How practical changes resulted in significant environmental gains

As an organisation, the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) is always looking at ways in which we can reduce our environmental footprint. Last year, one of the main ways in which we addressed this was to review the member copies that were being distributed for one of our journals, Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy (BCP). Each BABCP member is entitled to receive a hard copy of each issue of the journal, as well as having online access via our membership portal. In 2021, we had around 7,500 members who had all signed up to receive hard copies of BCP. BCP publishes six issues per year and so we were aware that distributing this many member copies was a significant cost- both to the organisation and to the planet.

To tackle this issue, we first conducted a member survey to try and find out more about how members access the journals and how important receiving a hard copy of the journal was to them, especially as they have online access to the journal. Interestingly, only 25% of the respondents said that receiving the hard copy of the journal was important to them and the majority of members were happy to continue to access the journals online.

We then reviewed our processes on how we messaged to members about the hard copies and how they were set up to receive them. We made the following changes:

• Amended the wording on our membership application forms from a simple tick box stating “I want to receive paper copies of BCP” to more explicitly stating that in an effort to be more environmentally conscious we offer all our members online access to the BABCP journals. However, if they still want a hard copy of BCP to tick this option.
• Created a new option in the Preferences section of our members area where members could easily opt out of receiving the copies at any time – six issues a year rapidly takes up a lot of shelf space.
• In December 2021 we made the move from an “opt-out” policy to an “opt-in” policy for the member copies.

We decided to roll out the “opt-in” policy for our members in December 2021, after the last issue of the year had been published. This meant that we re-set all of our member preferences to automatically no longer receive the hard copies of the journal. We then messaged this change to all our members asking them to “opt-in” if they still wanted to receive their copies. They could either do this by amending the preferences themselves in the members area of our website or by contacting us to let us know they still wished to receive the hard copies.

As of February 2022, the number of BABCP members who want to receive the hard copies of the journal have reduced from 7,420 to 689 which is a huge decrease. We have also seen an uptake in members accessing the journals online via the member portal.

So far, we have received some positive feedback from members who have welcomed the change and the positive impact this will have on reducing our environmental footprint. One member emailed to say “So pleased to hear this, a brilliant step to take, thank you :)”. We haven’t received any negative feedback at all which has been really encouraging