Green Gown Awards 2018 - Nottingham Trent University - Finalist

The SDG Visual Displays project aims to stimulate curiosity and interest of the SDGs amongst the students at NTU, whilst encouraging them to make positive steps towards the underlying targets. The project followed leading research in communicating sustainability to build a communication campaign, looking at how to contextualise unfamiliar problems and encourage movement towards sustainable lifestyles. The campaign emphasises the importance of message framing, highlighting the need to tap into the creative potential of students to align messaging with the target audience.

To facilitate more sustainable attitudes and behaviours, students attended creative workshops carried out by the NTU’s Green Academy, encouraging participation in an interactive setting. During the workshops students looked at specific problems, applied different behaviour change models and worked together to find solutions that can be communicated to the rest of the university.

Three visual displays were created for this academic year 2017/2018, each commanding attention such as ‘The Sustainable Hippie and SDG14 Bottle-top Display’.

Top 3 learnings:

1. We found the most creative potential when including students in all phases of the project.

2. Framing our messaging around topical media that delivered fast impactful information had the best engagement.

3. We linked up/leap frogged off established groups to gain maximum impact during university events.