Foul play – council's online campaign shames dog owners leaving mess

In Monmouthshire the problem of people leaving dog poo around, or even putting it in a bag and hanging it on trees, has given us an opportunity to get better at talking to residents.

In Caldicot, the town and community councils are working with us to address the problem of irresponsible dog owners. My team decided that the first stage of tackling this would be to get people talking about the issue online over Christmas.

So we have been sharing pictures on social media to make people think about their actions and change behaviour. After all, nobody wants to step in poo. One image we have shared shows a sad looking jack russell and the caption "You just leave it on the floor for people to step in?" with the hashtag "shame" in the corner.

The campaign is a bit of fun, and to make sure more people have time to share and comment on the images we have thought about when we time our posts; mainly doing them on weekends.

But this is not just about dog poo. It is part of bigger plans to listen to and get ideas from our communities about how we will set a budget with millions of pounds less than we need. If people are comfortable talking to their council about these issues then hopefully they'll be more likely to get involved in these budget setting issues.

The plan was to use visuals and see the success of our #shame campaign before we put more effort in to a wider initiative. To be visual we needed to create a meme. I read a blog post that says tweets with images received 150% more retweets and I know myself that I'm far more likely to share an entertaining image on Facebook than anything else.

I'd initially asked my own Facebook friends to let me use their dog photos and they were my test audience for the pictures with funny captions. They seemed to go down well.

So far the images or stories about the images have been included in just over 200 tweets and we've had about 300 Facebook likes, comments and shares on our page. We also posted the images in local Facebook groups and on pages like the Keep Wales Tidy. This means that friends and followers of the people who we interacted with can see their activity and that exposes the message to a larger audience.

It's clear already that some images were shared more widely than others. This could have been down to a number of factors: timing, the cuteness of the dog or how funny the caption was.

Social media is free to use and we are thinking we could cheaply supplement the campaign by printing posters to put up in areas where the problem is worst and possibly giving stickers to responsible dog owners who want to help spread the word.

The story has been picked up by the local paper and on BBC Radio Wales so we hope to keep people talking in the next week and have lots of information from online communities to help us to get people to scoop the poop up.

To see the images and chat you can look at our Storify story.

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