23. A Community-Based Social Marketing Anti-littering Campaign: Be the Street You Want to See

The “Be the Street You Want to See” (BTS) is a regional litter abatement program developed by the Bay Area Stormwater Management Agencies Association (BASMAA) in California. The program primarily targeted 14–24-year-old San Francisco Bay Area youth who had been identified as a key polluting demographic. The program, launched in 2012, applied community-based social marketing techniques to a well-defined audience to reduce pollution. BTS focused heavily on social media with the end goal of promoting peer-to-peer interactions regarding littering and raising awareness of its environmental impacts. Whenever possible, the program involved the members of the target audience themselves and invited them to recast environmental messaging in their own words. In this way, the content of the campaign remained fresh and relatable, and the target audience felt the program was talking “with them,” not “at them.”