Support for “Carbon-Free Fairfax” Outreach Initiative

One of the most populous counties in the United States, Fairfax County, Virginia, set an aggressive goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030. To help meet this goal, the county needed to motivate its residents, businesses, and key stakeholders to decrease their climate-warming GHG emissions.

Fairfax County’s Office of Environmental and Energy Coordination engaged ERG to support an outreach initiative that involved a series of “Carbon-Free Fairfax” campaigns. Early in the project, ERG conducted a survey to better understand the knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, demographics, and cultural considerations of key target audiences. Based on the survey results, we identified topics that resonated with the “moveable middle.” We then worked in collaboration with Fairfax County to develop a suite of branded creative collateral focusing on these topics for use across the campaigns to promote actions that residents and businesses can take to reduce GHG emissions. These outreach products included infographics, short social media videos, longer testimonial-style videos, social media posts and graphics, and blog posts. Campaign topics included electric vehicles, residential solar installation and use, home energy assessments, simple ways to reduce emissions at home, alternative forms of transportation in the county, and the financial benefits of reducing emissions.