Once upon a time, on a cold and windy Halloweeny evening, a few brave Futerrans ventured to the depths of Southwark to learn about the ghosts of that area. The walking tour was compelling, as ghost stories notoriously are, and it got me thinking about what we can learn from this ancient art for our own sustainability communication purposes…

1. Atmosphere is everything – if this ghost walk had taken place on a sunny July afternoon, I doubt we would have given it much attention at all. But on a cold and dark autumn evening, the group stuck pretty close together.

   In the same way, your communications need to come at the right time – a campaign to encourage draught busting in the home won’t be very effective during the heat of summer.

2. Know your facts – our ghost walk was lead by a local historian. His expertise was obvious and this helped blur the line between factual history and ghost story – making it much more likely we were going to believe the latter.

   A display of expertise is a short cut to trustworthiness (one of our 10 Rules of Communicating Sustainability PDF). This is important whatever you’re trying to get your audience to believe in, from beheaded horsemen to the pros of lowering their washing machine temperature.

3. Gimmicks and overkill don’t work – one of the reasons I enjoyed this ghost walk more than others I’ve been on was the lack of ‘spooky’ effects – no try-hard top hat and cane, no forced group activities and definitely no ‘surprise’ visitors. Instead, enjoyment came directly from the stories of the local area – some ghostly, some not.

   When you’re trying to change unsustainable behaviour or give a convincing argument, cheap gimmicks or obvious devices rarely work; they’ll fail even harder if you don’t have a solid base of something worth saying to back your work up.

4. Social proof – a couple of times during the walk, our guide referred to his stories’ sources: most of them came via friends or acquaintances, picked up on other ghost walks or, in a couple of cases, experienced personally.

   Communicating about sustainability becomes much more powerful once you start including a similar kind of social proof. For example, talking about other people who have adopted a new behaviour is essentially the equivalent of saying ‘most people I bring here say they feel suddenly cold’. Brrrr.

5. Make a connection – I’ve only ever gone on ghost walks in an area that I’m familiar with. Wandering around London Bridge, the stories I heard came to life as I connected them with places that I’d walked past many times before.

   Relating sustainability communications to a personal circle is another of our Rules – just like I’d be unlikely to go on a ghost walk in a city I was visiting for one night, so I’m unlikely to take action on something that’ll cut carbon emissions in Asia, for example. But if that’s the action you really want me to take, try to make a connection between my geography and the place I’ll be helping.

6. Make your audience want to believe – None of these ghost walkers were there to heckle; in fact, because the guide was a well known local figure and a lovely guy to boot, there was a great deal of goodwill within the group. This positivity spilled over to the stories – we weren’t in a sceptical frame of mind, we were there to be entertained and, to some extent, informed.

   This is a particularly powerful technique in communicating sustainability. If you’re talking to an audience that would rather believe you than not, how can you fail? The trick of course is getting to this stage…but that sounds like a good subject for another blog post.

This ghost walk was run by John Constable, playwright, poet and local historian. Oh, and if you’re looking for how to actually tell a ghost story, try this.