Adopt-a-Drain--Measuring the impact of resident engagement on water resources

Engaging local residents to prevent water pollution can be difficult, measuring and sustaining their engagement even more so. How do we know whether people are seeing and responding to our clean water messages? Are we just preaching the choir? When people do respond to our campaigns, does it have a real impact on water resources? If so, how can we measure that? Hamline University engaged in a multi-year planning process with staff from fifty cities and watershed districts in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area to grapple with these questions. What resulted is a research-based Adopt a Storm Drain program that uses best practices in Environmental Psychology and Social Marketing to engage residents in water protection, supported by a web application and online data management system that gives city and watershed district staff access to detailed reporting and analytics for participants in their area.