How to Reach More Residents With Your Recycling Outreach

When your budget is tight, it’s easy to feel limited in your ability to reach residents with recycling information. It takes time and energy to build a recycling program on your own, not to mention getting the word out to residents about its intricacies. The end goal is always to reach more residents with the right information. But because there are a number of forces that sometimes get in your way, we’ve assembled a list of tips to maximize recycling outreach on a budget.

How to reach more residents with your recycling outreach programs:

Build a subscription list by leveraging already existing resident network 

A widely used strategy for recycling outreach involves building a comprehensive subscription list of residents in
your municipality. This list provides your office with the ability to reach out to residents directly—via email, text or even through customized recycling mobile applications.

But regardless of the “reach out” method that you choose, using tools that help you develop your subscription list, is a cost-effective way to getting the right message to more residents, more efficiently.  And a fast way to grow your subscription list, at an affordable cost, is by joining large recycling networks like  Nixle, Next Door, or even Recycle Coach, who might already have many of your residents in their system. Joining forces with networks like these is cheaper and easier than building a subscription list from scratch by yourself.

Voice search, digital assistants, and chatbots

Voice search preferences on on the rise – especially in younger generations. With Recycle Coach, residents simply need to activate their digital assistants (such as ‘OK Google’) and tell them ‘Ask Recycle Coach‘ or ‘Ask the Waste Wizard‘ how to recycle anything. Everyone who owns a device can immediately start using it –  no downloads required! Contact us to customize the disposal instructions for your municipality.

If they do not have a digital assistant, the Facebook chatbot for ‘What Goes Where?’ can be activated by simply messaging Recycle Coach on Facebook!

Web and mobile apps

An effective way to not only reach out to residents, but maintain a state of ongoing two-way communication, is to leverage the potential of mobile and web app technology. There are free and affordable technological tools like these available today, that allow you to reach out to residents (in real time) with important recycling information. Recycling web and mobile apps are subscription based, help you grow your contact list and also allow you to monitor resident usage. Web apps fit within your municipality’s website and are custom built for your specific program. By leveraging these tools, you residents have 24/7 access to recycling and waste disposal information and you have 24/7 access to them.

Print materials

Newspaper articles, newsletters, recycling calendars and flyers are still great ways to get the message out about your recycling programs. There are a number of companies that create custom built print calendars for municipalities, or, you may even decide to create one on your own. And pitching stories about upcoming recycling events of program changes to community print journalists is a great way to get the word out to residents who still use newspaper as a way to stay informed.

Events and school presentations

Holding events like city-wide garage sales or “Repair Cafés” are good ways to both broaden and fill in the gaps of your recycling program’s reach. Events like these are where community “doers” can come out, bond and have some facetime with fellow neighbors in their recycling network. School presentations are also great ways to elevate the amount of face-to-face contact you have with residents and reach younger children with your program before they start making recycling decisions of their own.

Social Media

Setting up a Facebook, Instagram or Twitter page for your municipality is another way to spread the word about your program and also, it’s costless. Once a blog article or event update is posted on one of these sites, by you, it is instantly shared on residents’ feeds across your municipality, increasing the number of eyeballs tuning into your program. You also have the option to create your own content or can choose to share blog articles and information from already existing platforms with editorial content like Recycle Bank, GoingZeroWaste, and RecycleNation.

These are 5 tips to maximizing your municipalities recycling outreach on a budget.