ideas42

University College London Nudgeathon: Can We Hit Refresh on our Domestic Travel Habits in Light ...

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 16:10:44 GMT

With the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and COVID-19 reducing aviation numbers dramatically, the current moment is seen as a unique chance to shift business travelling behaviour towards more sustainable choices. On Friday 4^th December, University College London’s (UCL) Behavioural Innovations Team launched a Nudgeathon, a unique event built around sharing ideas and developing innovative solutions to an important problem, in the incredibly short timeline of 48 hours. Three teams of students, from a variety of academic backgrounds, were briefed on this opportunity for positive change in business travel, before being challenged with developing and presenting an effective idea for a behaviour change intervention.

The challenge was set by ideas42, who drew from their own experience in environmental issues and behaviour to deliver the brief. With this in mind, the three participating teams set out to decide how behavioural science can best address the challenge. Their interventions had to focus on the structure, incentives and contexts that shape behaviour, and they had to determine whether to target the problem at the policy level; business, governance and leadership level; or the individual day-to-day level. From there, over the course of a weekend, the students designed their solutions, and then presented in a finale on Monday 7^th December in front of a panel of behavioural science experts.

Thinking creatively about sustainability during the time of COVID-19 and beyond, and applying a behavioural lens to the approach, are important steps to addressing climate change. In that vein, we’re sharing brief descriptions of each proposed intervention, written by the three teams, to contribute to the ongoing discussion of sustainable behaviours going forward:

Leveraging a new social norm

By “Team Hive” (Julien Maxime Antoine Guerville, Pierce Gately, Jahnina Carla Queddeng, Michi Aneez)

Tagskryt, or train bragging, is a trend newly democratized by Greta Thunberg, which consists of travelling around only using trains and glorifying train travel’s benefits on social media. If this trend could rise, it could drastically change business travel and its environmental impact. Employing nudges and the EAST model, we can redesign old mentalities to prioritize greener methods of transport, through a poster campaign and changing the ticket booking process. Our plan also includes working with companies to create a workplace committed to helping people make the greenest travel decisions, using forms, and rebuilding the work environment with cues, in the hope of stimulating these habits.

Focusing on company travel and goal-setting

By “Team Green Chameleon” (Elisa Paka, RiinuPae, Hendrik Leenders, Mohamed Al-Ali)

While severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic business travel by plane in the UK remains popular. Despite alternative modes and high awareness of the environmental impact, there is little willingness to choose rail over air travel. We propose a holistic intervention aimed at companies who seek to reduce their carbon footprint. First, we lay out a travel policy which focuses on removing barriers and introducing incentives that promote alternative choices to flying. Next, this policy is translated into a booking process using travel management software. Lastly, these changes are introduced by a pledge taken by senior leaders to set goals and address cultural norms.

Creating new avenues for more sustainable conferences

By “Team Urban Foxes” (Robin Kwon, Sana Fasihi, Tash Perros, Cagla Kaya)

Over 67% of companies attend conferences solely by travelling there. Ouridea is to inform businesses and attendees about how to attend conferences in a more sustainable way. We aim to persuade companies to run hybrid events in regions that are way away from the primary location of the event. Thus, people from the same area would gather locally and be connected to the rest of the conference virtually. As a result, this would reduce the aviation between the busiest routes within the UK. We designed our intervention bearing in mind the convenience of virtual events, and the invaluable face-to-face interaction that promotes networking.

All three ideas promised new and unique avenues of opportunity to help maintain the reduced domestic flying resulting from COVID-19. After deliberation, our judges named Team Green Chameleon as the victor, courtesy of their comprehensive approach to their behaviour change solution, presenting an effective and well-considered solution to the challenge. Their solution particularly showed a depth of behavioural science understanding, from the big-picture level down to small contextual details, and was ambitious in the scope of business travel it attempted to address.

We’re grateful to all the students who took part and shared enthusiasm for behavioural science, innovation, and sustainability. Dr Umar Taj at Nudgeathon provided guidance, and the judges were: Co-Founder of Salient Madeline Quinlan, VC of Ogilvy Rory Sutherland, DoT’s Principle Behavioural Scientist Pete Dyson, Associate Professor at UCL’s centre of Behaviour Change Paul Chadwick, CEO of Nickels Joseph Garcia, and ideas42’s own Vice President Erin Sherman and Senior Associate Lee-Sien Kao.

To join the conversation on environmental sustainability, tweet at us at @UCLBIT and @ideas42.

The post University College London Nudgeathon: Can We Hit Refresh on our Domestic Travel Habits in Light of COVID-19? appeared first on ideas42.

Our Top Behavioral Science Highlights of the Year (Goodbye, 2020)

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 22:06:16 GMT

It’s become tradition of sorts that each December, we reflect on the year behind us and celebrate the newest evidence and social impact generated by behavioral science. Of course, 2020 is a difficult year to look back on with much fondness.

And yet, even in one of the more challenging years in living memory, we remain grateful for your ongoing support of our work in a growing behavioral science community. An understanding of human behavior proved more important than ever for tackling complex problems around the globe in 2020 (and not just in seeking responses to the COVID-19 pandemic)—and we’d like to share with you a small sample of our own contributions.

In 2020, our teams used behavioral science to…

…Support efforts to inoculate democracy from COVID-19 in the U.S. 2020 election with the Safe Voter Playbook that included behaviorally informed solutions for boosting mail ballot returns, combatting misinformation, and more. We also supported state and local governments and mission-aligned organizations to increase and diversify turnout safely during a pandemic.

…Make it easier for women to continue using injectable contraceptives in Ethiopia by designing an appointment reminder card and a visual aid for health workers interacting with clients. The discontinuation rate was 10 percentage points lower in the intervention area than in a control area.

…Reduce improperly disposed trash in public housing communities by 25% by co-designing infrastructure improvements with community members. Insights from this work help correct negative misperceptions about resident behavior.

…Support the rapid response to COVID-19 in U.S. emergency rooms with simple solutions for communicating the latest care-related changes and information to providers, as well as tackling physician burnout.

…Drive diversity in tech entrepreneurship with the launch of Ventures for Shared Prosperity, a cohort of innovators that will build businesses to reduce the costs of living in poverty and improve lives.

…Design simple tools to reduce the most common cause of maternal mortality, like a low power timer and glow in the dark poster that help health workers administer oxytocin immediately after birth to cut the likelihood of postpartum hemorrhage in half.

…Map out the steps cash transfer recipients must take to make the most out of the cash they receive. We also created simple, actionable guidance for maximizing social protection programs at a time when more than 100 countries have leveraged emergency cash transfers in economic response to the pandemic.

…Improve participant’s satisfaction with appointments at Texas WIC by providing a roadmap of what to expect during an appointment. We also outlined how the printed roadmap could be adapted for digital channels during the pandemic.

…Help more people find meaningful work in the Global South by strengthening programs that improve job seekers’ skills and match them to appropriate opportunities.

…Underscore the damaging, cruel effects of the expanded “public charge” rule, with a study estimating that 260,000 fewer children of immigrants enrolled in Medicaid due to fear caused by the rule’s mere announcement. This study also highlights the urgency of creating policies based on evidence and behavioral science.

…Publish new analysis on previous work to redesign the NYC summons form and create behaviorally informed text message reminders in Science. The intervention decreased failures to appear in court for low-level offenses by up to 36%, preventing 30,000 warrants over three years. We’re exploring paths to replicate and scale this approach to improving justice.

…Change malaria testing practices in Nigeria to prevent misdiagnoses with a simple redesign to patient flow in a clinic: test patients for malaria before their consultation with a health care provider to help providers avoid anchoring to impressions of symptoms over test results.

…Develop toolkits to bolster student success through simplifying applications and adapting and scaling behavioral interventions based on our work with two major college systems: The City University of New York (CUNY) and California Community Colleges.

…Improve government performance around the world to enable more equitable growth and development with our first foray into directly changing government officials’ behavior. Our initial work included increasing responsiveness to residents’ requests and facilitating procurement of low-risk, highly replicable innovations.

Thank you for your support of ideas42 during a tumultuous year as we adapted our approach to making the world more equitably healthy, wealthy, just, and sustainable to a post-COVID world. As we carry with us our often hard-won insights of 2020, we look forward to a better year ahead for our mission and for all—and we wish you and your families a safe and happy holiday season.

The post Our Top Behavioral Science Highlights of the Year (Goodbye, 2020) appeared first on ideas42.

How to Mobilize Your Future Self

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 20:53:46 GMT

Silver linings are hard to come by in 2020. But from our perspective, there’s at least one: this is the year millions of Americans discovered their civic voices – speaking out in person and virtually, at the polls and in the streets, and by volunteering in their communities at historic levels.

Voter turnout smashed records. Election-related volunteering and get-out-the-vote efforts surged. Take the example of Power to the Polls, an initiative launched to address the pandemic-induced poll worker shortage, which reported a remarkable 700,000 sign-ups.

Where could all of this civic momentum take us?

In past years, the answer has been: nowhere. Civic engagement tends to rise during a contentious election season and then drop off after results are tallied. It becomes a blip rather than a pattern.

For Americans who want to have an ongoing, meaningful impact on shaping policies and programs, this approach is ineffective. That’s why our civic engagement team is focused on cultivating habits of civic engagement that go beyond turning out voters in a single election. We’re designing solutions that expand how people engage with their communities, maintain a sense of empowerment, and connect their civic actions to actual impact. Someone who has a habit of civic engagement might then be quicker to participate in peaceful protests, attend a town hall meeting, or volunteer in their neighborhood – and would certainly be more likely to vote in future elections.

This year, millions of Americans took the first steps to building a habit of civic engagement. And this year, we have an opportunity to change the historical pattern of rising and falling participation in the U.S.. Using insights from behavioral science, we can harness the civic energy we have today to mobilize our future selves.

Social scientists have long wondered how we can better compel our future selves to do the things we desire in the present. Our Sunday afternoon self, for instance, may intend our Monday morning self to wake up early for a run. We know how good it will make us feel, and how good it is for us. But when Monday morning comes, we ignore the feeble protestations of our past self, and decide to sleep in for another hour.

Like exercise, civic activism not only feels good, but it’s good for us (and for democracy). Some of us may have felt a surge of energy after voting, volunteering, or attending a protest with an accompanying conviction: I want to do that again. But in the days and weeks afterwards, it becomes harder to access that warm glow. As that emotional energy becomes more distant, so, too, does our motivation to take action again.

Luckily, behavioral science provides tools to transform present intentions into future actions – to narrow the psychological distance between what we want today and what we’ll do tomorrow. We know that making a clear plan about what you want to do – including the nitty-gritty details of how, when and where you’ll do it– can make it more likely that you’ll follow through. Making a clear, formal, and public commitment to your plan, creating well-timed reminders, and writing yourself a motivational message for future retrieval are other ways to influence your future self.

But if that sounds like a lot of work, there’s some good news: we’ve already done a lot of it for you.

Meet the Civic Action Time Capsule – a tool that allows you to capture how and why you got involved in 2020, recall the excitement of this moment, and send a message to your future self.

The idea is to capture your current sentiment , and use it to propel you forward in the future. In 2022 (the next major federal election year in the United States), the Time Capsule will send your present-day reflections to your future self as a reminder of your motivations this year, hopefully inspiring yourself all over again.

Now we realize you’re probably eager to forget 2020 ever happened. But forgetting can be a form of loss: we lose what we’ve learned about ourselves – our resilience, our fortitude, in the face of societal and personal catastrophe. Instead of forgetting, why not capture the most rewarding parts of 2020? In holding on to some memories, you might gain a valuable perspective: if you surmounted such formidable challenges once, you can do it again.

This month, with partners like Vote.org and others, we’re encouraging as many people as possible to create their own Time Capsules and harness their motivation from this historic year to inspire continued civic action for years to come.

The post How to Mobilize Your Future Self appeared first on ideas42.

Utilizing Pre-COVID Behavioral Designs During a Pandemic: Experiences of Kenya’s National ...

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 19:07:34 GMT

Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images/Images of Empowerment

Beyond the grim realities of a growing death toll, the COVID-19 pandemic has had negative effects on multiple dimensions of life for many people across the globe for much of 2020. Sadly, those already facing instability are disproportionately affected.

Social protection programs, including cash transfers, are crucial to safeguarding those living with extreme poverty, and keeping those who are only temporarily at risk during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic out of long-term poverty. Before the onset of the pandemic, our livelihoods team had been working with numerous governments in sub-Saharan Africa to design and build evidence on behavioral designs that can be applied to enhance the impact of social protection cash transfers.

In March 2020, our team was in the process of generating more evidence on the effectiveness of behavioral design to encourage savings and enhance productive investments for recipients of Kenya’s National Safety Net Programme (NSNP), dubbed Inua Jamii. When movement restrictions were initiated, we were in the process of rolling out a large-scale cluster randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of the nudge designs. The work came to a sharp halt, of course, but we found an opportunity to pivot our research and still seek positive impact on livelihoods using a no-contact methodology. The COVID-19 environment presented an important question: Are behavioral interventions designed in the pre-COVID context effective during a chaotic time such as a global pandemic?

To answer this question, ideas42 worked with the Kenyan Ministry of Labor and Social Protection – Social Assistance Unit and carried out a phone study to explore the effectiveness of designs created pre-COVID during the pandemic. Interviews with 66 men and women aged 32-85 years old and enrolled in Inua Jamii were completed in June/July 2020. Our aim was to gain insight into the effects of COVID-19 on the day-to-day lives of cash transfer beneficiaries. We also sought to understand if and how those who had received our behavioral designs used them during the pandemic, and any differences between those who received them and those who did not.

Survey participants reported that even if they did not know anyone who had fallen sick due to the coronavirus, they have faced indirect impacts that negatively affected their livelihoods. The changes expressed by 79% of respondents fell into three buckets: increased food prices, decreased income due to movement restrictions, and social changes, such as not being able to meet with family or children not being in school, making it difficult to save or invest. Some participants told us “Income has decreased and it is hard to buy food and have any left over for savings,” while others reported that because children are home from school, they must buy more food throughout the day, and increased prices add to this additional burden.

We also found that despite the overall negative impacts of COVID-19, recipients who had received the enhanced behavioral features both remembered the tools (90%) and found them useful (85%) in navigating the pandemic.

They were also more likely to have concrete goals and were benefitting from their efforts to save toward those goals during the pandemic. Once the pandemic set in, they were better able to safeguard their livelihoods by relying on the savings and productive investments accrued beforehand. One beneficiary in Kisumu County reported, “I had a goal to buy 2 goats and they have reproduced and now they are 5 in number.” Another beneficiary from West Pokot County shared, “…because before the pandemic I used to save, and the money that I have been saving has helped me during this time.”

They also reported being able to adapt, even though they reduced their savings amounts to account for increased expenses. Though their goals were often delayed, recipients of behavioral enhancements were able to adjust and save a little (50% more than those who did not receive nudges). “My goal was to buy another sheep to keep. Corona has contributed a lot not attaining the goal at the right time, [but] by October I will be able to buy my sheep”.

They were more likely to report having agency or taking action to improve their livelihoods in the future. Recipients of the behavioral enhancements to cash transfers forecasted a positive change in six months, citing that they intended to make productive investments that would help them “My family’s wealth will change. My goal was to buy 2 goats. By the end of the year…we will be able to cater to our needs.”

Our findings from remote interviews at the height of COVID-19 reinforce earlier project findings from a pilot test that demonstrated positive effects for Inua Jamii beneficiaries in goal setting, plan-making, and follow-through with savings. This work in Kenya was also an opportunity to gather insights on how to safely conduct field studies remotely more broadly, with implications for future work for our team and others.

As the social protection landscape explores systems approaches to better address the most extreme forms of poverty around the globe at scale, behavioral science offers a wide array of context-driven tools to do so. While we continue our pre-COVID goal of generating more evidence on the effectiveness of behavioral design to encourage savings and enhance productive investments in cash transfers, as well as exploring beneficial changes to other social protection programs, future directions of this work include determining how behavioral design can be streamlined into government policy to allow for more scalability and efficient delivery.

For more information on mainstreaming the applications of behavioral science in government policy, stay tuned for our forthcoming policy brief in early 2021.

The post Utilizing Pre-COVID Behavioral Designs During a Pandemic: Experiences of Kenya’s National Cash Transfer Beneficiaries appeared first on ideas42.

The Road to Equity: 4 Ways Behavioral Design Has Made New York City Services More Accessible ...

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 15:55:19 GMT

Local government agencies directly impact millions of people’s day-to-day lives, providing essential public services that keep our cities running. Yet we know from behavioral science—the study of how people make decisions and take action in the real world—that there are many reasons programs and services don’t reach as wide or diverse of a population as they could. Sometimes programs require regular renewal and complicated applications that compete for people’s scarce time and resources, or people may believe a program is not meant for them. These types of barriers or mental models of how and for whom programs work can disproportionately disadvantage those with the fewest resources.

Fortunately, behavioral design can make a meaningful difference when it comes to problems like these. For the past four years the New York City Behavioral Design Team (BDT)—a partnership between the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity and ideas42—has been redesigning elements of programs and services to make them more accessible to more New Yorkers, and make the City more equitable for more of its residents.

We’ve undertaken 47 projects and worked with 15 different City agencies to diagnose behavioral barriers, design solutions, and evaluate their impact. From this extensive work, we’ve distilled four ways behavioral design has improved equity by making New York City more accessible—just a small sample of what the partnership has produced and what behavioral science can accomplish in the future, particularly if other agencies and cities adopt a behavioral approach and insights.

Preventing loss of food benefits

Each year, the SNAP program (formerly known as food stamps) requires clients to recertify in order to continue receiving their benefits. Around 25-30% of clients do not complete the required steps and lose their benefits, only to reapply within a few months. This not only causes people to lose a month or more of needed food benefits for themselves and their families, but it also increases the City resources (staff and tax dollars) needed to serve its residents.

To help improve recertification rates and avoid unnecessary loss of food benefits, the BDT redesigned a reminder notification that both informed clients about required next steps, and simplified them. Clients who received the notification were 5% more likely to take the first critical step in the recertification process: submitting the recertification form. Clients who received the notice also submitted their recertification forms earlier: these clients were 12.9% more likely to submit their forms by day 45 of the 75-day recertification period, compared to clients who did not receive the notice.

Helping Gifted & Talented programs reach more low-income students

New York’s Gifted & Talented programs offer specialized instruction and enrichment opportunities to exceptional students regardless of socioeconomic status, and can make a real difference in the educational trajectory of students from backgrounds with fewer resources. However, students in low-income districts are less likely than their peers in higher-income districts to take the admissions test. As a result, fewer low-income students test into and attend Gifted & Talented programs, missing out on potential benefits.

The BDT redesigned emails and postcards to encourage parents of all preschoolers entering kindergarten to sign their students up for the test, in a randomized controlled trial. The redesigned communications used a congratulatory tone to prime the positive identity of a proud parent and framed the program as one in which all types of students participate. Across all 60,000 households, these efforts led to an increase in test registration by 5%. More notably, test registration increased by 9% among children living in low-income districts, where average registration rates are half those in high-income districts. Making it easier for gifted students of all socioeconomic levels to access supportive educational programs is an important first step toward educational equity.

Securing financial aid dollars for CUNY students

That the U.S has a growing student debt crisis is not news—but many people don’t know that students leave billions in financial aid on the table each year when eligible students don’t file the federal financial aid application. Lacking funds for postsecondary education may cause financial hardships or even prevent some students from enrolling at all.

The BDT sent a series of email and text message reminders to enrolled students to increase financial aid renewal rates at three CUNY campuses, and saw steep increases at all of them: Borough of Manhattan Community College (38%), Bronx Community College (19%), and Hostos Community College (28%). Based on these results, CUNY is scaling this intervention to the majority of its two-year community colleges in the City—helping more students continue to receive the funds they need to attain higher education.

Building a more diverse fire department

The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) invested in a multi-year, multi-pronged effort to increase the diversity of its ranks so that its firefighters would better reflect the population they serve. As part of this initiative, the BDT worked with FDNY to conduct a randomized controlled trial to assess whether waiving filing fees for applicants would increase the diversity of applicants taking the qualifying examination.

Results showed that waiving the fee increased filing rates for FDNY’s new recruit applications by 36% overall. Without the fee waiver, black and female candidates filed half and two-thirds as many applications as other candidates, respectively. Waiving the fee increased filing rates by 84% among black candidates and 83% among female candidates. Broadening the candidate pool is a step toward building a more representative FDNY.

These examples are just a sampling of the ways in which behavioral design helped make New York City a bit more equitable by removing barriers blocking access to beneficial programs and services that can improve opportunities and lives. Of course, our work thus far is just one small part of a sustained and systemic effort needed to continue to promote true equity. To this end, the BDT will continue to work with NYC Opportunity to apply behavioral insights to government agencies, programs, and services to identify and address economic injustices and generate real social impact.

The post The Road to Equity: 4 Ways Behavioral Design Has Made New York City Services More Accessible (So Far) appeared first on ideas42.

Simple Tools to Reduce Preventable Deaths During Childbirth

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 17:56:27 GMT

Photo credit: Maddie Kau

Worldwide, what is more likely to kill you than 200 skydives, 1000 scuba dives, or a diagnosed case of malaria? Giving birth once.

Too often, giving birth is dangerous, and the most common cause of maternal mortality – postpartum hemorrhage (PPH), or excessive bleeding after childbirth – is largely preventable. The clinical best practices to prevent and manage PPH seem simple enough: administer oxytocin immediately after delivery; monitor frequently to detect any bleeding early; manage the source of the bleeding accordingly; and if the provider cannot stop the bleeding, promptly refer the patient to a higher-level facility for surgery or a blood transfusion.

When compliance with these best practices falls short, a common strategy used to improve health workers’ decision-making and adherence is to provide more training. However, simply giving people access to more information rarely changes behavior, and these trainings typically do not consider the extremely resource and time constrained environment that they often work in. For health workers in many contexts, like rural Madagascar, following PPH best practices is far from simple.

What prevents providers from following best practices?

For the past year, as part of the USAID-funded Breakthrough RESEARCH project led by the Population Council, we at ideas42 have learned about the extraordinary constraints that Malagasy health workers must face to save mothers’ lives. Basic care facilities are often only staffed by a midwife, who is responsible for myriad tasks, from delivering babies to treating malaria, administering child vaccinations, and more. To serve more of the population, many facilities are remote, sometimes accessible only by canoe when roads are washed out, and there is no one else available to give guidance or a helping hand if complications arise. Babies are often born at night, making it impossible for a health worker to sleep (affecting her ability to stay alert and do her job during the day) if she follows the monitoring protocol to regularly check the mother for bleeding. Facilities often have no running water or electricity, so working alone at night is even more difficult—it’s hard to deliver a baby or check for bleeding with just a cellphone’s flashlight.

A public health facility on the eastern coast of Madagascar
Photo credit: Jana Smith

Since referrals to better-equipped facilities are difficult and often impossible, and the conditions of health posts are such that management of PPH is difficult, prevention is of utmost importance. Administering oxytocin immediately after the birth of a baby cuts the likelihood of PPH in half, which makes it the single most important best practice.

Why don’t health workers always administer oxytocin immediately after a delivery?

We spoke with health workers to understand their constraints and design solutions that might work for them. We found that they underestimate the likelihood and consequences of PPH, and as a result, prioritize other concerns. Even though PPH is the most common cause of death for women giving birth, it’s still rare, and rural health workers who deliver only a few babies per week are unlikely to encounter it often. Additionally, oxytocin injection should be given within one minute of birth to be effective, but none of the health workers we spoke with mentioned this time window. They are in the habit of performing several other tasks prior to administering oxytocin. Without any clocks to keep time, regular supervision, or other sources of feedback, there is no way for a health worker to learn she is administering oxytocin too late, and no prompt for her to change her practice.

Recognizing and empathizing with this context — the absence of resources and support, time scarcity, and the mental burden of dealing with it all alone — was the starting point for our team’s effort to design a solution with behavioral insights in mind. Through iterative testing with health workers and other Malagasy stakeholders we developed a set of tools to help providers improve quality of care and reduce complications and deaths from PPH.

Real-time tools to address health workers’ challenges and save lives

One of the solutions we developed is a low power electronic timer that gives immediate feedback on the timeliness of oxytocin administration. As soon as the baby is born, the health worker can hit a large button to start a timer that counts down and beeps as 60 seconds approaches. The lunchbox-sized device is mounted on the wall so it can be hit with an elbow instead of soiled hands. The device also has the added benefit of freezing the timestamp at birth so it can be accurately recorded later—an incentive to use the timer, as it removes a reported burden of having to remember the time of birth for paperwork. In the words of one health worker: “It would be good to have the time noted for me, because sometimes I have other things to do and forget to record it. It will also help to be more conscious of 60 seconds.” Other health workers were excited about having a timer for oxytocin, but they also told us they wished they had timers for other time-sensitive procedures like malaria tests or respiratory monitoring. In response, we redesigned the timer to add flexibility and broaden its use.

A health provider tests out an oxytocin timer prototype on the wall of her delivery room
Photo credit: Maddie Kau

We also designed a glow-in-the-dark poster with simple illustrations of how to stop bleeding, based on cause, because when PPH occurs it’s hard for health workers to remember the specific details of their training in the urgent moment, and they have nobody to ask for help. Some facilities already have a sheet with a clinical algorithm for managing PPH, but as one health worker described it: “I couldn’t use it when there is a case of hemorrhage since I won’t be able to see the content and it’s too detailed. It’s for when you have free time.” Moreover, such materials are not useful in the dark. The new poster is meant to be easy and intuitive to reference in a moment of panic. When viewing both materials, another health worker said, “I would choose the simple one because it is a brief summary with pictures. I don’t need to read between the lines. I know this by heart but sometimes I panic. I might forget something, and this will remind me. Pictures will tell me what I have or have not already done.”

The last tool is a set of seven lanyard badges for assigning tasks – like “emotional support,” “torch bearer,” or “bleeding monitor” – to the people who go with a pregnant woman to the facility. In Madagascar, it is customary for relatives, neighbors, and other community members to attend deliveries to show their support and help laboring women reach the facility. The crowd of attendees at a delivery can be overwhelming for a provider; as one health worker explained, “[the badges] would be useful because lots of family come and don’t know what to do, and think someone else is going to do something so they don’t do it themselves.” The badges help by relieving health workers of some non-technical tasks while also making the attendees feel valued and important—a win-win. A community member we showed the badges to said, “people would like getting the badges since they’ll feel proud that they’re contributing to the health of the mother.” The seven tasks on the badges were chosen by health workers to reflect the reality of their context—such as having to perform a delivery in the dark. Some tasks we originally thought would be helpful (e.g. arranging transportation in case of a referral) were eliminated through user testing, and some tasks we hadn’t thought of (e.g. cleaning up the mess the crowd of supportive attendees creates) were added.

A health provider provides feedback on the different tasks included in the badge set. The final set includes “emotional support,” “runner,” “food and water,” “torch bearer,” “baby care,” “bleeding monitor,” and “cleaner.”
Photo credit: Sara Flanagan

These tools are innovative because, unlike other PPH interventions, they don’t focus on training. Designed to fit health workers’ contexts and the realities of the challenges they themselves reported facing, we hope these resources will empower them to better prevent, detect, and manage PPH—the biggest risk to the lives of women giving birth in their facilities.

In the coming months we will be testing these tools further in a small-scale pilot in 10 health facilities alongside a new and innovative approach to PPH management training called Virtual Mentor, and we are excited to see how they hold up to the stress of live use.

To learn more about our approach, research findings, and full intervention, write to us at gh@ideas42.org.

The post Simple Tools to Reduce Preventable Deaths During Childbirth appeared first on ideas42.

Fieldwork During the Pandemic? Four Behavioral Insights for Conducting Remote Interviews

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 18:25:52 GMT

As behavioral scientists, we know context matters. That’s why in a typical ideas42 project, our team members engage closely with the lived context of real people who will use or be impacted by our designs. We observe how people go about their lives and make daily decisions, interview service providers and people who use these services, meet with program designers and practitioners, and observe the environments in which people interact with the programs and services. Much of this work happens during visits to the field in countries all over the world, as part of our contextual reconnaissance. In addition, evaluating impact of interventions involves surveys or other kinds of data collection.

All this has, of course, changed dramatically since March 2020, when COVID-19 upended the world and the context of our own work, with strict movement restrictions and lockdowns making how we typically do physical interaction untenable. At the same time, our existing knowledge of programs and the ways in which people interact with them became less relevant, as restrictions on gatherings and movement changed the lives of program beneficiaries in a variety of ways. For instance, someone who used to go to a clinic for health care might now obtain the service in a different way – or not at all. Faced with the impossibility (and inadvisability) of travel and the increased importance of understanding people’s new realities – we developed alternative means to get the information we needed to design behaviorally informed programs and services. And, as we do with all our work, we applied a behavioral lens to this new approach.

Between March and August 2020, ideas42 teams in our Livelihoods, Governance and Health focus areas, which work across many countries, conducted remote interviews for 10 projects as illustrated below.

Countries, focus areas, and channels through which remote interviews were conducted.

The growing availability of basic mobile phones allowed us to connect with a significant portion of target populations. These interviews covered a variety of target populations, including farmers in India, cash transfer recipients in Kenya, small business owners in Ethiopia, community influencers in DRC, and municipality officials in Brazil, India and South Africa. In all, we spoke to people across 8 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America using voice and video calls – and in one case, by coordinating in-person interviews carried out by local enumerators.

After going through numerous remote working experiences, we’re sharing behavioral insights for making rapid adjustments that researchers doing fieldwork may find useful in these times.

1. Flawed mental models led to planning fallacy

Initially we believed that the time and effort required to conduct interviews remotely instead of in-person would be much lower (due to reduced logistics and eliminated travel). This mental model proved flawed because overall, we needed more resources than anticipated.

Unsurprisingly, flawed mental models led to planning fallacy – we under-budgeted time and resources because we incorrectly assumed that not having to travel would make the process cheaper and faster. Instead, we found that several aspects of working remotely actually require more resources; for example, training enumerators remotely was more time-consuming, especially given the nature of our probing diagnostic interviews.

Strategies to address mental models and to help overcome the planning fallacy

Make interview guides more structured by reducing the use of discretionary probing questions which are much more difficult to ‘engineer’ remotely, especially when working through an enumerator/third party.
Build in some “slack” time for unforeseen delays and challenges such as multiple interview rounds or interview breaks, even for plans that seem to account for all activities. This becomes more relevant for remote activities as there are multiple stakeholders across locations and many moving pieces to manage.
Be adaptable, as some planned activities may prove to be unfeasible – If so, don’t be afraid to eliminate them!

2. Teams experienced cognitive scarcity

Like everyone, our teams are subject to cognitive scarcity, which is magnified when working on multiple tasks across different projects. We realized that an underappreciated aspect of field travel was that it allowed us to focus limited attention and cognitive bandwidth on a specific task (the fieldwork), enabling rapid progress. When we did fieldwork remotely, teams continued to work on their other tasks and projects at the same time, because they could. This results in cognitive overload, exacerbating the effects of limited attention, which can result in teams missing details they would otherwise notice. Furthermore, cognitive scarcity became even more pronounced due to the pandemic, when people juggled home and work responsibilities and also experienced information overload (and stress) about COVID-19 itself.

When we noticed this challenge, we organized remote interviews ‘as if we were in the field’ – blocking out chunks of time to focus on tasks for a single project.

Strategies to manage cognitive scarcity

If possible, split work between teams to allow individuals to focus undivided attention on one task by blocking particular times (preferably full days) for the task. Consider normalizing the option to decline other competing demands and meeting requests, such as not attending all-team meetings on New York time when focusing on fieldwork on Ethiopia time.
Create protocols that replicate what you would do in the field: for example, check in at the end of every day’s fieldwork to review and amend any part of the interview process, discuss key insights with team members, and so on.

3. A small token incentive can be helpful, where possible

Respondents may forgo income or work opportunities or incur other costs to participate in remote interviews. For example, erratic electric supply meant that some respondents in rural Kenya walked to locations a distance away from home, where they paid to charge their phones to ensure they could receive the interview call at the scheduled time. We therefore felt it important to compensate them for these direct and imputed costs by means of a token payment for participation. In addition to being the right thing to do, we found that a small incentive led to greater motivation to respond and to stay on the phone during the interview.

Strategies to give incentives

Ideally, incentives are a small token to compensate respondents, not so large that they influence the decision to participate or responses to survey questions.
You may Inform participants about the incentive before or after the respondent gives consent for the interview depending on the circumstance. Both strategies worked equally well for us; In Kenya, participants were informed about the airtime incentive after giving oral consent during the interview, and incentives were transferred to them after the interview. In India, participants were informed of the incentive while making an appointment and it was transferred to them before the interview call. Both these projects received similar response rates and most respondents stayed on the calls for the full duration of the interview (30-45 minutes).
Manage participant expectations, and keep in mind ongoing work; when working with a local partner, you should ideally align the amount and type of incentive to the partner’s typical incentive that they give.

4. Empathize, and be flexible with respondents

Like us, respondents are also facing an unprecedented situation, typically with limited resources. Empathizing and intentionally conveying empathy is important. For instance, ask questions that ensure that participants are comfortable taking the interview at that time, particularly if the questions being asked are personal and sensitive. As most activities have become remote due to COVID-19, interview participants may be fielding calls from a variety of organizations and are talking on the phone much more than before, making fatigue likely. Remembering this and seeking to put people at ease can help ensure more successful interviews.

Strategies to empathize and be flexible

Establish a connection early during the call by explaining the purpose of the interview and the value of the conversation for them or for people like them. Such efforts go a long way to arouse a sense of reciprocity and make the discussion more meaningful, leading to richer responses and a greater willingness to share relevant incidents and anecdotes, which are particularly useful for designing solutions.
Use local enumerators who can converse in the local language and understand the context, helping establish rapport through relevant small talk and conversational gambits. Going through trusted sources is helpful to establish credibility, particularly if participants have not already engaged with the organization carrying out the interview.
Make the timing of the interview flexible, at the convenience of the respondent, and include this flexibility in the project plans. Enumerators may need to call people outside usual working hours, since respondents are often busy in their work during the day. It may also make sense to break interviews up into two parts to accommodate respondents’ schedules, and to be prepared to call back if the initial time proves inconvenient.

Even with preparation and adaptation, not every remote effort will be feasible and successful. Being realistic about this is critical, as is being open to mid-course changes in strategy. While remote interviews are unlikely to replace the value of connecting directly and meeting stakeholders in person, our experience over these past months has made us appreciate their uses. In fact, there are many situations in which remote interviews could continue to be a widely-used tool even when travel and in-person meetings are safe and possible again.

Have you adapted interviews and data collection methods during the pandemic? Join the conversation and share insights from your work by tweeting at us @ideas42.

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ideas42 Statement on the US 2020 Election: Celebrating Increased Voter Turnout & A ...

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 17:42:55 GMT

The heart of a functioning democracy is the integrity of its democratic institutions, most notably trust in elections and the process by which everyone can make their voice heard. In the 2020 U.S. election, voters made their voices heard at historic levels: turnout is projected to be at its highest in over a century, including for traditionally underrepresented groups such as communities of color and youth. ideas42 commends the countless get-out-the-vote efforts around the country that made this record-breaking voter turnout a reality and demonstrated how whole voting systems and individual GOTV tactics designed around insights into human behavior can increase civic participation at scale.

Though the act of voting has long been replete with hassles and barriers – particularly for underrepresented and traditionally marginalized groups – the COVID-19 pandemic introduced an unprecedented set of challenges for all voters. That so many voters were able to turn out in the face of new hassle factors, enormous ambiguity, and deliberate suppression speaks to the hard work of election officials and administrators to produce a smooth and reliable result.

While we are encouraged by the incredible turnout levels in the 2020 election, boosting civic engagement with behavioral insights doesn’t end here. First and most urgently, the preservation of our democracy requires that we maintain trust in the results of the election. Because behavioral science is a critical tool for responding to misinformation and stopping it in its tracks, we created a behavioral guide for combating misinformation. Initially used with election administrators leading up to the election, it can be useful to all as the focus has shifted to protecting the integrity of the results. We are continuing to tackle misinformation that questions the legitimacy of the vote counting process.

The outcome of this election will have implications for all of our work as an organization that supports using evidence-based interventions and policy to solve social problems. We’re heartened by the impending return to using facts and science in policy making. False narratives, false mental models, and assumptions about motivations and behavior often fuel uninformed policies that negatively impact the lives of millions of people. We’re exploring new avenues for supporting more evidence-based policy in the future.

Voter turnout in the United States historically lags behind participation in many other countries. And because we believe that many people don’t participate for reasons other than lack of intention, helping people turn out, and indeed building a culture of voting, has long been a focus for ideas42’s Civic Engagement team. Voting is one of the most fundamental ways for the people to make real change, and broad-based turnout is necessary to ensure we have a democracy that’s responsive to all Americans.

We’re invigorated by the partners we’ve worked alongside and the historic levels of participation in 2020, and like many others we’re ready to do more work and build a true culture of voting and civic engagement in the United States. We’re also encouraged by the outpouring of effort on the part of journalists, academics, our fellow nonpartisan institutions, and other influential leaders who are using their voices to amplify factual information in the name of protecting our democracy.

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Combating Misinformation in a Critical Period for the United States Election

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 20:23:43 GMT

It’s November 4th, Day 2 of election returns in the United States 2020 election, and as was expected and planned for, the outcome is not yet decided. All the votes are usually not counted election night, but in the past, reasonable projections could be made the night of. This year, due to safety concerns amid the COVID-19 pandemic leading to many more mail in ballots, it will take longer to process every vote and make projections or final calls–and that is a sign of the system working properly.

While it is still unclear exactly how long it is going to be, it could take a few days or a week for election officials to carry out their normal duties of counting votes. If the results are taken to the next step in the prescribed electoral process spelled out in US law, it could even take a month or more, as in the 2000 election, which was decided on Dec. 12th, a little more than a month after Election Day.

Nothing should stand in the way of counting every vote and delivering our democracy. Rampant misinformation about election processes threatens the integrity of our democratic institutions. Misinformation spreads more quickly than facts, so responsive messaging needs to be targeted and coordinated between election officials, public and private partners. At this stage, while the world watches and waits for election officials to do their part in making sure every vote is counted, stakeholders should focus on inoculating the public from misinformation before false beliefs take hold. We can apply proven behavioral principles to help the public navigate these unusual times and prepare for what’s to come throughout this process.

This includes not repeating falsehoods, focusing on the facts, and delivering accurate information at regular intervals, concisely and repeatedly. This is a time where stakeholders should be aiming for redundancy. In support of these efforts, ideas42’s civic engagement team will be working with several of our fellow nonpartisan partners throughout the coming hours and days to support combating misinformation and ensuring electoral integrity by providing clear, concise, behaviorally informed messaging in real time.

We also continue to provide accurate, trusted messages to the public and officials with a new resource: LiveElectionFactChecks.org.

A project of the National Vote at Home Institute and ideas42 in partnership with We Can Vote, the site provides clear, simple fact checks from industry experts, and cited to primary sources when possible.

While election officials are the best sources for results, state and local regulations, and ongoing events, combating misinformation requires each of us, as we may even be spreading it unintentionally. This may be Day 2 of many more to come, and ideas42 is committed to doing what it takes for the long haul to protect our democracy.

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Helping Community Food Advocates Spread the Word about Pandemic-EBT Food Benefits to NYC Families

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 19:23:27 GMT

At ideas42, we’ve thought a lot about how to maximize the impacts of public benefits in the lives of everyday people, especially during a pandemic. Since the COVID-19 crisis began, we’ve assisted government and non-profit agencies in making their communications about the changes to these benefits more effective. We also generated guidelines for states and retail providers that can make it easier for WIC beneficiaries to find and purchase approved items during the COVID-induced grocery shortages. These efforts are part of ideas42’s ongoing work to bolster economic justice, and are guided by principles from our Poverty Interrupted framework, with a particular emphasis on “cutting the costs” of participating in essential services and benefit programs.

The NYC Behavioral Design Center drew upon these insights recently when we partnered with Community Food Advocates, a policy advocacy organization, to spread the word about a new Pandemic-Electronic Benefit T ransfer (P-EBT) food benefit, worth $420, to New York City families. P-EBT distribution in New York State already exemplifies the behaviorally informed “cutting the costs” approach by reducing barriers to public benefits. Unlike many public benefit programs, rather than requiring people to apply for assistance, the State is sending benefits proactively to all eligible families.

However, there was concern that parents might throw the card away without understanding what it was, potentially out of fear that it was part a scam, or that using it would increase their tax liability or lead to immigration-related consequences, like being deemed a public charge. Community Food Advocates was eager to ensure that these families recognized the mailing when it arrived, understood their right to this benefit, and used the funds. That was where we came in to help spread the word using behavioral insights.

Over the past few months, the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) has distributed this $420 food benefit to around 2.1 million students across the state who were eligible for free or reduced-priced meals when schools closed due to the pandemic in mid-March. The benefit amount is based on reimbursement for meals that students missed when schools moved to remote learning between March and June. In New York City, all 1.1 million public school students received P-EBT because school meals have been free for all students since 2017 as a result of the Lunch for Learning campaign for universal free school lunch, led by Community Food Advocates.

P-EBT benefits were distributed in three waves: the first two consisted of electronic deposits onto existing EBT or Medicaid cards to families enrolled in SNAP, Public Assistance, or Medicaid. This fall, OTDA provided the P-EBT funds to families who were not enrolled in any of those benefit programs by mailing them new P-EBT cards. These recipients are primarily immigrant families who are ineligible for most other benefits, and families whose incomes are above the eligibility limit for income-linked benefits.

To ensure that recipients recognize the benefits and how to use them (and reduce the chances of them being discarded), we designed a behaviorally informed flyer with key information. Because children of immigrant parents often serve as linguistic and cultural interpreters, we created a student-facing flyer that describes the program at a level most middle and high school students could understand and use in explaining the benefit to their parents. The flyer was designed with input from a student advisory group convened by CFA.

In addition to explaining how families receive the benefit, the flyer provides information on eligible food items and participating stores, which students in the virtual design sessions expressed an interest in knowing. It also dispels common misconceptions about P-EBT that parents might be concerned about, highlighting, for example, that it requires no application and won’t affect their immigration status or tax burden.

CFA disseminated the flyer through its website, in emails to school principals, and in its newsletter to over 4500 community organizations, advocates, service providers, and others during the first week of September to coincide with the state’s mailing of the P-EBT cards.

We anticipate that CFA staff will be able to use the behavioral design strategies reflected in the flyer and other recommendations we provided in their ongoing efforts to expand access to nutritious food for all New Yorkers. We are gratified that we were able to help CFA inform NYC public school students and their families about this important food benefit. The heightened economic strain on thousands of New Yorkers created by the pandemic and related job losses makes it all the more critical to ensure that available assistance reaches all eligible people and families.

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Spreading Fear: Public Charge Rule Announcement Reduced Enrollment In Child Safety-Net Programs

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 20:03:21 GMT

On February 24, 2020, the Trump administration’s expanded “public charge” rule took effect. Afterward, the Department of Homeland Security could reject an immigrant’s application for permanent residence for using safety net programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called food stamps). The rule’s adoption was the culmination of a years-long campaign by the Trump administration to spread fear and misinformation that, ultimately, reduced enrollment in crucial safety-net programs among immigrants and their families. While the rule change went into effect this February, the damage began years earlier. Because food aid reduces child poverty significantly, and child health coverage decreases household medical spending and debt and improves adult health, the consequences will last a lifetime.

Virtually all social scientists predicted that, if adopted, the public charge rule would significantly reduce enrollment in safety net programs for low-income immigrant adults and their families. We investigated whether the mere announcement of the public charge rule change drove families away from critical programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). In a new paper in Health Affairs, our team showed that the announcement of the rule in September 2018 stoked enough fear to reduce program enrollment, leading to 260,000 children losing Medicaid coverage. These results also suggest further declines in safety-net use after the rule’s adoption.

That would be devastating in normal times, never mind during a pandemic. Jobs in service industries, which employed individuals most likely to be affected by the public charge rule, have been hit disproportionately hard. The results of our research suggest that at the time when safety-net support is most needed, Trump administration policies have caused many eligible immigrants and their children to avoid the safety-net, cruelly worsening poverty and health.

How did we get here? The Trump administration’s effort to punish immigrants and their families began almost immediately after inauguration. In January 2017, an unsigned executive order was leaked, sparking rumors of a planned public charge rule expansion. We have written about the rule’s winding path from rumors to adoption here and here. Figure 1 provides a timeline.

Figure 1: Timeline

Our Research

In our new research, we investigated whether the announced public charge rule affected the share of children enrolled in Medicaid, SNAP, and WIC using county-level data from January 2015 to June 2019. We focus on anticipatory effects: the announcement’s impact on child safety-net use before the rule was finalized and adopted. Data on child Medicaid participation was included from California, New Jersey, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington State. Child SNAP enrollment included Texas data and child WIC enrollment used data from Washington and California.

To estimate the causal effect of the proposed rule change, we compared differences in enrollment before and after the September 2018 announcement in counties with varying levels of noncitizen population shares. Our hypothesis was that counties with higher noncitizen population shares would experience larger declines in child safety-net enrollment compared to counties with lower noncitizens shares post-announcement. We estimated effects using difference-in-differences (DID) and event study models.

Results

First, we wanted to verify that the public charge rule announcement coincided with a sharp increase in media coverage that would drive fear and disenrollment. Figure 2 shows the number of news articles per day in four locally focused, US-based Spanish-language newspapers and the website of one major national Spanish language television network from August 2016 to June 2019. Indeed, we observed a large increase in the number of news articles mentioning the term public charge coincident with the September 2018 announcement.

Figure 2: Exposure to information on the public charge rule, August 2016– June 2019

Our main results from the DID models showed that a 1-percentage-point increase in a county’s noncitizen share was associated with a 0.1-percentage-point reduction in child Medicaid use. Applied nationwide, our findings imply that 260,000 more children lost health coverage in high- compared to low-noncitizen share counties. Figure 3 shows the impact of the public charge rule announcement graphically using an event study. We observe a decline in child Medicaid enrollment immediately after the announcement, consistent with our hypothesis that the announcement caused the decrease.

Figure 3: Effect of the Public Charge Rule Announcement on Medicaid Enrollment in Five States

Implications

Put candidly, the administration’s pernicious misinformation campaign has had negative short- and long-term effects on child welfare. We found evidence that child enrollment in WIC declined as well – even though that program was not included in the rule. This implies that fears of safety-net use among immigrants spilled over beyond the programs directly included. Broader offers of help to noncitizens – from local or state authorities – therefore may be jeopardized by the rule as well. This is particularly dangerous when cooperation and trust in government is needed to combat the spread of COVID-19.

Our results mean that by reducing child safety-net enrollment, the public charge rule announcement increased child poverty and ill health at a time when one person’s health affects us all. Our ability to control the current pandemic in this country depends on providing treatment to all residents of the United States.

Beyond the immediate risks posed by ongoing COVID-19 spread, this reduction in enrollment in essential safety-net programs will negatively affect the children of immigrants for the rest of their lives. These outcomes are monstrous – morally, economically, and for the public’s health. The public charge rule change must be reversed, and investments made to reduce fear and restore trust in a government that works for everyone.

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Boosting Student Voter Participation During a Pandemic

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 16:28:20 GMT

Nearly twice as many students voted in the 2018 midterm election as in 2014, raising turnout among student voters to a high-water mark. As recently as last fall, analysts confidently forecasted similarly record-breaking levels of participation in the 2020 presidential election. Fast forward 12 months and, needless to say, things have changed. The pandemic is impacting every part of the student experience, and civic participation is no different.

Back in 2016, ideas42 set out to investigate barriers to student voter participation by speaking to college students, faculty, and leadership across the country. Students intent on voting often face substantial structural barriers like restrictive ID laws, but we also identified behavioral obstacles that bear on student participation, many of which can be addressed through simple and proactive messages to help them navigate steps of the voting process like registering to vote or requesting a mail ballot for the first time. In the years since we published our initial findings, colleges and universities have made great progress helping students exercise their right to vote, but a pandemic that has thrust campuses nationwide into a chaotic fall semester now threatens that progress.

Understanding the Changed Landscape of Student Voting

To better understand how COVID-19 is impacting how students are thinking about the election — and what schools can do to support student voters — we conducted a national survey using Amazon’s MTurk platform over three weeks this August. Overall, we heard from just over 1,000 eligible voters between the ages of 18-25 years old who are enrolled at 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities across the United States.

The good news is that our survey indicated that most students report strong intentions of voting. The bad news is that even in the best of times the number of students who report that they intend to vote tends to outstrip the number who actually cast a ballot, and the pandemic has exacerbated many of the barriers that prevent civic-minded students from following through on their goal of participating in the election. Below we explore four such barriers that have taken on heightened resonance this year, along with concrete ways schools can help students overcome them:

1. Uncertainty about the process of voting

As new voters, students face a lot of uncertainty about the details and implications of registering to vote. Even in “normal” times, they lack the familiarity with the elections that helps more seasoned voters navigate the electoral process. As a deep literature from behavioral science demonstrates, when we experience uncertainty or ambiguity about a decision, we tend to shy away from it. While the pandemic has heightened ambiguity and confusion around how to participate for all voters, introducing a new dimension of uncertainty around the safety of different voting options. This is especially true for students, millions of whom are unsure where they’ll be living next month, let alone how they’ll vote in the election.

Over 90% of students reported that they intend to vote this fall, but if they have not considered how in-person options have changed in their states over the past few months they could confront unanticipated obstacles. Over 80% of surveyed students indicated that voting in person (either through early voting or on election day) is the voting method that feels most familiar or “normal,” but in-person voting is more complex and ambiguous this year than in previous elections due to changes in polling locations, new safety protocols, and new options in some states – such as early voting.

While some students are proactively considering other methods of voting besides in-person, this means that they’re even less familiar with the process. Nearly 33% of our survey respondents indicated that the way they intend to vote this fall is not what they consider normal. Students are already new to voting, and any knowledge they might have may not be applicable in a year when familiar options like the local polling place are no longer available, or no longer safe.

What students need:

Simple and clear information about the different voting options and processes from a source that they trust.

What schools can do:

Be prepared to answer common voter questions about registration, voter ID laws, mail ballot eligibility and relevant voting deadlines.

2. Indecision about where to register and vote

Students who choose to move away for college may be uneasy registering to vote at school. Some feel like they’re abandoning their hometowns — especially if they are connected to local issues that may affect their families and friends. Worse yet, many fear that registering in the wrong place could result in serious consequences like compromised financial aid.

Voting by mail is often a good option for students, and access has expanded even further this year, with nearly three quarters of Americans eligible to vote by mail. But with more options comes more opportunities for indecision, and students may be uniquely vulnerable to confusion over where and how to vote. Over half of the students we surveyed intended to register and vote using their campus address, but they may be unsure how to plan for sudden changes in their living arrangements between now and November 3 as a result of unanticipated COVID-19 spikes.

What students need:

Reassurance that students can register “at home” and still be part of the student community, regardless of whether or not they remain on campus.

What schools can do:

Deliver tailored registration and absentee ballot request information based on the requirements of student’s home states. In many states, students are eligible for absentee ballots, even without a COVID exception.

3. Low visibility of participation

During our initial research into student voting, we found that voting was not always visible or well-advertised on college campuses, and that schools rarely communicated an expectation that students should participate in elections. Over the last several years, colleges have made strides to make voting more salient, such as locating polling places in high-traffic campus locations, starting civic engagement initiatives, and using posters and in-person organizing to engage with students.

This year, with many students taking classes remotely, many of these efforts will be severely curtailed if not impossible. Students who, like the rest of us, look to the people around them for cues on what to do, might conclude that voting isn’t typical behavior. We know that social norms, or the perceived behavior of others, exert a powerful influence on whether or not students vote, and in an election where more people plan to vote by mail than ever before, there will be even fewer visible signals of student participation, such as the popular “I voted” stickers.

Our survey indicated that nearly half of surveyed students did not know whether or not their three closest friends intend to vote, and the fall semester’s absence of visible normative signals like tables at student centers, flyers on lampposts, or lines at campus polling places risks further undermining student participation and leaving many students in the dark on the voting behavior of their peers.

What students need:

Clear messages that voting is normal, and expected, behavior for students, and opportunities for students to publicly share voting plans.

What schools can do:

Participate in the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, where campuses commit to increasing student voting rates. Many resources already exist through this project that can help schools create a salient norm of student voting.

4. Psychological distance between voting and everyday life

Voting is one of the principal ways that citizens of a democracy act on their political conviction. For younger Americans, however, it is not always a natural form of political expression. Our initial research rejected the notion that students are underrepresented in the American electorate because they are disengaged – when it comes to other forms of political participation like protesting, they are just as engaged as other Americans, if not more. Instead, we found that students often fail to link their everyday experiences to voting.

Our survey revealed that while many students do view voting as an impactful way to drive change in their communities, a sizable minority see donating money to causes (such as mutual aid funds or community based organizing) or protesting as more important. Heightened activism around pressing social causes that began earlier this year presents an opportunity to transfer momentum into student voter turnout, but only if students see voting as a consistent extension of, and not a substitute for, other forms of political participation that may come more naturally to them.

What students need:

Support to think through the concrete details of voting for the first time, and an invitation to participate in the election to spark change around the issues they care about.

What schools can do:

Frame voting as a natural next step for anyone who has previously donated money or attended protests — keep the momentum going!

How Schools Can Help Their Student Voters

Heading into a critical election at the outset of a highly irregular academic year, schools have an opportunity, and an obligation, to proactively address heightened barriers to student voting — and it’s not too late for schools to make a difference, even with limited resources. A final insight from our survey suggests great potential for schools to make an impact: one in four students could not recall having ever been contacted by someone at their school about registering to vote. While registration deadlines have passed in many states across the country, over 20 allow voters to register and cast a ballot on the same day in-person. And beyond registering to vote, schools have a unique ability to help students throughout every step of the voting process.

Nurturing strong habits of civic engagement among students is an obligation that schools can’t push to the back burner, even as they deal with unprecedented challenges brought on by the pandemic. In our new context, schools need to leverage their entire communications toolbox — email, social media, direct text messages, and more — to help their students understand and exercise their right to vote, wherever they are.

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De-biasing the Process to Drive Diversity in Tech Entrepreneurship with Ventures for Shared ...

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 17:08:02 GMT

Like so many of the world’s innovators, when Janica Alvarez became fed up with a terrible product, she invented a better one, in this case a breast pump. Her smart pump enables faster, more comfortable pumping, and allows mothers to track their output. Breast pumps hadn’t been improved in years, and there was strong demand for a better product. Yet Janica struggled to obtain the funding needed to grow her business.

Sadly, many people like Janica face steep barriers to entry into the world of tech entrepreneurship. Just 1-3% of venture capital funding goes to Black and Latino founders, and only 9% goes to women of any background. The lack of diversity in the tech-based entrepreneurial world across gender, race, orientation, and socio-economic status stems from unequal opportunity driven by biases and systemic racism. In our own new initiative, Ventures for Shared Prosperity, we aim to attract entrepreneurs who can reflect their lived experience in the products they develop, and who might not normally have the opportunities to do so because of exclusion from networks or resources. We’ve developed a thoughtful approach to recruiting, informed by behavioral science, that can be easily adopted by others.

As is the case in other sectors, those who decide who gets opportunities often claim that lack of diversity is driven by a lack of qualified talent. It’s a phenomenon John Rice has labeled “the Third Degree of Racism”, where the victim is essentially blamed for the structural systems reinforcing lack of opportunity in society. These existing structural barriers are significant and rooted in a long history of public policies. Additionally, most decisions about hiring and funding are made by humans, and we know from behavioral science that all humans have unintentional and unconscious biases. Those biases are at play in the common processes used to recruit, hire, promote, and fund.

Beyond limiting opportunities for innovators from underrepresented groups, the lack of diversity in entrepreneurship also creates a world that is designed for the few instead of the many. For better or worse, startup founders and entrepreneurs are responsible for many of the products, tools, apps, and resources we use in our day-to-day lives, and if they’re all inventing solutions to problems from a limited perspective, many problems go unsolved, and indeed many solutions on the market fail to work for many.

It’s no secret that entrepreneurs usually address problems that they directly understand or are facing themselves. It’s why Janica Alvarez created the Naya Smart Breast Pump. It’s why when Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick created Uber, it wasn’t because they wanted to revolutionize transportation, it was because they wanted to make it easier to get a taxi in San Francisco, something they found frustrating in their own lives. The solution is simple–if we want businesses and services that solve different types of problems, we need to recruit and fund people who understand and have experience with different types of problems.

The onus is on those offering opportunities to innovators to make sure they design efforts to find, support, and unleash the untapped talent that exists. It is also on those offering opportunities to both measure how they perform in such efforts, and hold themselves accountable to the outcomes. The ultimate aim is to adapt the entrepreneurship pipeline to fit new people, not reshape people to fit the pipeline.

With Ventures for Shared Prosperity, we’re seeking a cohort of entrepreneurs to build socially impactful software businesses that reduce the many excess costs faced by people with low incomes. Central to this work is an effort to recruit individuals typically shut out of the world of tech entrepreneurship, with program features designed specifically to support them. We know there are many talented people with innovative ideas or a passion for solving problems in their communities who are currently outside the world of tech entrepreneurship, facing complex barriers to accessing resources and opportunities.

We recognize that this statement stands in stark contrast to recent comments made by the CEO of our funder, Wells Fargo, around diversity and hiring. The goal of Ventures for Shared Prosperity is and has always been to improve lives and to de-bias unfair processes. It is simply the way we believe the problem needs to be solved. We hope our funder is also ready to do this same work internally, and to tackle the barriers that exist for underrepresented groups during hiring processes.

Drawing from research on bias in hiring, and building on the work done to improve our own recruiting efforts at ideas42 through a behavioral science lens, our aim in designing a bespoke approach to cohort recruitment is to cast a wider net at the outreach stage, de-bias the application process and establish structures that make participation possible for people of all backgrounds, and set concrete diversity goals for ourselves.

We’re sharing the barriers and strategies we’ve identified both to take our own recommendation to make our recruitment process more transparent, and in the hopes that others can use them in their own efforts. Following the onboarding of our first cohort of entrepreneurs, we’ll be sharing an update on what we’ve learned from this approach.

1. Financial risk and insecurity

Entrepreneurship is inherently risky. It takes significant time and resources (when founders aren’t necessarily earning income) to generate a business idea. Individuals with personal wealth or with access to wealthy networks are among the few who have typically been able to take this type of risk. Such barriers likely prevent many people from entering, and perhaps even considering, tech entrepreneurship.

To create more diversity in our cohort, the first step we took with Ventures for Shared Prosperity was to mitigate these risks. Individuals engaged in Venture for Shared Prosperity will receive a full salary and health benefits for the first 18 months of the program, in addition to (and distinct from) startup capital. The program also includes time for ideation (as opposed to requiring a fully developed product idea at the application stage), and no specific tech skills are required. Cohort members will receive ample support from business advisors, software developers, and behavioral scientists to help with design, customer insights, and UX. Such support can make tech entrepreneurship more feasible for more people.

2. Networks skewed toward privilege

Tech is a small world. Funding tends to be spread through the same networks, among those with similar backgrounds and even in similar locations. This skews application pools toward more privileged individuals. A RateMyInvestor report found that over 25% of invested capital goes to founders who attended Ivy League schools (while by contrast fewer than 1% of 2019 college graduates overall obtained a degree from an Ivy League school), and 42% of VC-backed startups are physically located in Silicon Valley. In the U.S., 18.3% of the population is Black and 18.5% is Latino, and yet less than 3% of VC firms have Black or Latino investment partners.

That’s why it’s important to broadcast new opportunities beyond the typical networks and channels. In addition to a public launch at the Prosperity Now conference, we’re prioritizing outreach to community-based organizations and groups that specifically work to support diverse communities, rather than just to players already involved with existing tech and financial services networks.

3. Language that excludes

Language and framing in job postings can be, among other things, gendered, and perceptions of being qualified for an opportunity can differ by gender. In one study, the removal of qualifications that were optional and “superfluous adjectives” resulted in more qualified women applying for jobs. Of course, language can carry signifiers that exclude based on a wide range of identities and group membership including class, race, national origin, and ability.

While not a panacea, the gender decoder for job ads is a valuable tool for anyone designing outreach programs or hiring processes. We used it to improve sections of the Ventures for Shared Prosperity site and informational materials. Additionally, standard criteria for assessing candidates for more traditional jobs doesn’t necessarily translate to entrepreneurial success, so our materials emphasize a wider range of applicable skill sets, including lived and personal experiences outside a work environment.

4. Not enough transparency in evaluation processes

When seeking funding or other opportunities in the world of entrepreneurship, “the rules of the game seem opaque,” especially for underrepresented applicants. How do applicants know the process is fair?

To increase transparency, applications should provide an explanation about why every question is being asked, and how it corresponds to the evaluation process. These explanations might seem obvious to those who created the questions, but not to the applicants themselves. In our application, we’re also explaining how we see the questions connecting back to entrepreneurship by using short blurbs that help frame the questions. For instance, in questions where we ask about what motivates the candidate, we provide a link to information about our area of focus and explicitly ask candidates to connect their motivation to the topic area.

5. Implicit bias in screening applications

Women receive different types of questions from venture capital firms than men, and underrepresented minorities are more likely to receive additional probes during interviews than others.

Equalizing the evaluation process is crucial. Developing a set of fixed interview questions and scoring criteria that will be applied to all applicants reduces the potential for evaluators to default to unconscious biases when assessing candidates. Screening candidates in a slate, or comparing an individual’s qualifications to those of the other applicants rather than making judgement calls about each applicant individually, can also help to de-bias screening.

With Ventures for Shared Prosperity, to ensure that we’re incorporating a diversity of perspectives, multiple reviewers will evaluate each candidate independently. We will also track metrics around who is, and who is not, making it through each stage of our application process in order to further investigate whether there are features of our application process that unintentionally remain biased. At each stage we can then see if there are inequities before narrowing the candidate pool.

Where we go from here

After our first cohort of entrepreneurs has been selected, we’ll share what we’ve learned from this process in the hope that others find the insights useful. What worked? What was the experience like for applicants? What would we do differently? If widely adopted, insights like these can pave the way for innovative changes that make entrepreneurship (and hiring overall) more inclusive and support the development of groundbreaking products and services with the potential to drastically improve many lives, not just a few.

Interested in learning more about our approach to de-biasing recruitment and outreach? Get in touch at info@ideas42.org.

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Brain, Meet Modern Journalism

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 15:25:20 GMT

A lesson one of us (Elizabeth) learned in journalism school: The best first sentences, also known as the lead, are vacuums. Great journalists use them to demand a slice of readers’ limited cognitive bandwidth and suck them into a story. If the story is well-written and interesting enough, your audience will read and understand it, lectured journalism school professors back when Facebook was merely a platform for students to connect.

A lesson that both of us have learned as applied behavioral scientists: our psychology influences how and whether we read the news in ways that can render even the most powerful lead moot. For instance, we constantly make unconscious decisions about what to focus on and what to ignore – not necessarily based on what’s most important to us, but on small cues in our environment. As a journalist, you can help news consumers zero in on key information by changing those environmental cues and presenting it at moments when they’re primed to listen.

Understanding how our psychology interacts with the news we consume is more important than ever as journalists plan election coverage during a season rife with misinformation that threatens the integrity of our democracy. Perhaps the most important piece of information news consumers will need to understand over the next month: November 3rd is the first day of what will likely be a prolonged election results period – and that’s a sign of the system working properly.

We can apply proven behavioral principles to help the public navigate these unusual times and prepare for what’s to come in November. Below, we’ve pulled together four simple insights journalists can use when covering the election, each paired with easy-to-use solutions aimed at building understanding and confidence in the upcoming election results.

Insight #1: Reset people’s expectations early and often. It’s certainly not news that emotions around this election are in overdrive. But as we inch towards November, emotional states will only intensify, making people more likely to support interpretations of the results that favor their candidates – regardless of veracity. To account for this tendency, we can help people internalize how votes will be tallied far in advance of November 3rd while they are still receptive to objective information. Rather than using phrases like “delayed results,” journalists should frame longer count periods as a signal of an accurate and secure count.

More specifically, you can offer a clear framework for anticipating which states may need more time to count votes. This framework could be built around three objective indicators: 1) the expected proportion of mail ballots; 2) the rules determining when officials can start processing and counting mail ballots; and 3) the closeness of the races being contested.

Illustration:

Insight #2: Keep key information simple, consistent, and redundant. People have a limited supply of attention in an already noisy media environment. To break through the din, go back to basics: concise messages that reset basic expectations, delivered over and again. Reinforce in as many ways as possible that accurate results may take several weeks to be fully counted. Redundant messages will make the new expectations and vote count timelines feel intuitive and familiar, and therefore, more likely to be perceived as true.

One approach to consider is affixing standard language to all political coverage from now through November.

Insight #3: Deliver clear cues to orient people’s expectations in real time. People constantly make unconscious assessments of situations based on subtle cues in their environment. When Election Day arrives, visual markers and other signals can help your audience navigate a deluge of information and maintain the accurate expectations that have been set.

Returning to the message that election day will be the first of many, try labeling November 3rd as “Day 1” of an ongoing election period. You could also preview important milestones happening in the week (or weeks) after the election to set accurate expectations.

Illustration:

Insight #4: Empower people with concrete information at the right time. People tend to hold on to existing beliefs and rationalize evidence to support them while rejecting information that doesn’t. This can place a higher burden on journalists to present results in a way that can’t be easily misconstrued. When in doubt, we recommend over-explaining election processes so they’re concrete and transparent. As with our previous insights, providing real-time details on what factors are causing drawn-out (or initially skewed) results equips your audience with a credible understanding of what’s happening in each state. That, in turn, could make them less likely to fall for false claims of election rigging or other attempts to challenge the integrity of the process.

Combine early vote counts with information on the number of outstanding mail ballots and any ballot processing policies that may prolong the results (e.g., a state’s deadline for receiving ballots from the post office).

Illustration:

For the two of us, the longer we’ve worked together, the more we’ve realized that behavioral scientists and journalists have a lot in common – and a lot we can learn from each other. Both fields, after all, are interested in excavating the often hidden explanations for why people do what they do. Both fields care about communicating crucial information clearly and concisely.

Journalism is designed to capture attention, slice through noise and illuminate truth. But in an election season rife with confusion and misinformation, this job is harder than ever. Making small changes to how coverage is framed, explained, and disseminated could make a big difference in how the public understands what’s happening in the election. And with the precarious state our democracy is currently in, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

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How to Prevent the Minor Errors that Disqualify Mail-In Ballots

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:30:00 GMT

At first glance, mail-in ballot numbers seem to presage a coming disaster: during the primaries more than 550,000 mail ballots were rejected, many disqualified for seemingly small errors, like envelopes sealed with tape. But these numbers don’t signal an inevitable November Nightmare. In fact, the science of human behavior can help explain both why these rejection rates were so high and how state and local officials can reduce them in November.

The usual reasons for rejecting mail ballots are: they arrive too late, administrators can’t match a voter’s signature with the one on file, or the signature is missing altogether. Notably, rejection rates are typically higher in states where fewer people use mail ballots. With effective design and outreach, these problems can all be overcome.

Take first the problem of missed deadlines.

Voters often rely on past experiences of voting in-person, their mental model of how voting works, to set their expectations for the vote-by-mail process. For many, that mental model includes a reasonable assumption that Election Day is voting day – whether by mail or in-person. Unfortunately, more than half of all states require ballots to be received, not just postmarked, by Election Day–or in some cases the day before. Many people simply don’t know about this.

Even voters who know the deadline may procrastinate or don’t account for how long delivery may take. For example, in California’s March primary – where voters could mail their ballot on Election Day as long as it was received within three days – 70% of rejected ballots were due to late arrivals. The complexity of the mail system – both how long delivery takes and the nuances of postmarks – make it difficult for even the most enthusiastic voters to ensure their ballots are received on time.

A clear fix for this problem is to relax that delivery constraint while still letting people mail their ballot on Election Day–a day set firmly in many voters’ minds. Since the primaries, California and many other states, recognizing the new COVID voting reality, created more flexible deadlines for ballot return. As long as they are postmarked by Election Day, ballots in California now have up to 17 days after the election to arrive and still be counted. This takes the onus off of voters to calculate how long postal delivery takes, which may vary and is out of their control.

Another option is to institute more flexible ballot return options. While some states, such as Georgia, haven’t adjusted their deadline statutes, they have created dropboxes and other non-mail return methods where voters can return their ballots on or before Election Day. Dropboxes are already popular in universal vote-by-mail states like Colorado and Washington, and have blossomed across the U.S. with the rise in mail ballot demand.

Finally, just-in-time reminders, delivered across multiple channels (mail, text, email, and more), when voters have ballots in hand and are able to act, combined with simple heuristics about when voters should return can both help solve the problem. In Oregon and Arizona, both states with high or universal vote by mail usage and deadlines that required ballots to be received by Election Day, election officials and their partners widely publicize two different deadlines. The first deadline is the last day when voters can reliably return their ballot by mail and the second is Election Day, the deadline for voters to hand deliver their ballots to a dropbox or other return location.

There are also predictable – and solvable– behavioral patterns at the root of the other most common reason ballots are rejected: voter signatures.

People can only take in so much information at once – and mail ballots tend to have a lot of information to sift through: long and confusing instructions, and sometimes dozens of different contests to vote on. It’s easy in this context for voters to hone in on the “big” pieces of the process – like marking our choices –without accounting for other nuanced features, like signing properly or at all.

Some will simply forget to sign. For others, their signature may not match their official signature on file (often the signature on their driver’s license or voter registration record) which can lead to rejection. People may not realize that the signatures need to match. Many of us sign our names without much conscious thought or concern about how it looks. But our “habitual” signature, the one we might use to quickly sign our names on digital pads at the grocery store or a restaurant may look different than the one we carefully signed on our drivers license several years ago.

Ballot design and accompanying outreach materials can provide timely guidance (on the envelope itself in the best cases) reminding voters they need to sign and making it hard to forget by using strategically redundant messaging. Officials and advocates can also offer heuristics, like “sign the ballot like you would an official contract, not how you would at the grocery store” to alert voters that the quality of their signature matters in order for their vote to be counted. Lastly, where possible, states should be transparent about the signature verification process and build in opportunities for voters to fix mistakes, or “cure” their ballots. These programs make it clear why following the rules is important, provide clear and easy paths to correct mistakes, and assure voters that ballot rejections are not arbitrary.

Even with Election Day fast approaching, it’s not too late for state officials to make simple adjustments to voter outreach messaging strategies and operational policies. Making evidence-based changes now can help prevent unnecessary ballot rejections and ensure everyone who intends to cast a ballot has their chance to have their voice heard.

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Empowering Girls as Agents of Change in Preventing Unplanned Pregnancy

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 15:44:08 GMT

An unplanned pregnancy during adolescence can dramatically impact a girl’s health and economic future, yet use of modern family planning (FP) services among adolescents remains low in many places. The challenge is particularly great in many countries in Africa, where despite a global rise in FP use among adolescents, adolescent fertility remains high and nearly two-thirds of sexually active girls who want to avoid pregnancy are not using a modern contraceptive method. Access to modern contraceptives is hindered by a variety of factors, including legal barriers like age of consent, affordability, method availability, and health workers’ willingness to provide sexual and reproductive health services to youth. But even when these obstacles are overcome, uptake of FP services often remains low.

Efforts to tackle the challenge often focus on improving the availability and ‘youth-friendliness’ of services, educating girls about FP and encouraging them to access services, and convincing communities that youth access to modern contraceptives is important. While programs sometimes work through peer educators to reach youth, these young people are often trained extensively and take on a more formal role, in contrast to the girls they seek to reach, who are approached as more passive recipients or beneficiaries of such a program rather than true peers. Historically, peer education programs have had limited success.

How, then, can we support girls who wish to avoid an unplanned pregnancy? One answer may lie in the role that girls are asked to play in programs that seek to reach them. Research has repeatedly shown that across many contexts, girls often don’t perceive themselves to have agency in matters concerning sex, family planning, and their reproductive futures. They might be physically able to visit a clinic and take up a family planning method, but they don’t feel confident making the choice for themselves or empowered to act on it. To enhance a sense of agency among girls, we drew from research in other contexts showing that giving advice to others can encourage action by building confidence and motivation. With this in mind, we sought to develop solutions which would put more girls in the role of advocates for family planning within their peer groups.

In Burkina Faso, we partnered with Pathfinder International as part of the (re)solve project to design a board game for high school students called La Chance. As they play, girls encounter real-life relationship scenarios, “experience” consequences, and are prompted to share advice. Going through this experience with their classmates, players can begin to understand that other girls like them are both at risk for unplanned pregnancy and can make the choice to access and use FP methods. Players may pick “advice” cards which ask them to provide guidance to other girls on how they should manage difficult relationship situations, or to educate friends that simply knowing and tracking your menstrual cycle may not protect you from pregnancy. We designed the game cards so that players read questions aloud to the rest of the group, and then reveal answers that are visible only with a pair of decoder glasses. This ensured that girls were being engaged as advisors, rather than only listening to messages from authoritative game facilitators. At the end of the game, girls are given multiple “passport” booklets to encourage them and their friends to visit health facilities.

La Chance board game

In Uganda, through a collaboration with Marie Stopes, teenage girls receive “Refer-a-Friend” cards from a community-based mobilizer or FP service provider, on which they mark their own motivations for using or learning about family planning. They are then prompted to give the card to a friend and suggest that she also learn more about family planning by visiting a Marie Stopes clinic. At the clinic, each card can be redeemed for two friendship wristbands – one for the girl visiting the clinic and the other for the friend who referred her. Girls are not required to take up an FP method either to give a Refer-a-Friend card or to receive the wristbands. This program offers girls an immediate motivation to talk to friends about family planning, share advice, and articulate reasons why girls like them may choose to use family planning. Girls who receive Refer-a-Friend cards get an endorsement from a trusted peer, while girls who give the cards have an opportunity to give advice that builds their confidence and solidifies their motivation to access FP services when they need them. When a girl visits a clinic to redeem a card, she receives a new card to give to another friend, becoming an advice-giver herself.

Back (left) and front (right) of Refer-A-Friend card.

Both of these novel programs were designed with girls’ agency in mind–placing them as both active participants in and as recipients of the program. Additionally, both interventions include changes to the facility environment, such as youth-friendly posters and provider training that aim to make health facilities more welcoming environments for girls who have decided to visit. Initial feedback – from girls and from those responsible for administering the programs – has been positive. Both programs are currently being evaluated to assess their impact on volume of adolescent clients at participating clinics (in both countries), intention to use FP (in Burkina Faso), and FP takeup (in Uganda), and we look forward to sharing results when they are available.

Stay tuned for more insights from our work to put every girl and woman in control of their own reproductive health. Questions? Reach out to us at GH@ideas42.org.

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Using Behavioral Insights to Make the Most of Emergency Social Protection Cash Transfers

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 16:52:58 GMT

Hafia village, prefecture of Dalaba, Guinea. A man receives money as part of a social net project. © Vincent Tremeau /World Bank

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries across the globe have been adapting social assistance policies to support their populations. In fact, since March 2020, 139 countries and territories have planned, implemented, or adapted cash transfers to support their citizens. Cash transfers specifically make up about half of the social protection programs implemented to address the pandemic. Now more than ever, it’s crucial that such programs are designed to maximize impacts. Behavioral insights can be mobilized as a cost-effective way to help beneficiaries make the most out of the available support. The World Bank and ideas42 partnership on behavioral designs for cash transfer programs is helping countries achieve this goal.

Cash transfers are a key response instrument in the social protection toolkit—and for good reason. Cash transfers have been shown to generate a wide variety of positive benefits, from helping families invest in their children to promoting gender equality. However, we know from our previous work that in order to make the most out of cash transfers, recipients of any program (already facing challenging circumstances that compete for their attention) must undertake complex decisions and actions with their cash. These challenges are only magnified by the global pandemic. COVID-19 has wrought increased uncertainty around future employment and income, which makes calculations and planning to use cash transfer benefits all the more complex.

To help practitioners design programs that account for the complex thought processes and potential barriers recipients face, we mapped out their journey to effectively spend emergency social protection cash transfers. We also created simple, actionable guidance for program designers to put to use in maximizing their programs to help recipients use their cash transfer benefit to most effectively support families and reduce mid- to long-term financial volatility.

For example, the first step is helping recipients understand what the transfer is for. For recipients who have not yet been impacted by financial instability, or indeed have never encountered a cash transfer before, such funds might seem like a gift or bonus, and recipients may spend it accordingly. Providing clear, simple framing or labelling the transfer may signal to recipients that they should use the cash not only for immediate needs, but also in ways that can help them protect investments in their family members’ human capital and jumpstart their livelihood after the crisis wanes.

After enrolling in the program, recipients must then plan how to spend their cash. In order to make a plan that effectively allocates cash for immediate needs and what might be needed in the future, recipients must think about when they might get more support (or when they might have income restored) in the future. Clearly communicating if and when future payments will come can help recipients manage and best allocate the cash they receive.

After completing all other steps in the journey—paying attention to and acting on any additional messages and receiving their cash—recipients must spend the cash according to their plan to help smooth consumption during the crisis and reduce long-term financial volatility.

Barriers can emerge that make it difficult for beneficiaries to stick to their plan. For example, they may look to the spending patterns of others, and decide to deviate from their original plan if it does not match what they see their peers doing. The stress of the crisis may also prompt them to focus on short-term issues, rather than longer-term plans. Simple designs—such as using posters, flyers, SMS or media posts—to communicate norms around productive spending or providing a tool that recipients can use to separate their cash immediately upon receipt—can help recipients stay on track with their own plans.

While suggestions should always be tailored to the context and cultural nuances of each program, and adjusted to minimize risks (health or otherwise) to beneficiaries, this guidance aims to provide principles that can be applied to a wide range of cash transfer programs with a variety of goals.

The current global pandemic and its ensuing economic crisis make it all the more important that cash transfer recipients use the income support as effectively as possible. Light-touch, low-cost tweaks, derived from evidence and a deep understanding of human behavior, can ensure programs are designed in a way that do just that—potentially improving countless lives.

To learn more, get the checklist and infographic that map out the journey to effectively spending cash transfers.

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8 Strategies for College Leaders Advancing Change Initiatives

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 14:40:15 GMT

Beyond the stress of actually living through the COVID-19 crisis themselves, college leaders are in the midst of having to make substantial changes to the higher education system in what feels like real time. From ongoing efforts to improve student services to the urgent need to transition courses online due to the pandemic, the entire post-secondary education field is confronting significant transformation.

Most people would likely agree that large-scale organizational change is incredibly challenging–even daunting. For example, schools looking to implement Guided Pathways (a set of reforms that streamlines the student journey through college) need to not only restructure degree requirements across every department, but also redesign student advising, course registration, first year experience programs, and course curricula. This is a campus-wide effort, but even seemingly smaller initiatives can be difficult to implement successfully.

Applying behavioral science to organizational change can help make transformation efforts easier, faster, and more effective. We’ve identified a set of strategies that school leaders can use to manage some of the most common behavioral barriers they’re likely to face when promoting change, from planning for needed changes through implementation of plans:

Unstick from the status quo – People prefer to avoid change, especially when there are many potential paths forward or these paths are hard to compare. School leaders can mitigate status quo bias by highlighting the benefits of change and prompting those affected to compare the current approach with the proposed new one.

Set a goal and get on the same page – When working on a change initiative, people may have different visions of the end goal without even realizing it. To address this, leaders should ensure that everyone’s mental models of the end goal are aligned through activities such as collaborative visioning exercises.

Connect identities to tasks – Change initiatives require people to take on new tasks. Team members may be reticent to take on a task if they feel it’s not part of their defined role. School leaders must therefore help people see a connection between their new responsibilities and their established role-based identity.

Work together from the start – When working through a significant change, people care not only about fair outcomes, but also about fair processes. To promote a sense of procedural justice among those who will be affected by any change, school leaders should create channels for meaningful input.

Simplify, simplify, simplify – Every change initiative involves many smaller steps, and little hassles along the way can have a disproportionately large impact on behavior. Leaders managing the change should simplify new tasks as much as possible, and keep an eye out for any steps on which people get stuck.

Build habits to make new tasks stick – Change initiatives, by definition, require people to do their jobs differently — but new one-off tasks are easy to forget. School leaders should help people develop new habits by integrating any new processes into existing routines, and timing the roll-out of changes with natural breaks in the school calendar.

Expect delays and build in buffer – People systematically underestimate how much time, money, and effort it will take to design and implement a change initiative. To address this planning fallacy, school leaders should help those managing the change process create concrete, detailed plans, and encourage them to add more slack to the schedule and budget than they think is necessary.

Leave time for integration – Responsibility for planning most change initiatives is typically split among different people or even different departments. Aligning separate workstreams at the end of the process takes more time and attention than people think. School leaders should budget extra time and attention for this coordination, and avoid tunnelling on small pieces at the expense of the bigger picture.

Our toolkit “Advancing Transformation with Behavioral Science” delves into the behavioral science principles that inform each recommendation as well as tips for putting the strategies into practice. You can also find a handy overview of these eight strategies here.

While we developed these strategies with higher education in mind, they are applicable for any organization facing large-scale change. By proactively designing for common behavioral barriers, we hope that readers will be able to bring about the organizational changes they seek faster and with less friction. Leaders at colleges, universities, and beyond have no shortage of good ideas—our goal is to deploy behavioral insights to help make planning for and implementing those ideas as effective as possible.

Interested in learning more about putting these strategies into practice? Reach out to Rachel Taylor at rtaylor@ideas42.org with questions or thoughts.

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The College Student Journey in the Time of COVID-19

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 14:29:48 GMT

We know there are often invisible behavioral barriers at every point in the college process. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic and its repercussions impact every point along a student’s college journey — exacerbating existing barriers and creating new ones for more than 25 million students across the U.S. All students, especially low-income and first-generation students who already face steeper barriers, will feel the impacts of COVID-19 for months and years to come.

In the first weeks of the pandemic, we shared evidence-based behavioral tips for creating positive and more effective online learning experiences, but it’s clear that the impact of COVID-19 on student life extends beyond merely transitioning course content from classrooms to Zoom. Here at ideas42, we’ve been working to identify how the COVID crisis is likely to exacerbate behavioral barriers students face along the college journey in order to facilitate new solutions that ease the burden on students and administrators in our new reality. Some of the new problems include:

1. Pre-Admissions: Prospective students recently shifted their preferences for institutions based on now-salient factors like proximity to home and lower tuition rather than long-term indicators like graduation rates and job placement statistics. Due to COVID-19, for example, 28% of enrolled students have an increased preference for staying closer to home.

Rapid changes in priority around school selection such as these may result in undermatching, the term for when students attend lower- resourced or lower-performing schools than they may have otherwise been able to attend. Additionally, limited in-person classes and uncertainty around what the traditional “college experience” can now look like reduces the perceived benefits of choosing selective residential campuses. With fewer evaluative resources available, such as campus tours and possibly even access to college counselors, students may continue to prioritize immediate, much more salient factors over the long-term benefits of attending higher-performing schools.

2. Affordability & Financial Aid: Applying for financial aid is already a hassle-filled process that results in funds being left on the table each year, and there is no reason to expect students and families who are under enormous added stress from the pandemic to have an easier time overcoming administrative burden than they did before the pandemic.

Now, applying for financial aid could be even more burdensome. More students, especially those whose financial situations have changed recently, will likely have an increased need for financial aid, and may not utilize available financial resources, as we’ve seen in the past.

Uncertainty around future college plans might cause students to put off filing the FAFSA, and poor academic performances during the height of the pandemic may negatively impact students’ aid eligibility. Students may also view their award as final, rather than something that they can appeal. Finally, the unmet, increased need for financial aid could lead students to transfer to cheaper but lower-performing institutions, accrue more debt, or drop out of college altogether, failing to reap the benefits of a degree while having to pay back their existing loans.

3. Connecting on Campus: It will be harder than ever to connect with peers in a virtual college setting, and we know that cultivating a sense of community, belonging, and identity are all essential for bolstering resilience when a student inevitably faces adversity in a new and challenging environment. These feelings of isolation will only be intensified by the mental strain of “Zoom fatigue” that comes from hours of video calls every day. Difficulties in forming meaningful relationships will likely extend to faculty-student connections as well. Professors who are transitioning to online teaching and adapting to their own new realities may not be able to offer traditional levels of mentorship and attention.

Excelling in college is challenging during normal times, but without the often-overlooked benefits that peers, faculty, and other support services can provide, students may feel more isolated and experience decreased resilience when adversity strikes, leading many to question their place in higher education, and some to drop out altogether.

4. Using Student Services: Tutoring, advising, and wraparound support services are essential for student persistence, and we already know that students don’t always take advantage of these programs. When these services transition online, we expect utilization to drop even further, especially among first-generation students, low-income students, and students of color who can be less likely to leverage them in the first place.

For example, students may miss communications from support services staff due to an overwhelming increase in information on fewer communication channels while they’re stressed and bandwidth constrained. Additionally, faculty and staff (who often proactively refer students to appropriate resources) may be less able to identify students who need help if struggling students are less noticeable online than in-person. Furthermore, we anticipate that services could become less effective, as many of them rely on in-person consultations and relationship building. To maintain effectiveness, colleges will need to redesign programs so that they can effectively cultivate these relationships remotely. Between lower uptake and lower efficacy, students will be less likely to receive the support they need to face a variety of academic, social, financial, or personal challenges.

5. Job Placement: COVID-19 has shaken the job market, and recent college graduates, who graduated during a recession, will be some of the most impacted. As in the years following the Great Recession, students across the country are struggling to find jobs, and employment challenges for recent graduates exacerbate inequalities and disproportionately harm students without strong professional networks.

But it isn’t just the economy. Students will have fewer opportunities to attend networking events, reduced access to career counselors, and curtailed internship and other experiential learning opportunities due to the pandemic. As a result, in the years to come, students’ breadth of career prospects may be limited to their own knowledge of career options that would otherwise be broadened through the exposure they get to other students, faculty, alumni, and people moving through a college campus. Students might also self-select into less ambitious career opportunities because of the uncertainty and fear brought about by COVID-19 and related economic downturn. And missed job opportunities, including internships and full-time jobs, may make it harder for students to fit the pre-qualifications of certain employers.

Behavioral science can be applied to these and many other barriers that students increasingly face along their college journey. It may seem daunting, but identifying critical challenges along the student journey is the first step to designing solutions that address them.

Following a decade of conducting research with schools and students, designing and testing solutions around the country, and conversations with stakeholders in the last few months, we are now taking what we know and adapting what works for educators and administrators to the new COVID-19 reality we’re all facing.

For example, we’re working to develop resources that help college administrators deliver behaviorally informed text message communications to students, which is a more important channel than ever now that students are largely remote. We’re also working to make it easier for adult students to enroll in postsecondary programs and creating new ways to improve the efficacy of workforce development programs.

There have always been hurdles on the path to college graduation. Unfortunately, these issues are not going away any time soon, and many of these barriers will continue to impact students for years to come. At a time when college communities won’t be “together” in the same sense as they have been in the past, it’s more important than ever for colleges to use a behavioral lens to support current and prospective students to and through college. Armed with a deep understanding of human behavior, schools can anticipate new barriers students will face and invest in addressing these new challenges to help more students obtain their degree.

The post The College Student Journey in the Time of COVID-19 appeared first on ideas42.

When Choices Don’t Match Preferences: Better Family Planning Through Behavioral Design

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 20:22:46 GMT

Women from the Young Mothers Group meeting and getting family planning information from a community health worker. The program is supported by Reproductive Health Uganda, with the goal to empower the women in the group, and provide them with family planning information. Credit: Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images/Images of Empowerment

This post originally appeared on the Breakthrough Action + Research blog.

Thanks to global efforts, family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) services have made great strides. However, many people still do not use these services even when they currently want to avoid or delay pregnancy. Behavioral economics brings a unique perspective to the choices people make around having children and using FP. This field has generated new insight to help explain why women, their partners, and their families sometimes make choices that are not aligned with their own preferences. It sheds light on the reasons why even a strong intention to use FP services does not always translate into taking up a method or using it correctly and consistently. The behavioral economics approach also offers insight into the challenges health workers face in offering high-quality FP/RH services, even if they have the training and resources to do so.

Drawing on insights from behavioral economics and other disciplines, behavioral design offers a powerful tool for program designers that supports women and their families in achieving their reproductive goals. Behaviorally informed programs account for and reshape the environments in which people live and make decisions to positively influence behavior. For example:

Gamifying counseling on FP methods provides engagement that encourages women to actively choose the method that is best for them.
Benchmarking performance in clinics against other clinics encourages consistent counseling on long-acting methods for post-abortion clients.
Using an interactive game helps men see the benefits of child spacing and boosts their confidence to have open conversations about FP with their partners.
Instituting a behaviorally-optimized referral system that integrates FP with childhood immunizations to increase postpartum uptake of contraceptive methods.

In FP/RH, it is critical to support people in making the choice that is best for them and behavioral design offers a growing body of evidence for how to do just that.

To learn more about using behavioral economics and behavioral design in FP/RH, visit the new Trending Topics page.

The post When Choices Don’t Match Preferences: Better Family Planning Through Behavioral Design appeared first on ideas42.