Using Co-Design to Create Community Advocacy for Biosecurity Behavior Change

Background: New Zealand’s Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) manages the “declare or dispose” biosecurity border compliance social marketing program. Its aim is to protect the country’s important horticulture and agriculture industries from imported pests and diseases, and its environment. The program encourages visitors to New Zealand to leave potential biosecurity risk items at home or dispose in specially marked bins on arrival. An important part of this is having New Zealand ethnic communities advocate on MPI’s behalf to friends and family overseas to follow the biosecurity rules. To fully engage the community to be advocates, it was felt that the community should be involved in the creation of this aspect of the program. Focus of the article: The article is a case study explaining how MPI used co-design methodology to create an advocacy program with a local community to assist behavior change in overseas visitors. The article focusses on the process and planning (including following a six-step co-design model) from a practitioners’ perspective to develop a program co-created with the target audience, rather than the final interventions developed. Program design/approach: The “declare or dispose” program had been solely “expert led” and designed by social marketers and researchers. The program is heavily influenced by a mix of quantitative and ethnographic research. These feed into customer journey mapping where interventions are inserted to influence audiences’ behavior. To assist in advocacy from the New Zealand Indian community to friends and family overseas, a customer led co-design process was developed to create community engagement and advocacy. Methods: MPI ran three co-design sessions involving members of local Indian community groups. The sessions used a mixture of card sorting and open discussion within small groups. The card sorting was used to review, and rate current interventions used in the behavior change program (including interventions both overseas direct to visitors and locally to community members). The open discussion asked participants to generate new ideas for potential new interventions to reach visitors. Results: Through the ranking of existing tools and participant suggestions of new ideas—MPI has developed an advocacy program that spans expert-led and user-led interventions. As hoped, the user-led suggestions were at a community-based level, resulting in a stronger buy-in from the community to deliver advocacy messages to overseas friends and family. Recommendations for practice: The article is useful for practitioners by detailing how to not only use co-design for creating new ideas, but also to evaluate existing ones to create a program blending both expert- and user-led interventions. MPI followed a six-step co-design process to organize its co-design program. This ensured that the right preparation was followed, sessions were effective, and the desired results of the program were achieved.