard Kaplan Foundation, and former president and CEO, The Nature Conservancy

TO TACKLE OUR urgent environmental problems and achieve positive, durable change, we must design solutions based directly on how people think, make decisions, and act.

From hotels that save water and money using simple signage, to energy suppliers that boost participation in renewable energy programs through mere enrollment form tweaks - shifting the behavior of millions for the better is possible.

Based on decades of research into what drives behavior change, Making Shift Happen provides a suite of powerful tools to transform the world. It features A to Z guidance on how to design a behavior change initiative - from choosing the right audience and uncovering what drives their behavior, to designing, prototyping, testing, and implementation.

Clear instructions and real-world examples empower you to apply hundreds of behavioral science solutions including:

• Using social norms to spread positive environmental behaviors
• Selecting and testing stories, metaphors, and values to frame information for each audience
• Catalyzing action by aligning your initiative with your audience's personal and social motivators
• Breaking bad habits and building positive ones
• Capturing your audience's attention and reducing barriers to action
• Connecting people with nature and building empathy for the environment and its inhabitants.

Making Shift Happen is a must-have guide for practitioners in non-profits, governments, and businesses looking to design successful campaigns and initiatives that shift behaviors and mindsets toward positive environmental outcomes and a better future for all.

A fascinating workshop-in-a-book that takes practitioners through the entire intervention design and implementation process of creating the conditions under which change happens, grows, and endures.
- Raymond De Young, professor, University of Michigan, co-author, The Localization Reader

Making Shift Happen brings behavioral science alive. It's timely, grounded in behavioral science, and practical.
- Wesley Schultz, Professor of Psychological Science, California State University

Nya Van Leuvan, MA, Lauren Highleyman, MS, Rod Fujita, PhD, and Ashleigh Kellerman are experts in applying science-based behavior change interventions to solve large scale conservation problems. They wrote Making Shift Happen through the non-profit, Root Solutions, based in the San Francisco Bay area.