When was the last time you watched a movie about poverty? Our Economic Justice team recently kicked off a new tradition of regularly watching movies about poverty to critically examine how the people who experience it are depicted, and what narratives are told. The first film we chose was The Florida Project, an award-winner about a child and her mother living at the margins of Disney World in central Florida. The movie was shot at a functioning motel in the area, and some of the real families who live in the motel participated. It sought to depict the challenges faced by the motel residents in an illuminating light. Our team discussed the ways the movie succeeded, as well as the ways it fell short. 

Stories about financial hardship are worth telling well, and not just because it’s good cinema or entertaining. The real value is the powerful impact that effective storytelling  can have on people’s lives. However, even well-meaning films and TV shows are often laced with false narratives about what causes poverty, and what it’s like to live in its grasp. Not only that, these narratives are deeply ingrained in many of us, and they are often racialized and gendered— built on stereotypes and prejudices. They are full of misinformation, reinforced through perceptions of personal experiences, traditions, and of course, media and movies. 

Yet those attitudes aren’t confined to plotlines in  film, the rabbit holes of social media, our minds, or even day-to-day conversations we have with those in our lives. Widely prevalent attitudes and beliefs about poverty influence lawmakers and program designers too, and these are the people who make choices about how to shape programs, policies, and systems meant to help people who lack resources. In the United States, and in various ways around the world, our current poverty narratives aren’t just false, they are harmful. The so-called American Dream itself tees up a way of blaming individuals who fail to achieve it, without considering the myriad socioeconomic and structural forces at play. Narratives about poverty are responsible for the failures that often plague even well-meaning programs, such as poorly designed application processes full of hassles, the imposition of work requirements, and stigma from participation—despite the vast evidence that these elements of programs hurt families and can trap them in poverty.

Given these false and harmful narratives driving the choices being made, program and policy design, both intentionally and unintentionally, are then destined to fail the very people they are meant to serve. And because the public generally holds these faulty narratives to be true, there’s not enough political economy or will  to change harmful policies or programs. Put bluntly, harmful narratives about poverty can and do prevent meaningful improvement in reducing inequality and improving lives for those with fewer resources. 

To unlock the political will to promote more effective and generous social policy and truly tackle inequality, we must first change the narrative. That’s why, as part of our multi-pronged initiative Shared Prosperity Catalyst, we’ve launched narrative change initiatives in New York City, Washington D.C., and the East Bay of northern California, and we’re using this approach to launch in Memphis and Detroit. This work explores ways to shift poverty narratives at a local level through targeted campaigns  leveraging behavioral science research and the lived expertise of people experiencing poverty in those cities. 

Based on initial research, it’s clear that behavioral concepts such as fundamental attribution error—when we are more likely to attribute a person’s behavior to their character, rather than their context or external circumstances (but do the opposite for ourselves)—play a significant role in shaping and reinforcing poverty narratives.  Recognizing this, we can use our deep understanding of cognitive biases, coupled with our expertise in designing for contexts of chronic scarcity, to develop new tools and practices to shift false and harmful poverty narratives. 

We know, however, that we cannot do this work successfully alone. We’re bringing together “Local Narrative Teams”— groups of local organizations that have deep knowledge and expertise of these cities and their people. Our partners include Center for Community Resilience, COTS Detroit, and WHEDCo, among others. Together, the Local Narrative Teams, individuals with lived experience, and ideas42 will co-design narrative change campaigns attuned to the needs of each city and the communities within them. In addition, we plan to create new tools and resources for measuring narrative change, which we will use to evaluate the campaigns to understand what works. 

To begin to honestly explore how different narratives impact your own beliefs, ask yourself: how do you feel about requiring people to submit employment paperwork in order to receive food assistance or medical coverage from the government? What images, stories, or emotions are conjured up for you when you consider this question? Does your opinion change depending on whether the recipient is a mother of children, versus a single adult? An immigrant? (And also, what do you know about the (lack of) evidence that supports such a policy?) It’s likely multiple narratives that you hold about poverty, the government, immigration, as well as who is deserving of what help, shaped the thoughts, stories, and emotions that surfaced.

As we further develop our work in narrative change, we hope to unearth insights that will be relevant to existing  narrative change work and the social impact space more broadly, including organizations working on poverty in the U.S. and globally, advocacy and policy organizations, media, and beyond. This work is ambitious, but we are excited about its potential for impact.

If we are successful, even the way poverty is depicted in film may change. Perhaps it will make it easier to address false narratives in scripts and ensure evidence-based depictions of poverty and its causes—helping to shift the audience’s beliefs and attitudes and forming a counter-narrative shaped by people’s real lived experience. If our narrative change work is truly successful, we will have also gained new insights for how behavioral science, through partnership with communities and those with the real expertise in living with poverty, can shift narratives that galvanize the political will to advance social policies that not only seek to end poverty, but also promote dignity and advance justice for all.

The post Changing Harmful Narratives About Poverty appeared first on ideas42.

Application processes—whether for jobs, funding, or other opportunities—are full of potential moments for bias to occur. In launching our venture studio, Ventures for Shared Prosperity, we knew that recruiting the right people to join our cohort as entrepreneurs was going to be crucial, and we saw a responsibility to create and conduct our application process in a way that encouraged people of all backgrounds—across race, age, ability, gender, and many other dimensions—to apply and feel welcome. 

In our recruiting and outreach efforts, this started with expanding the very definition of who thinks of themselves as an entrepreneur. When we began recruiting in September 2020, we wanted to ensure that the application was open and accessible, with an emphasis on individuals with lived experience of our venture studio’s initial area of focus, reducing the costs of living in poverty. Why this emphasis on lived experience? Because we know that the context of poverty is complex, requiring intricate and challenging decisions and tradeoffs. We think those who have lived this reality are the real experts and will be the right leaders to identify and develop effective solutions, as they understand the nuance of poverty better than someone without that experience. It was crucial that people with direct experience with our focus area felt comfortable applying, even if they didn’t necessarily think of themselves as entrepreneurs yet. 

 We shared strategies for setting up our recruitment and application processes in an earlier post about this work. Now that we’ve successfully run the process and had time to take stock of what we’ve learned, we’re sharing more practical tips and insights gained from having used our behaviorally-informed recruitment practices to onboard a slate of extremely talented entrepreneurs. These insights can be put to work by any organization seeking to revamp recruitment processes with an eye toward reducing bias and recruiting for lived experience:

• Design for Scarcity: A long line of behavioral science research teaches us that when we experience a chronic lack of a resource—like time or money—it takes a toll on our abilities. People living with less resources are especially likely to experience chronic scarcity, and we wanted to design our application process to be as friendly as possible to applicants in this context. Thankfully, designing for scarcity is a core part of our work at ideas42, and we took the opportunity to weave our three principles for designing for scarcity into our application process:
  • • Build in time slack: Research shows that deadline extensions can help people do better work, but that not everyone feels comfortable asking. We planned for unexpected delays that our candidates might face so that it was easy to accommodate extensions. For example, in our case study round—a 3-4 hour, written activity completed by about 70 applicants—we knew that some candidates might need extra time. We built an extra three days into our review timeline and offered all candidates the opportunity to extend their deadline if needed. Because we planned for this at the outset, it was easy to accommodate deadline extensions. 
    • Cut participation costs by paying for time: We were concerned that applicants who might face the most time or money scarcity could drop off in our case study round in particular. To help create more flexibility, we reimbursed all applicants at this stage for their time with a $60 Visa gift card. We hoped that applicants might be able to use this gift card to “create time” in a busy schedule by ordering a meal or paying for childcare. Since the concept of “buying time” has been linked to greater levels of happiness and satisfaction, we hoped the use of gift cards would make it easier and more enjoyable for everyone to participate. Of course, doing this requires a budget, and it’s not something we can commit to for every recruitment process we run as an organization. But in this process, where we particularly wanted to cut the costs for applicants facing time and money scarcity, we think it was the right thing to do.
    • Talk to applicants like clients: In a recruiting process, it’s easy to dash off impersonal emails to applicants or rely on stock language. We know that simple changes, like personalized encouragement, can reduce gender imbalances in job applications, and we embedded this kind of encouragement into our process wherever possible. Taking a moment to thank people for reaching out, acknowledging concerns they shared directly, and signing emails with our names were all small touches that we used to make people feel valued for their time and effort during a challenging process. 

• Make Transparency a Push, Not a Pull: We know that when processes are more transparent, people feel better about the institutions behind them and the resulting outcomes. But will all applicants feel similarly comfortable reaching out and asking questions? In our process, we quickly realized that merely providing additional information when asked by a select number of individuals had the potential to produce inequitable outcomes. We wanted to make sure that transparent information about our process made its way to all applicants, so we found ways to broadcast the information to everyone rather than being responsive to a select few.
  • • Replace informational interviews with open forums: If your professional network is skewed, prioritizing individual conversations with people who reach out on their own volition can reinforce existing inequities. We created two open-to-the-public webinars for any applicant to meet us and ask questions. We held these outside of traditional business hours and posted recordings of these webinars to our website so that as many people as possible could view them. Doing this lowered the bar for applicants to meet our team and ask questions, and saved time for us by reducing the number of one-off conversations our team members had.
    • Elevate questions to all applicants: Answering questions about a job posting is a great way to be transparent, but only answering individual questions over email means that there’s no guarantee everyone has access to that information. We invested in simple processes that pushed answers to common questions out to anyone who might benefit. We created a simple FAQ on the website and updated it regularly based on questions that we received over email. It was a quick way to ensure that helpful clarifications weren’t limited only to those who felt comfortable reaching out.
      
      

• Combat Your Own Bias: Our earlier blog post shared many tactics to reduce the effects of our own unconscious biases when reviewing applications. As we moved through entrepreneur selection, we found some additional ways to reduce the impact of our individual biases:
  • • Build a qualitative rubric: It’s easy to have a rubric for things that can be quantified like years or experience. But many of the traits that determine whether someone is a good fit for a particular role are more subjective and can be harder to define. Rather than leaving those qualitative traits vague, we built a specific and clear rubric with shared definitions and descriptors to help our team elucidate what we were looking for and weed out bias. For instance, rather than looking for “leadership”—a general description that is demonstrably prone to gender bias— we outlined specific markers of leadership, like having started a business, non-profit, or club that other people became involved in.
    • Bring in an observer: Even the most clear and fair rubric is not useful if the recruiting team doesn’t use it. As we got to know applicants through interviews, we found it easy for our discussions to stray beyond our pre-specified rubric. To combat this, we brought in an outside member of the ideas42 People Operations team to sit in on our final deliberations. Because this observer was less familiar with individual candidates, they were able to ask fair probing questions and help our team follow through on our intentions for a fair process.

It took a lot of care to design our process well, and in the end, we found the results to be well worth it. We’re proud of the entrepreneurs we selected and the feedback we received from applicants. We were encouraged to hear that even people we didn’t select, “couldn’t be more motivated to continue [working on their] passions” and that others were thankful that the process gave them “the opportunity to express [themselves] and [their] plans to impact…lives.” Our approach yielded a cohort of incredibly strong entrepreneurs out of a large pool of extremely talented and competitive candidates. For us, this process led to an extraordinarily diverse set of entrepreneurs-in-residence, who are already using their lived experience to build companies that we hope will significantly reduce the excess costs of poverty in the U.S.

We also think these approaches are useful beyond just our own recruiting process and would love to apply, test, and scale them in other contexts. If you are interested in testing out any of these practices, we would love to hear about it (you can reach out to us at info@ideas42.org). As we continue to recruit entrepreneurs to solve big, important challenges, we’re excited to expand on these practices to recruit even more diverse talent to Ventures for Shared Prosperity.

The post Designing for Inclusion: Lessons from the Venture Studio’s Entrepreneur Recruitment appeared first on ideas42.

I picked up a lot of new habits over the past year. With the pandemic scrambling “life as usual,” everything from how I eat, sleep, and exercise to how I work, relax, and socialize looks different these days. It’s an open question to what extent this new way of life will stick once the world recovers from the COVID-19 crisis. I’d love to hold onto new rituals like daily runs on weekday afternoons or video calls with family on Sundays. My nighttime Netflix watching? I’m less keen to hold onto that.

One behavior that millions of Americans picked up during the pandemic would have far bigger consequences if it were to become habitual — voting. The 2020 election brought voter turnout in the United States to its highest level in decades, with a record number of first-time voters casting ballots. Whether or not this level of participation marks a temporary blip or the beginning of a new trend will dictate the course of elections for a generation.

It’s conventional wisdom among researchers studying patterns of civic engagement that voting is a “habit forming” behavior — whether or not someone voted in previous elections is a reliable predictor of whether or not they will vote in the next one. But we shouldn’t assume that all of the new voters in 2020 will automatically form enduring voting habits — not least of all because those with the power to shape the choice architecture of American civic life are actively working to prevent it. We have a big opportunity to make sure Americans who newly joined the electorate in 2020 become lifetime voters instead of one-time voters, and we can turn to four principles of habit formation (and disruption) to understand how to seize it to foster a culture of civic participation, and with it a more representative democracy.

#1 Make it easy

The easier an action is to take, the easier it is to make a habit out of it. Psychologists often draw an analogy to the concept of “friction” when thinking about this aspect of habit formation — the idea being that the fewer obstacles or less resistance we encounter in our choice and action environment, the more likely we are to succeed in forming a new habit. Trying to start a habit of reading before bed? Pull the bookshelf to your bedside and plug your phone in somewhere out of reach (or, even better, in another room). In short, if you want to make (or break) a habit, make it easier (or harder) to act on.

The application of this principle to voting is straightforward. There are a number of basic reforms that we know make voting easier by reducing hassles for people — early voting or weekend voting, prepaid return postage and secure drop boxes for mail ballots, paid time off on election day, automatic voter registration. If we want to help Americans strengthen voting habits, putting  measures like these in place is a promising avenue.

On the flip side, we can also help by smoothing out needless frictions in our election processes. Many features of elections in the United States introduce barriers that voters must overcome to cast a ballot — the kind of things Richard Thaler calls “sludge.” If you want to make it hard to form a voting habit, closing local polling places, cancelling voter registrations, or restricting access to convenient options like mail ballots are effective ways to do it. And that’s exactly what many state lawmakers across the country are doing. To help voting habits stick, we need to reduce existing sludge and closely scrutinize measures that may introduce new frictions into our elections.

#2 Consistency is key

For a behavior to become a habit, it needs to be more than easy to act on — it needs to attach to stable features of our environment. You likely pick up your phone when it makes a noise or wash your hands after using a public restroom. In both of these cases, you’re taking an almost automatic action in response to a consistent cue, which gives us a good working definition of a habit. The key insight to draw out here is that disrupting the cue — silencing our phones or avoiding public restrooms — makes the response behavior less likely to occur, resulting in fewer glances at the phone and perhaps dirtier hands.

Voting is a lot more complicated than checking your phone or washing your hands, so you might wonder if the cue-response relationship holds true. Indeed, longitudinal studies of voting behavior suggest that similarly disrupting the context in which a person casts a ballot can break their voting habit. As mentioned earlier, researchers have demonstrated that past participation in an election is generally a reliable predictor of future participation; however they have also found that a change to the context in which someone votes — such as moving to a new city or state — strips away the predictive power of past voting.

Much of the context of the 2020 election is not a permanent feature of voting in the United States. Not all elections will be carried out during a pandemic, nor will all future candidates be as polarizing. That may be a net positive for the country, but it also means that people who voted for the first time did so in a highly unusual context that is unlikely to be replicated in future elections. We need to pay special attention to voters who used temporary voting options like expanded mail balloting or who were brought into the election by unique candidates to make sure they don’t drop out of the electorate if the cues that prompted them to vote in 2020 disappear.

Regardless of how motivating particular candidates or issues are, keeping measures adopted on an emergency basis in 2020 like no-excuse absentee balloting or universal mail voting is one way to help sustain high participation. This would preserve the context in which many new voters participated. States like Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Utah have run all-mail elections for years, establishing universal vote by mail as a feasible, cost-effective way to administer elections that allow broad participation. Other states like California that were on their way to universal vote-by-mail are now working to consolidate changes made in response to the pandemic. In jurisdictions where mail voting was put in place on a more provisional basis, decision-makers should work to maintain the expanded options that many voters, new and existing alike, embraced in 2020.

#3 Repeat, repeat, repeat

Despite its ubiquity in pop psychology, there’s no “magic number” of times you need to repeat a behavior for it to become habitual — it’s highly dependent on the person, the behavior, and the context. For example, something like taking a multivitamin with breakfast may be easy to train yourself to do habitually in just a couple of weeks, while forming a habit of going for a run each morning might take months. There is, however, consensus that the more opportunities we have to rehearse a behavior the more likely it is to become automatic — something we don’t have to consciously deliberate over — and therefore adhere as a habit.

The notion that repetition might help establish a voting habit by bypassing conscious deliberation fits with one of the more widely-cited findings in the field of voter turnout research: when voting is framed to people as an identity (“being a voter”) versus an action (“voting”), they are more likely to cast a ballot. Researchers suggest that when we think about voting as an action, we ask ourselves questions like “is this race important to me?” or “am I excited about the candidates on the ballot?” before deciding whether or not to participate. When we think instead of being a voter as an identity, we don’t ask these kinds of questions every time an election rolls around. As Aristotle put it, “we are what we repeatedly do.”

While presidential races only happen once every four years, the United States is in fact an outlier among democracies in the frequency of our elections. There are many contests before the 2024 presidential campaign, ranging from midterm congressional elections to state, city, or local races. For many Americans, however, voting is something that only happens once every four years. Over the past century, turnout in midterm elections has consistently lagged presidential elections by between 10 and 20 percentage points, suggesting there are millions of so-called “drop-off” voters who sit out all but the highest profile races. Indeed, as I’ve learned interviewing dozens of voters over the years, when people report that they vote in “every election” what they often mean is every presidential election. 

Getting people to cast a ballot in a midterm or subnational election, when media markets aren’t as saturated with campaign ads, may actually be a more cost-effective way to lock in a voter’s participation in the next presidential contest. Someone who votes in a midterm is a safe bet to turn out in a presidential election.

#4 A spoonful of sugar helps

If we want new voters to keep voting, they need to find the experience rewarding — or, at the very least, not find it too noxious. We’ve come a long way since B.F. Skinner was experimenting on animals in boxes, but his theory of operant conditioning and study of reinforcement schedules offer one final insight into how to make sure voting habits stick: big, unexpected, and immediate rewards speed things up.

There are a couple caveats that caution against a superficial reading of the power of rewards to accelerate the formation of voting habits. First, it’s not necessarily about material incentives. In fact, there is good reason to expect that an overreliance on extrinsic motivators could backfire by displacing more powerful and enduring sources of intrinsic motivation. Second, the most powerful rewards are not necessarily the biggest; instead, it’s those that surprise us, making an experience more salient and therefore more likely to come to mind the next time we encounter a similar context. Third, you might assume the most powerful reward of all for voters would be seeing your preferred candidate win office, and thus that voting in an election where your candidate loses would frustrate habit formation. This has intuitive appeal but overlooks a critical feature of the neurocognitive mechanics of habit formation: payoffs need to be almost immediate in order for a reward to reinforce a behavior. 

An example of one of my earliest elections illustrates these three points nicely. I was voting in a midterm as a new college student in New Jersey. I can’t tell you who was on the ballot or why I had even decided to vote in the first place, but I can vividly recall leaving my polling place, a Methodist church in town, and being greeted by an elderly volunteer with the League of Women Voters who leapt up to shake my hand and thank me for being a voter. The exchange didn’t involve any material rewards, just an enthusiastic affirmation that reinforced my existing motivation; it was entirely unexpected, and for that reason highly memorable; and it happened within seconds of me dropping my ballot into the ballot box.

What can we take away from this example? Well, it may be too late to send an army of volunteers across the country to thank new voters for participating in 2020. But we can make sure that in future elections we more consistently engage voters not only in the weeks and days before an election asking them to vote, but also with meaningful expressions of appreciation afterwards. We can also do things to increase the hedonic charge people feel at the time of voting through big events like election day festivals or smaller gatherings like mail ballot completion nights — “putting the party back into politics.”

To 2024 and beyond

With less than a year gone by since an exhausting presidential contest, many of us may want to think about anything other than the next election. But if we hope to sustain the high levels of participation achieved in 2020, then that’s a luxury we don’t have. With a decisive midterm election in 2022, as well as huge gubernatorial contests in New Jersey, Virginia, and California this year, now is the time to make — or break — the voting habits of a newly engaged electorate.

The post Let’s Make Voting a Habit appeared first on ideas42.

This is part of a series of posts about our ongoing partnership with the University of Virginia’s Nudge4 Solutions Lab and the community college systems of Tennessee and Virginia to increase degree attainment among adult students in the U.S. by designing and testing behaviorally informed solutions. Click here to read more about this partnership.

In Tennessee, more than half a million working-age adults, or one in six Tennesseans between the ages of 25 and 64, have attended college but not completed a postsecondary degree. Given that adults with some college credits but no degree face significantly worse employment outcomes than those with a degree, many states have started to prioritize increasing degree attainment among this population.

In 2018, Tennessee launched Tennessee Reconnect, a “last dollar” scholarship that offers adults without a postsecondary degree the opportunity to attend a community college tuition-free. After its launch, adult student enrollment at Tennessee community colleges increased for the first time since 2010. However, fewer than half of these students reapplied for Tennessee Reconnect (a requirement for maintaining the scholarship) and returned the following year. 

ideas42 and the Nudge4 Solutions Lab collaborated with the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) to boost the persistence of Reconnect students.

We started by conducting interviews with 30 students from two community colleges in Tennessee—Nashville State Community College and Pellissippi State Community College—to better understand the behavioral barriers that prevent Reconnect students from reapplying for the scholarship and persisting to the following academic year. From these interviews, we identified three primary barriers:

• Lack of Awareness: Students often don’t know that they need to reapply for Reconnect each year.

• Limited Reminders: Many students either don’t receive a reminder to reapply, or don’t  receive a reminder that effectively captures their attention and prompts them to act.
• Unclear Information: Students don’t know who to go to with questions about Reconnect, or they may receive inconsistent information depending on who they ask.

Based on these insights, we designed a set of interventions to increase reapplication and persistence rates among Reconnect students at Nashville and Pellissippi. The first of these interventions, piloted in spring 2020, consisted of nudging students to reapply for the Reconnect scholarship through a series of reminders—targeted emails, texts, and alerts posted on the schools’ online portals and learning management systems. Nudges sent to Reconnect students, like the email below, highlighted the need to reapply for the scholarship each year, prompted action by specifying where to apply and how long it would take, and specified who to contact for help.

An example email nudge urging students to reapply for the Reconnect scholarship.

The reminders increased reapplication and persistence rates for Reconnect students at Nashville and Pellissippi. At Nashville, persistence rates for Reconnect students increased from 38% in 2019 to 53% in 2020; at Pellissippi, persistence rates rose from 47% to 53%. In contrast, persistence rates during the same time period at the other 11 community colleges in Tennessee fell from 47% to 46%. 

Reapplication and persistence rates for Reconnect students at
Nashville, Pellissippi, and other Tenessee Community Colleges.

Surges in Reconnect reapplication rates immediately following the emails, texts, and alerts indicate that these nudges were effective.

Reapplications for Reconnect by month at Nashville and other Tenessee Community Colleges.

Not only were these interventions effective, but they were inexpensive to implement; all reminder emails, texts, and alerts were sent through existing communication systems. For a full summary of the results and implementation details, read our report.

The success of reminder interventions in Tennessee community college systems is just one of many aspects of our partnership targeting college success. In the coming months, we’ll share results from additional interventions we’ve piloted. If you’re interested in learning more, or asking questions of our team, register for our (free) September webinar on improving adult student success and persistence. This work and other interventions like it, if scaled to more college systems, holds promise for improving the long-term economic security and well-being of millions of adults across the country.

The post A Nudge to Reconnect: Boosting College Persistence Rates Among Adult Students in Tennessee appeared first on ideas42.

A year ago, we listed seven concrete ways we would support racial justice in our work, as calls for racial justice rang not only in the United States but around the world. Now, a year later, we are holding ourselves accountable to those commitments, and taking a moment to report on the initial progress we have made while acknowledging there is still more work to be done.

In all that we do as we strive to achieve our mission of improving lives around the world, we aim for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice for all. It is our hope that sharing our efforts will not only serve as an ongoing commitment device for ourselves but encourage others to be explicit with theirs.

Below are the commitments we made in 2020, and how we took action over the last year. There is a fair amount of detail on the specific actions we took and data on progress towards our goal when those goals are quantitative. We feel it is important to be specific and transparent with our progress, whether that progress is good or not.

Commitment #1 – As a means of greater accountability, we will publicly report annually on the progress we have been making on our existing internal commitments to increase our team diversity, and specifically to have a senior team and board of directors that reflect the populations we serve, both in the United States and around the world.

• Action: Proactively sought diverse and underrepresented voices from the communities we serve to help guide our organization as board members. We have joined the Board Challenge as a Charter Partner. Our board is now 33% female, 17% Black, and 8% Southeast Asian. We currently have no Latino board members. We have more work to do to reach gender parity and make our board more representative of the people and communities we work with, and that continues to be our goal.

• Action: Updated our recruiting process to further reduce biases, including re-writing the standard cases we use as screening mechanisms during our hiring process, expanding the channels through which we share our open positions, and requiring that at least one candidate in the pool of three finalists for each position we hire for be from an underrepresented group before we can make a decision. These efforts have helped us to diversify our senior team. Our senior team is now 35% members from underrepresented groups, and more than 50% female. While we have met our gender parity target, we have more work to do on achieving even greater diversity on our senior team so that it is more representative of the people and communities we work with. This will enable us to do even better work in the service of improving the lives of millions.  

Commitment #2 – We will adopt a more race-conscious and anti-racist lens in project selection and project execution.

• Action: Developed our own training and behaviorally designed tools (e.g. pre-mortem, checklists, etc.)—to be used in all of our project work going forward—that will improve our ability to apply an equity lens as researchers and designers in the field of behavioral science. These trainings and tools explore how identity, privilege, and power can affect our research and the impact we have on individuals and structures within our different issue areas. All team members will receive this training and regularly use these tools in our work by the end of 2021.

• Action: Hired an ethics consulting firm, Principia, to help us establish new principles, checklists, and an escalation review process for our business development and project selection processes. These tools will ensure that we engage in projects that live up to our values and mission, of which a commitment to doing work that promotes equity and inclusion is central.

Commitment #3 – We will increase by eightfold the number of Black scholars in our academic affiliate network.

• Action: Expanded the network of academic affiliates who inform our work with an eye toward ensuring that our network of scholars reflects the diversity of the populations we serve. Since last June, we have onboarded 21 new academic affiliates, moving closer to gender parity (now 44% female) and increasing the number of Black scholars by 7.5x. We look forward to learning from our newest affiliates and continuing to expand the diversity of scholars who contribute to our work along multiple dimensions. 

Commitment #4 – We will conduct more applied research in the service of designing anti-racist interventions in all of the policy areas in which we work.

• Action: Launched our new Policy Lab with an initial focus on the development of new policies, rules, and regulations that explicitly improve the financial health of families struggling to make ends meet, address racial and gender disparities in financial health, and narrow the racial wealth gap in the United States.

• Action: Explicitly tackled racial inequities in the United States as part of our Economic Justice work. Select projects include:
  
  • Partnering with experts to ensure our efforts to redesign aspects of WIC were tailored for the realities faced by Black families.
  • Working with the state of Michigan to identify ways to reduce racial disproportionality at the “front door” of the child welfare system.
  • Launching a five-city initiative aimed at using behavioral insights to shift narratives surrounding poverty in the United States, many of which are deeply intertwined with narratives about race and nationality.

• Action: Explicitly focused on inequities in accessing quality care and staying healthy for individuals from lower resource communities in our Global Health work. Select projects include:
  • Designing and implementing approaches with midwives in remote, rural clinics with no electricity in Madagascar to address postpartum hemorrhage—a major killer of women in the Global South.
  • Tackling child malnutrition and stunting by improving complementary feeding practices for children under 5 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
  • Adapting solutions developed in Zambia to Liberia to decrease incidents of mistreatment and promote respectful care during labor and delivery—a worldwide phenomenon that happens even more often to women of lower socioeconomic status.

• Action: Targeted creating more equitable health outcomes, experiences, and costs as a central goal of our U.S.-focused health portfolio. Select projects include:
  • Supporting the design of Get-Out-the-Vax programs with the most effective messengers and motivational interviewing techniques to engage Black and Latino communities in cities and states like Montgomery, Alabama, to increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccination rates.
  • Supporting the design of outreach to health providers—like doctors and nurses—in New York City and Los Angeles and community health workers in New Jersey and Virginia around not repeating misinformation myths. The outreach was easy to digest and allowed health workers to engage their peers and patients to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates.
  • Working with the University of Chicago to write a playbook on fixing racial bias in health care algorithms, and then with health systems, insurers, and businesses to start to implement it.

• Action: Explicitly supported more equitable representation in our democracy in the United States as a central goal of our Civic Engagement work. Select projects include:
  • Supporting the design of an NAACP relational organizing program in which recruited volunteers did targeted outreach to mid- and low-propensity Black voters in states like Georgia for the 2020 election.   
  • Publishing a report ahead of the 2020 elections on common contextual and psychological reasons for why members of Latino communities may or may not value their vote.  
  • Partnering with the California Secretary of State’s office to design and implement a voter outreach campaign to help people navigate voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, placing a special focus on reaching and supporting communities of color.

• Action: Focused on helping more people from underrepresented backgrounds complete higher education and access the myriad benefits of a college degree as a core focus of our Education portfolio. Select projects include: 
  • Securing funding to work with two partner states’ school systems to enroll or re-enroll more adults in good fit bachelor’s degree programs with a focus on Black, Latino, and Indigenous adults.

Commitment #5 – We will challenge our funders and our partners to adopt similar diversity and inclusion practices in their internal and external structures, and also to consult viewpoints that are more representative of the populations they serve when setting their research and development agendas.

• Action: Candidly, we have not yet figured out a good way to further challenge our funders on these issues, a reflection of the current power dynamics between funders and grantees in philanthropy around the world that needs addressing. This is still an area of opportunity for ideas42 to improve.

Commitment #6 – We commit to expanding our existing Safety & Justice work and continue to focus on fighting racial injustice in the broken criminal justice system.

• Action: Explicitly tackled racial inequities in the policing, judicial, and probation spaces in the United States as part of our Safety & Justice work. Select projects include:
  • Working with the Judicial Council of California and six county courts to improve a new online system that reduces traffic fines for people with low incomes, and with the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center to redesign notices to help people in North Carolina get their drivers’ licenses back.
  • Researching and designing strategies to reduce probation revocations with the Spokane Municipal Court Probation Department in Washington.
  • Creating designs with the MacArthur Justice Center to increase the use of court diversion programs in Gretna, Louisiana.
  • Working with the New York City Law Department to identify the behavioral drivers leading to conflict between police and protestors during the NYC George Floyd protests
  • In partnership with Harris County, Texas, redesigning all communications associated with misdemeanor court notifications and launching new research to more deeply understand and address challenges to appearing in court.

Over the next year, our Safety & Justice work will center on two main efforts designed to generate significant impact at scale, which is an area where ideas42 can make more of a difference in the lives of those affected by the criminal legal systems in the United States. These efforts include:

• Vergil, technology designed to help parolees and those on probation set and achieve positive goals. It connects users with desired and available social services, all in the service of helping them avoid incarceration or reincarceration.
• Driving adoption and adaptation of our New York City Summons work where our redesign of the citation and behaviorally informed reminders led to 36% reduction in failures to appear in court. We will continue to expand these interventions to other jurisdictions with similar or related practices, such as Harris County, in service of helping people avoid arrest warrants, fines, suspended drivers’ licenses, increased bail, and/or incarceration.  

Commitment #7 – We commit to partnering with more organizations on the front line of this battle.

• Action: We remain committed to partnering with more organizations on the front lines of the battle for racial justice in the United States and around the world. We welcome partnerships with fellow non-profits, governments, and any organization committed to change, dialogue, and actions that move us closer to racial justice. By June 2022, we will publish a list of organizations with whom we have or are currently partnering in this effort. 

We know this progress is still not enough, and while we have more clarity around concrete steps that can be taken a year into our efforts, we still do not have all the answers. In the coming months and years, we will make additional commitments. Now more than ever, we know it will take all of us continuing to push for change to dismantle and rebuild our failing systems. We will report again on our progress one year from now.

Words without action are just a wish, and social proof is an effective behavioral principle. Not just by organizations like ideas42, but by those who work to legislate, protect, and serve society. Please email us at racialjustice@ideas42.org or contact us on Twitter @ideas42 if you have ideas or opportunities to partner in the fight for racial justice.

The post Our Ongoing Commitment to Racial Justice appeared first on ideas42.

High levels of fines and fees imposed by traffic courts have become a major strain on low-income drivers in California. In 2020, Californians had $8.6 billion in delinquent court debt, imposing potentially disastrous economic consequences. These impacts fall disproportionately on people of color, who are both more likely to be low-income and more likely to be given traffic citations than white drivers.

To provide relief to low-income drivers, California has been working to expand the ability-to-pay (AtP) system for traffic courts. California’s AtP system allows drivers experiencing financial hardship to request a reduction in their traffic fine by submitting a petition to the court in person or by mail. To expand access to this option, the Judicial Council of California created MyCitations, which allows drivers to submit AtP petitions online. With MyCitations, drivers can request and receive an adjusted fine or payment plan with ease. However, use of the MyCitations system remains low. 

What can be done to both reduce the inequity in court debt and make traffic fines and fees more affordable? Working with the Judicial Council of California, we set out to address the behavioral aspects of this challenge.

It was clear from our conversations with drivers across the four pilot counties—Shasta, San Francisco, Tulare, and Ventura—that while users had largely positive views of MyCitations, there were a number of behavioral barriers that prevented them from accessing the platform to resolve their citations. Understanding these barriers was integral to our work designing effective solutions that make fines and fees more equitable and affordable for Californians.

First, we looked for barriers that made it difficult for drivers to learn about MyCitations and use it before their fine due date. We expected to hear that drivers didn’t notice MyCitations on court notices or didn’t understand what the system was. As court staff themselves told us, MyCitations is often confusingly described in official notices or buried in text about the many other options for resolving citations. But drivers cited other reasons:

• Drivers’ expectations about how to resolve a traffic ticket can lead them to overlook MyCitations as an option. Many drivers believe they need to go to court in person and appeal directly to court staff to request a lower fine, and do not look for other options. Additionally, based on their previous experiences with the court or stories from others, drivers may not expect the court to help them and therefore may not look for options like MyCitations.

• Drivers experiencing financial hardship may wait to pay their fines so they can manage their cash flow but end up missing crucial deadlines. Some drivers procrastinated on taking action on their tickets; they anticipated that the process would be unpleasant or they were stopped by hassles, like a long drive to get to court. But we also heard that some drivers intentionally delayed acting on their ticket because of cash flow challenges; they needed to pay an immediate bill or debt and wait until payday or a benefits payment to have the funds to make a payment on their fine. Needing to coordinate payment on multiple obligations, like rent and utilities, puts drivers at greater risk of not attending to their citation amidst other urgent financial challenges.  

When we asked MyCitations users about their experience using the system, we heard that for some, the reduced fine was affordable, and they were able to quickly pay it off. Others struggled to make payments. Affordability remains an issue for some drivers, and additional behavioral barriers can get in the way of drivers paying off their reduced fine: 

• The adjusted fine may still cause financial hardship, especially when additional fees are added in. Drivers who need to prioritize providing necessities for themselves or their families over paying court debt still need to do so even with a reduced fine. Drivers may also incur additional fees to set up a payment plan or even to pay their reduced fine online, which can add up and make the reduced fine unaffordable. While many drivers interviewed felt that the adjustment they received was affordable, only one of eight drivers on a payment plan said that the traffic court debt wasn’t causing additional financial hardship.

• Drivers who cannot afford to pay outright and find themselves on a payment plan that can stretch over many months or years may lose the motivation to pay because the fine still seems impossible to afford or never-ending. Throughout the process, the cognitive burdens caused by the day-to-day stresses and challenges of living with financial hardship make it difficult for drivers to focus on making consistent payments. At the same time, drivers may not try to request a different arrangement because they do not believe that the court will help them. Drivers may also feel the way to adjust their arrangement is ambiguous or hassle-filled.

With deeper insights into the barriers and realities drivers experience, we set out to design solutions that help more drivers faced with excessive traffic debt access the court to request an AtP determination. Stay tuned for the release of our full report later this week, where we dive into some of the potential solutions to address these barriers. These solutions could serve as an important model for other jurisdictions to reduce the outsized burden of unaffordable fines and fees that disproportionately fall on people of color and other low-income drivers.

Interested in learning more about this work applying behavioral science to a crucial social problem? Reach out to us: info@ideas42.org or tweet at @ideas42 to join the conversation.

The post On the Road to Justice: Reducing Fines and Fees for Low-Income Drivers appeared first on ideas42.

In the past year, nearly 3 million women have left the labor force due to the pandemic and resulting economic recession. At the same time, due to the pandemic, many organizations have adopted new policies regarding work from home and flexible hours, which can positively impact women’s earnings and labor force participation. Now that all American adults are eligible for vaccination, many employers face the decision of whether to embrace new standards going forward or return to business-as-usual.

Changes like increased flexibility could actually strengthen gender equality, but only if they last. In the past, crises such as the Great Depression and World War II also ushered in changes to workplace norms that temporarily benefitted women, but ultimately were not permanent. And employees in sectors where remote work was not possible, such as retail, will face different challenges as customers return to in-person settings amid unfamiliar health and safety procedures. 

This moment of change presents an opportunity for employers across different industries to reshape the workplace altogether—not only offering more flexibility, but also tackling discrimination, bias, and the persistent gender pay gap in order to help all employees advance and thrive.

That’s the premise behind new research from TIME’S UP Foundation and ideas42, which uses behavioral design to address the root causes of discrimination and inequity at work. Rather than changing the behaviors of individuals alone, this approach equips employers with strategies to address systems and practices–from hiring to compensation negotiation to performance evaluations–that often enable discriminatory behaviors in the first place. 

At this critical moment, it’s time to shift the paradigm and reimagine employers’ role in fostering fair and equitable workplaces. Below are three ‘ideal workplace standards’ employers can adopt right away to do just that: 

Ideal Workplace Standard #1: Design a hiring and recruitment process that centers the needs of caregivers. 

Hiring managers often lack clear, explicit criteria that tells them what to look for in a job candidate, creating opportunities for bias when selecting candidates they think “fit the part.” For example, if a woman signals that she is a caregiver, it can activate unconscious biases and flawed assumptions about her potential performance and dedication to paid work. 

As a result, women–especially women of color–who often bear the brunt of care responsibilities at home, can be funneled into part-time, lower-paid, or lower-level positions. Research shows that this sorting of women into specific industries, also known as occupational segregation, can explain roughly 50% of the gender gap in the United States. 

That’s a staggering number, but employers could begin to address occupational segregation by creating a set of standardized hiring criteria that centers the experience of caregivers as the default to reduce bias and broaden women’s opportunities. Reframing caregiving as an asset, rather than a liability, highlights new applicable skills and takes the onus off women to volunteer stereotype-challenging information to affirm their credibility. 

Ideal Workplace Standard #2: Create clear scheduling and work hour expectations that embrace culture changes. 

More than 80% of employers say they will offer flexibility (such as paid time off, shift accommodations, and work from home options) at a greater scale as a result. This is a promising development, as workplace systems are rarely designed with the realities of women’s everyday lives in mind and research reveals that increasing predictability, stability, and scheduling control can increase worker productivity and sales. 

However, flexibility may not benefit workers if the norms around it are unclear. Managers can help employees take better advantage of scheduling flexibility by making clear how to request changes or even providing a default number of flexible days/shifts to all. 

Instituting gender-neutral paid family and medical leave policies with clear guidelines can also level the unequal playing field and create greater work life balance. 

Ideal Workplace Standard #3: Provide a pathway to fair promotions and reframe the definition of leadership. 

Our research is clear — without a structured promotion process, the door is left open for subjective decision-making influenced by personal biases, which can often be unconscious. Unstructured paths to promotion also eschew recency bias, i.e., the tendency to remember only an employee’s most recent successes. 

Creating a regular review cadence for managers to comprehensively evaluate their direct reports and consider them for promotion (without expecting employees to self-nominate) is vital to helping employees move up and ultimately close the pay gap. 

Going hand-in-hand with this is the need to develop structures and standardized evaluation criteria that create a more expansive set of leadership qualities and broadens the way leadership is defined. As it stands right now, managers tend to give more negative feedback to women than to men, and the feedback is more likely to be tied to negative stereotypes and less likely to be connected to their work. This not only hurts women as they try to advance, but it also brings up questions about how we as a society define “ideal leaders.” Employers need to expand their view of what leadership looks like, which over indexes on the stereotypically masculine traits of being “assertive, competitive, and ambitious.”

After a year of COVID-19 has devastated women’s economic progress and exposed longstanding inequities, employers should be equipped with research in order to rethink baked-in expectations and biases that harm workers. It’s past time to shift the paradigm — and use all proven tools that are available to create workplaces that are safe, fair, and dignified for all.

Read From Ideal Worker to Ideal Workplace: Using Behavioral Design to Create More Equitable Companies for more insights.

The post Reimagining the Workplace with Behavioral Science appeared first on ideas42.

Program beneficiary

In January 2020, before “COVID-19” and “pandemic” had even entered most people’s vocabulary, I took a trip to Uganda to help kick off the implementation and evaluation period of a promising project to address unmet need for family planning (FP) services among adolescent girls. By April, the intervention was on hold and we weren’t sure if or when it would restart, nor whether we would be able to collect the necessary data to advocate for future adoption and scale of this behaviorally-informed intervention. 

Thankfully, the project did eventually re-launch, and our implementing partner – Marie Stopes Uganda (MSUG) – was able to capture enough data to show that, not only did the intervention work as intended, but it had achieved major impact despite all the challenges of implementing during a pandemic. Through this experience, we learned an important lesson about what it takes to create and carry out a behavioral intervention that could withstand tough circumstances and achieve results despite unforeseen challenges.

BACKGROUND

We knew from our earlier behavioral diagnosis work that a successful intervention would have to use social proof to convince adolescent girls that considering FP is acceptable among their peer group; make the process of visiting a clinic as pleasant as possible; and empower adolescent girls to make decisions and take action around FP use.

To do this, we partnered with MSUG and MSI Reproductive Choices to collaboratively design a peer referral program, which leverages girls who have benefited from FP use or counseling as advocates of FP among their social circles. After receiving FP counseling or a FP method, adolescent girls are given a Refer-a-Friend (RAF) card that illustrates a range of reasons youth may choose FP. They are instructed to deliver the RAF card to a friend who could benefit from learning about FP herself, and when the friend redeems the card at the clinic, she is offered FP counseling in addition to two friendship wristbands – one to keep, and one for the friend who referred her. If she goes through counseling and/or receives a FP method, she receives a new card to give to another friend, becoming an advice-giver herself.

To learn more about the program, the associated materials, and the results of the evaluation, see the program brief here.

HOW BUY-IN GARNERS RESILIENCE

In my 10-year career as a public health practitioner and behavioral scientist, it’s been hammered into my brain that buy-in matters. In fact, ideas42’s behavioral design process puts this front and center, with opportunities to engage partners and end users at every step of the way. In this case, buy-in at all levels was the key to the project’s success.

Through our standard co-design process, we started obtaining buy-in early; not only did the program reflect input from a variety of stakeholders who had direct experience working with adolescent girls, but it addressed the specific behavioral barriers that had been identified through previous formative research as preventing those girls from taking up FP services. The final designs had also been iteratively refined based on feedback received during user testing in some of the clinics where the program would be implemented. 

Perhaps most importantly, buy-in was present from the leadership to the front lines – a testament to the success of ideas42’s collaborative process. Dr. Fred Nsbuga, the head of the MSUG Social Franchise channel the intervention was designed for, threw his full weight behind the program and urged the clinic staff to make its implementation a top priority in their day-to-day work. The MSUG staff responsible for training and overseeing the frontline service providers and mobilizers who would implement the program took full ownership of the program. They adeptly trained their own subordinates, adding their own twist and flair to the material in a way that exuded confidence in the program.

Mobilizer training in Masaka, Uganda

Providers and mobilizers walked out of each training session with a palpable sense of excitement. Early feedback from program participants echoed the enthusiasm we felt during training and roll-out:

“The ideas42 program has made it easy, especially for the young girls who can now access family planning services at facilities. It has increased the number of girls coming for family planning counseling and services…Before, I would only receive old ladies coming for family planning and not young girls (particularly adolescents).” – Service Provider

“[My friend] told me she wanted to get family planning but didn’t want to go to the main hospital and didn’t know where else she could get the service. I told her about my visit here and the RAF [Refer-a-Friend] card. She was so excited so I gave her the card.” – Adolescent Client

“So much [has made my job easy], especially taking away fear amongst [adolescent girls] in accessing FP services. Before, young girls would go to a facility and fear to say anything but now when they show up with a RAF card they get services.” – Community Mobilizer

Friendship wristbands

A STRONG FINISH AND A BRIGHT OUTLOOK

The final results of this randomized controlled field trial showed that, despite a three-month pause in the middle of implementation, and despite ongoing restrictions to movement due to the pandemic, clinics in the treatment group still saw on average a 45% increase in adolescent clients per month. This translates to nearly 2,000 new adolescent FP clients overall during six months of implementation, with an even greater number of girls who received FP counseling only. For more information on the study results, see the program brief here. 

Plans for scale-up are in process. MSUG is currently taking steps to re-launch the program within the 60 Social Franchise clinics where the pilot took place, as well as to expand the program to an additional 23 clinics they’ve identified as having the greatest need. Later in 2021, they plan to expand the program to the rest of the Social Franchise channel. Once the intervention is implemented at all 116 Social Franchise clinics, MSUG plans to adapt the program for other service delivery channels within Uganda. 

On the international level, MSI is incorporating this program into their work plan for 2021, which will include adaptation for new contexts and implementation within other country programs. We are eager to see how the program designs are adapted and used going forward, and hope that its scale-up will lead to large improvements in FP access among girls and women who need it the most.

If you work in an organization focused on expanding access to FP among adolescent clients and are interested in hearing more about this work, please email us at GH@ideas42.org. 

The post Using Refer-A-Friend to Increase Family Planning Uptake in Uganda: a Resilient Design in a Challenging Year appeared first on ideas42.

Because of the compounding effects of discrimination in our medical, legal, and social services infrastructures, Black mothers and infants in the United States face worse health outcomes than other groups. The Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) – which offers stipends for healthy foods and nutrition education – reduces racial disparities in infant mortality, and improves other key health outcomes for Black families living in the context of poverty. While the benefits are clear, WIC has an opportunity to close these racial disparities even further. By more effectively engaging Black families, WIC administrators can help more families access life-saving programs.

WIC’s potential reach is wide. Nearly half of all infants born in the United State are eligible for the program. However, of the 2.4 million Black individuals eligible for WIC, 41% of them are not participating.  Some families make an active choice not to participate in WIC, some face structural hurdles like irregular work schedules that make WIC appointment attendance difficult, and others are deterred by administrative or psychological barriers, like remembering to prepare the many documents needed for appointments, or uncertainty about if they’re eligible to participate in the first place.

We’ve learned in previous research that behavioral design can help potential and current WIC participants overcome the administrative and psychological barriers to program participation and access beneficial nutritional support for their families. For instance, WIC appointment attendance increases for a significant number of families when text message-based appointment reminders are delivered with more advanced notice, giving them adequate time to plan or reschedule when unexpected obstacles arise, like last-minute changes in work schedules or delays in obtaining the paperwork necessary for their appointment.

Given the historical and institutional racism faced by Black families accessing public benefit programs, we approached our latest work with WIC through an equity lens. We designed a suite of WIC appointment reminders to specifically address administrative and psychological barriers for Black families. While there are many principles to consider when doing equity-centered design work, three principles were important to this engagement:

• Design for the context by focusing on structures, processes, and barriers.
• Promote dignity, autonomy, and justice throughout the engagement and after.
• Listen to people with lived experience and prioritize those conversations in the design process.

Here’s how we intentionally implemented these principles. Our hope is that this example of equity-centered design in action may be helpful to others who want to center their work around designing for equity but are unsure how to start.

1) Design for the Context

There are many harmful and false narratives about poverty that proliferate in the United States, including that people who are experiencing it have no one to blame but themselves for their trouble. This narrative runs counter to what we know from behavioral science. Studies have shown that improving the lives of people experiencing poverty requires shifting structures and processes, removing barriers – not changing people. When we “design for context,” we focus on how behavioral design can remove barriers to access and participation in programs, like WIC, that have been shown to improve outcomes for families.

Our previous research on barriers to WIC participation provided a useful starting place for this work. We then went deeper into psychology literature and that of related fields to understand how contexts faced by Black families might exacerbate these barriers and create additional ones. For instance, Black workers are not only overrepresented in the service and hospitality sector – an industry known for high volatility in work schedules – but they also experience higher rates of irregular work hours even within that industry compared to white peers. Given that their work schedules may be harder to predict and subject to more change, Black WIC participants may find it especially difficult to keep their WIC appointment times, which are scheduled months in advance. This could contribute to fewer families staying in the program even when they’re eligible and intend to continue participating.

It is also well-documented that Black individuals often distrust medical providers and government institutions, an unsurprising fact given that Black individuals have historically experienced inequitable access to social services and racial discrimination when seeking medical care in the United States. The impact of racial inequities in care on infant and maternal health in particular – which is a primary focus of WIC – is staggering. Infant mortality rates for Black babies are more than twice that of white babies, and U.S. maternal mortality rates for Black women are three to four times higher than for white women.

Given that WIC is a public health program focused on pregnant women, infants, and children, we anticipated that Black families may have reservations about participating. This insight aligns with the findings of a task force assembled by the California WIC Association, which found that Black WIC participants feel underrepresented in the WIC program.

While research from behavioral science and related fields helped us start to understand how navigating the WIC experience may be different for Black families, we centered the perspectives and expertise of people with lived experience in WIC as our most valuable source of insight.

2) Promote dignity, autonomy, and justice

Our goal for this work was to challenge our own assumptions and instead focus on the amount there was to learn from the lived experience of participants in order to design meaningful solutions for Black families in WIC. To keep the needs of Black families at the center of our process, we structured our work around three core values: dignity, autonomy, and justice.

As a team of behavioral scientists, we started the project by recruiting a team of experts in Black infant and maternal health – including local WIC staff, health equity strategists, and facilitators in Black infant and maternal health programs – to provide feedback on our research and designs at various points in our process. This team of experts not only shared valuable insights from their experience in the field, but also helped prepare us for thoughtful, compassionate, and well-informed conversations with participants.

When talking with both community experts and WIC participants, we created space for autonomy in how they engaged with us. We did this by both asking direct questions that helped fill in specific gaps in our own knowledge, and also inviting people to share their broad ideas, ask us questions, challenge us, and bring up what they thought we might be missing. As we expected, this pushed us to explore new directions for the appointment reminders we might not have otherwise considered, and ultimately, made our collective work stronger.

3) Listen to people

After identifying potential behavioral barriers using our previous research and work with WIC, we sought out the real experts – WIC participants. Because this work focused on designing specifically for barriers faced by Black families, we spoke with Black participants. Knowing that participants have valuable insights to share and have busy schedules to manage, we compensated them fairly for their time spent talking with us. When the pandemic forced us to conduct our conversations virtually rather than meet with participants at the WIC agency, we increased the stipend paid for interviews to cover the costs of scheduling a less convenient time to meet, as well as cover the costs of using data to connect from their personal electronic devices.

Truly listening to participants means giving them an equal seat at the design table and acting on what we hear from them. In conversations with WIC participants, we learned that some of our own favorite appointment reminder designs did not resonate as well as we imagined they would. For instance, we shared designs with participants that centered on two key goals: instilling a sense of belonging with WIC, and making it easier to reschedule appointments. Although participants appreciated the efforts of WIC staff to make them feel like they belong when they are at the WIC agency, they felt strongly that text messages weren’t the right tool for addressing issues of belonging.

“We wouldn’t take that seriously. Even though it’s nice, it’s just like, whatever, if I can come, I can.”

– WIC Participant, West Oakland

Instead, what was most important to participants were messages that included a phone number in the message so they could more easily reschedule on the spot when necessary.

“When we need to reschedule, and we don’t see someone telling us we can, we just don’t want to deal with it. So, we just don’t do it. This [message] is calming. Even with this not being a real scenario, just seeing this, it made me feel better.”

– WIC participant, San Bernadino

After receiving this feedback from participants, we discarded messages aimed at fostering belonging, and advised our WIC partners to instead use appointment reminders addressing administrative hassles, like rescheduling appointments.

A continuous process

Going forward, we plan to draw out more insights from this work and our other public benefits work to help generate more transformative change through policy design with our forthcoming policy lab, and plan to continue working toward safety net improvements that will help programs like WIC better serve all families with an equity-focused approach.

These three principles and our experience implementing them in California are by no means an exhaustive guide for integrating a focus on designing for equity into behavioral design work. Instead, we hope to be a resource and ongoing partner in refining approaches to designing for equity.

You can read more about these text message designs, or if you want to partner with us or talk more about equity design in your own work, reach out to anthony@ideas42.org.

The post Three Behavioral Principles for Equity: Lessons from Redesigning WIC Appointment Reminders for Black Families appeared first on ideas42.

Quality education benefits individual learners (the South African term for students in primary schools), economies, and societies at large through increased earnings and economic growth, better health choices, better-functioning institutions and public services, and more. South Africa, among other countries, has sought to better realize these benefits through increased spending on education. However, while South Africa’s education spending has increased in recent years, school performance metrics continue to lag expectations.

While many factors contribute to lower-than-desired performance metrics, lack of data for education administrators and teachers on school performance presents one significant challenge. Past research has shown that access to and use of accurate data on school performance can help improve education outcomes for learners. As a result, in the past decade, governments, multilateral agencies, NGOs, and other actors around the world have made concerted pushes to put a range of data into the hands of government officials, including education administrators and teachers. But, we know from behavioral science that access to data alone doesn’t guarantee it will be put into action that impacts people’s lives. In 2020, ideas42 partnered with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation to determine how to remove barriers and enhance the impact of education data usage in South Africa.

As part of a larger set of initiatives targeted at improving South African educational outcomes, the Department of Basic Education (DBE) in partnership with the Dell Foundation, introduced an innovative data platform in 2013. The Data Driven Districts (DDD) Dashboard allows education administrators to positively impact learners through the ability to make data-driven decisions, from identifying and working with teachers with high absentee rates to identifying low-performing schools and developing targeted interventions to improve their performance. To support these decisions, the tool contains an online dashboard and downloadable reports with information on a variety of metrics, including learner and teacher attendance, test performance, and grade advancement. There are numerous instances where administrators are putting the dashboard to good use to make these types of decisions. For example, one curriculum official we spoke with uses the dashboard to identify low performing schools and subject areas within his district and offer targeted support based on the data. However, many administrators and teachers do not use the tool to the fullest extent.

While over 10,000 South African educational administrators and teachers access the tool each term, the DDD program aimed to further magnify impact by increasing uptake by the thousands of education officials who currently do not use the dashboard to allow for improvements in areas from earlier identification and response to decreasing performance in schools to improved allocation of resources among school.  We worked with the DDD implementation team and the Dell Foundation to apply a behavioral lens and explore ways to increase use of this tool by more education administrators.

When designing the dashboard, the DDD implementation team envisioned a tool that was both technologically innovative and user friendly for everyone in the education system who needed to access it. In partnership with the dashboard implementing program team, we explored the behavioral barriers that prevent educational administrators from using the DDD Dashboard efficiently and effectively. While data in the dashboard is relevant for educators at all levels, we focused specifically on education administrators at the circuit level (analogous to the district level in the United States). We looked to identify barriers that prevent them from using the data dashboard to formulate interventions for lower performing schools.

As education administrators use the dashboard, they go through several steps, which we identified through diagnosis interviews and a process audit of the dashboard. As users go through these steps, several behavioral barriers may arise along the way, and prevent successful use of the dashboard (see figure):

• Misleading social norms about who data tools are meant for and how many people use them depress use. In many cases, peer use looks much lower than it actually is because use of a tool is invisible (i.e. people don’t see their peers using it). This is especially prominent as people are working from home during school closures.
• In addition, people experience present bias. Educators are strapped for time and may overweight the near-term costs of learning the tool relative to the long-term benefits and time savings of mastering the tool.
• Decision makers also hold strong, outdated mental models and use default approaches when making decisions, which makes it difficult to integrate novel tools and prevents them from using data.
• Small hassle factors, such as forgetting their passwords, can further deter users when they’re getting started.
• Finally, users lack support tools to translate the data into action and follow through on implementation intentions after using the dashboard, such as reminders, planning prompts, and guidance.

The DDD Dashboard is consistently evolving based on real-time feedback. The DDD team incorporates input about what type of features best drive learner success and how these features can most easily be used when updating the dashboard. These findings will be incorporated into the dashboard itself as well materials and programs outside the dashboard, such as informational materials, to support better use of the dashboard and translation of insights, gleaned from the platform, to data-driven decisions.

Although this work focused on enabling education officials to access and apply learnings from the dashboard, many of the insights we captured are relevant to data use across different fields. While any interventions or changes to systems and practices should be adapted to suit their specific context, we believe that many of the barriers will be broadly applicable.

Based on both what we learned with this dashboard, and previous work encouraging South African municipal officials to use data when making policy decisions and responding to citizen requests, we’ve identified a set of common important barriers to account for, as well as broad recommendations for addressing them. Institutions, organizations, and government agencies can use these insights to help their decision makers follow through on using data systems that can significantly improve their decisions and relevant outcomes, but may face barriers to adoption:

• Decision makers have limited attention, which is already split over multiple tasks. New systems must capture attention, particularly by demonstrating how the tool will save decision makers time and effort while also improving their performance. Interventions can also showcase value through “jump start” reports that show key metrics and visuals in an appealing, concise format.
• Decision makers often face tremendous time scarcity. This scarcity makes them both more risk averse to approaches that could strain their already busy schedules and also causes them to tunnel, or focus on immediate tasks at the expense of long-term time saving and strategic opportunities. New data systems should clearly prove they will save time in the long run and also “create time” for users to learn the tool in the short term.
• Many decision makers have established habits that can be hard to break and are also averse to the risk of piloting unfamiliar approaches. Implementers of new data tools must carefully shift these habits or incorporate the new tools into habits. Stories and case studies about people who have successfully learned and incorporated the tool into their work can help users familiarize themselves with a new approach.
• Decision makers hold firm mental models about data tools. They often see these tools as difficult to learn and as being outside their responsibilities. Implementers should shift mental models to frame quantitative tools as a support tool, rather than a burden. Integrating data into day-to-day tasks (e.g., a browser extension tool that allows users to search for/integrate data when making a decision) and providing additional support for policymakers, such as interns or administrative assistants who can collect data, can also make leveraging data easier and less daunting.

As data tools, including data platforms, permeate into more areas, they have the potential to drastically improve decisions and outcomes. However, our findings suggest that it’s not enough to simple make data available to decision makers, it’s also crucial to design systems for use in the context of their work. Behavioral science reminds us that context matters. Those implementing data systems need to not only think through the data collection and display but also create the right environment for potential users to take it up and translate the data into informed actions.

The post What is Preventing Education Administrators from Using Data in Their Decisions? appeared first on ideas42.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clearer than ever that health outcomes for millions around the world are unequal and unfair. The pandemic has upended measurable progress toward improving the lives of millions of people and created new challenges for individuals, communities, health providers, and policymakers, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

At ideas42, our mission is to use behavioral science to solve complex social problems with the aim of making the world more equitably healthy, wealthy, just, and sustainable. This mission is especially salient on World Health Day, appropriately focused on building a fairer, healthier world. For over a decade, we’ve used our expertise in applied behavioral science as a problem-solving tool to improve health outcomes and well-being around the world with a focus on the very populations who are often left behind. 

From addressing stigma towards disadvantaged groups to ensuring that women are able to give birth free of mistreatment, we are dedicated to applying our tools to tackle complex problems. Below is just a small sample of how we’ve used behavioral design, in conjunction with trusted partners, to address health inequities:
 

• Understanding barriers to initial care-seeking among TB patients in the Philippines – Deeply intertwined barriers, like the ambiguity of symptoms and expectations of stigma, hold back individuals from seeking care for tuberculosis. Care-seeking delays have a tremendous impact on health outcomes and are often experienced by individuals in lower-income communities. We identified the contextual cues and psychological biases that contribute to delays in care-seeking, suggesting opportunities for innovative program design to improve health outcomes for patients with tuberculosis. This work was done under the USAID-funded Breakthrough RESEARCH project led by the Population Council and the Philippines Department of Health.

• Providing tools to reduce preventable deaths during childbirth in Madagascar – Malagasy health workers face extraordinary constraints when delivering babies; they often work alone, must provide myriad services, and work without running water or electricity. Through collaborative design with health workers and other Malagasy stakeholders, we developed a set of tools to help providers in remote, rural facilities prevent maternal deaths due to postpartum hemorrhage. This work was part of the USAID-funded Breakthrough RESEARCH project.

• Promoting respectful care during labor and delivery in Zambia – Instances of mistreatment during childbirth are prevalent around the world, particularly in low-resource settings [1].Under the USAID-funded Breakthrough RESEARCH project, we worked in partnership with Safe Motherhood 360+, the District Health Office of Chipata, and many midwives and women to develop cost-effective, innovative solutions to promote respectful care. A small-scale evaluation showed that these solutions led to a 15% decrease in instances of mistreatment during delivery.

• Increasing accessibility and use of family planning options in Uganda – Fourteen million adolescent girls living in low- and middle-income countries want to avoid pregnancy but aren’t using a modern contraceptive method [2]. In collaboration with MSI Reproductive Choices and Marie Stopes Uganda, we designed a refer-a-friend program that works through peers to empower and encourage girls to access family planning information and services.

The theme of World Health Day is an important call to action to work together with the communities most impacted by unfair and inequitable circumstances. Interested in joining us to tackle health inequities with behavioral design to improve health and well-being around the world? Reach out to us at gh@ideas42.org. We also encourage you to tweet us @ideas42 to join the conversation this World Health Day and every day.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)31992-0/fulltext#%20 

[2] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adding-it-up-investing-in-sexual-reproductive-health-adolescents 

The post World Health Day 2021: Building a Fairer, Healthier World Using Behavioral Science appeared first on ideas42.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, many families across America were struggling to make ends meet. But they still have big hopes and dreams today, from getting a car to finding better job opportunities to buying a home. To achieve any of these goals, saving and credit-building are two critical steps toward financial stability and self-determination. And at the current moment of societal upheaval, financial stability is not just nice-to-have, but vital.

We recently partnered with Capital One, which has established a unique collaboration with community-based organizations around the country to provide support on credit-building and savings as part of the Capital One Impact Initiative, which seeks to close gaps in equity, helping people gain better access to socioeconomic opportunity.

The partnership with ideas42 included Capital One associates engaging with community members via group sessions and one-on-one interactions, helping community members work on their financial goals:

“I just hope I can go through this with success and get my own home and give…my kids something. A place where I can plant a fruit tree.”

“I’m currently unemployed. I want to be able to get a car, and I want to live independently.”

“I want a stable life, and credit scores help you get to that.”

-Goals reported by clients in Capital One program

With such a broad range of goals, how can a program like this be designed with community members and their priorities at the center? Over the past few decades, classroom-based financial education programs have unfortunately proven largely ineffective, with limited exceptions. Often such programs prioritize sharing a wealth of information about financial management, but fail to provide the room for clients to apply that knowledge to their own situations, leverage clients’ collective expertise to overcome barriers, or take real actions toward their goals.

This is where behavioral science can help, by offering compelling insights on how to create a space for clients to identify, articulate, and plan out how to achieve financial goals of their own choosing. ideas42 and Capital One engaged in a hands-on, co-design process to incorporate four fundamental behavioral strategies into the program:

1. Personalize the goal: Research shows that self-set goals are more likely to lead to commitment and achievement. Setting a goal that is personally tailored to an individual’s circumstance has been shown to be effective in increasing student learning outcomes, among other areas. In the redesigned training, each client sets their own financial goal, identifies why this goal is important to them, and imagines what it will look like – and feel like – to attain that goal.
2. Focus on plan-making: Setting a high-level goal that is personally relevant is only the first step. Plan-making, or implementation intentions prompts — a behavioral science tactic which guides the individual through planning out the specific date, time, and location of an action — has effectively increased vaccination uptake, voter turnout, and savings contributions. A central feature of Capital One’s redesigned program is a map that asks clients to identify the various steps along the journey toward their goal. Along this journey, clients are prompted to write their next steps and the date, time, and location that they will take this next step.
3. Anticipate obstacles: Often goal-setting exercises begin with a visualization about what a positive future outcome might look like. Surprisingly, research shows that because positive visualization fosters a feeling of mental attainment, it can actually lead to reduced effort if conducted in isolation. However, an effective tactic is pairing positive visualization with “mental contrasting”: anticipating obstacles and planning out how to overcome them. Mental contrasting has proven an effective part of goal attainment across domains, including smoking cessation, exercising, and learning. In the redesigned program, Financial Access Educators ask clients to forecast what potential obstacles might get in the way of achieving their goal, and think through how they might overcome these obstacles. Both implementation intentions and mental contrasting can follow a simple but powerful formula of: if [cue], then [action].
4. Maintain momentum: Setting a goal, making a plan, and anticipating obstacles are important steps to achieving one’s (financial) goal. However, even after these steps have been completed, actual goal attainment requires maintaining momentum towards one’s goal. Here, we leveraged a behavioral science principle known as endowed progress: where an individual is given encouraging information about their advancement towards a goal to increase motivation.

A client’s map after they have completed the first three steps, which occur during the training.

Along with endowed progress, we built in reminders to maintain momentum after the session. Getting a reminder at the time that you intend to perform an action has been shown to increase follow-through on tasks across domains, ranging from higher education to healthcare. Clients track progress along their self-determined goal steps and are then prompted to set reminders for when they plan to take the remaining actions – ideally at a moment when the action can be taken right away.

Clients bring expertise around financial management to any program–indeed, people with limited resources are experts at managing them. But to be effective, behavioral tactics and financial programs also require an essential ingredient: trust. An integral part of Capital One’s program is strong relationships with their communities and nonprofit partners. Through effective facilitation and discussion, Capital One associates encourage the sharing of collective expertise in the room. These relationships ultimately foster the kind of trusting environment that we all need right now – the space to stop, breathe, set a goal that matters, and get started on the first step.

These best practices hold true whether a financial program is conducted in-person or virtually. In light of  the COVID-19 pandemic, Capital One has adapted additional behavioral approaches for virtual delivery channels like videoconferencing, such as: walking clients through drawing their own map if they aren’t able to print at home, using the chat function to help publicize goal setting within the group, and leveraging polling features to increase engagement and allow for data collection. Virtual sessions have actually been increasingly well-attended during the pandemic, underscoring the demand for financial health support during these tough times.

“Financial empowerment isn’t just about information and awareness. We want to give people the tools they need to feel confident in their relationship with money, remove barriers and create channels to action,” said Kim Allman, Senior Director of Community Impact & Investment at Capital One. “We believe that finances should work for everyone, no matter where they are on their financial journey.”

At this current moment, in the face of staggering job losses and uncertainty, it is crucial to continue to provide people with support to manage their finances. Of course, also necessary are the deeper financial supports to ensure basic needs are met during a crisis. As a complement to these essential supports, behavioral tactics like personalization and plan-making can strike the right balance between flexibility and simplicity by creating a space where clients are not passive listeners, but active agents in designing for their own lives.

The post From Aspirations to Action: Behavioral Tactics for Achieving Financial Goals appeared first on ideas42.

Despite rapid growth in the adoption of behavioral science over the last decade, some have argued that the field may not be reaching its full potential. When behavioral scientists focus on identifying new applications for existing frameworks, we risk falling short of innovative growth into new technologies and approaches. There is certainly still room to improve and scale the existing suite of behavioral science tools. But if we want applied behavioral science to magnify its role in creating and sustaining long-term social impact in a rapidly changing world, it’s time to expand our toolkit. 

Innovative machine learning methods for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (for example, causal forests) enable behavioral scientists to strategically deliver interventions to those most likely to benefit from them. Crucially, these methods also reveal who is not likely to benefit from an intervention, allowing us to design alternative solutions that will work for these individuals and meet the diverse needs of a heterogeneous population. This is a departure from the status-quo, in which we design and test behavioral interventions to see if they are effective on average. Existing methods do allow us to explore differences in response to treatment between pre-specified subgroups, but they do not capture the complex and intertwined factors that truly drive variation in how people respond to interventions. 

In 2019, with support from Schmidt Futures and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, ideas42 collaborated with the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford University to apply machine learning methods to a set of real-world behavioral interventions. We chose a set of prior ideas42 experiments that had positive average treatment effects (we knew they worked well, on average), and set out to explore heterogeneous treatment effects (for whom do these interventions work?). Ultimately, the goal is to use information about how different people respond to treatment to make strategic decisions about who should receive an intervention in the future. 

The culmination of our first year of work is the new report: Computational Applications to Behavioral Science. It is designed to be a guide for researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners who want to use machine learning to enhance their own field experiments – with a particular focus on behavioral science interventions. The report includes technical descriptions and tutorials for how to implement these methods, two illustrative case studies, and reflections on which experimental contexts are best suited for this particular application of machine learning. 

In one of our case studies, we revisit data from a five-year partnership with the City University of New York (CUNY). Of the 13 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that we ran with CUNY, four tested behavioral interventions encouraging community college students to secure their financial aid by renewing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). On average, students who received behaviorally-informed text messages and emails were between 4 and 9 percentage points more likely to renew FAFSA by the June 30th priority deadline. With our existing set of tools, we could see that the intervention was effective, but lacked insight into whether the campaign was equally effective for all students. 

Using machine learning, we discovered that students who unenrolled during the semester had significantly lower treatment effects (by about 4 percentage points) compared to students who remained enrolled. This insight serves two purposes from a policy-maker or practitioner’s perspective: first, we see evidence that those who unenroll during the semester need more intensive interventions (for example, personal outreach from advising staff) to encourage them to renew the FAFSA and help them overcome a multitude of other barriers to persistence. Second, we can make an informed decision about whether it is worthwhile to send messages to a group that is not benefitting from them (but is also not being harmed). This tradeoff becomes especially important in cases where the intervention is costly, or if we think inundating students with ineffective messages might cause them to ignore other important notifications. 

Having learned something about who benefits most from an intervention treatment, how do we target the right messaging to the right students? School administrators, of course, do not know ahead of time who is going to unenroll during the semester. Fortunately, we can use machine learning to help predict how each student will respond to the intervention and assign treatment to those most likely to benefit. We can also compare this approach to other ways of assigning treatment (for example, randomization) to determine which is a more “optimal policy” (i.e. leads to better outcomes). In this case, assigning treatment based on predicted treatment effect appears to be the “optimal policy.”

Through this process, we also learned a lot about how to scope behavioral science interventions and designs that incorporate machine learning methods successfully. In the report, we provide tips for designing experiments that allow for detecting heterogeneity if it exists. This application of machine learning will be most impactful in settings where multiple treatment arms are possible, where the data are both long and wide, and where there are behavioral – not just demographic – data (for example, information about somebody’s past engagement with a program or resource). The potential for impact is especially high in cases where some treatment options are expensive or hard to implement, but may be more effective for some people; when we know more about who really benefits from an expensive intervention, we can reduce the overall cost of implementation or maximize outcomes within cost constraints. 

Our initial case study with CUNY holds significant promise for this approach. If we scope, design, and test evidence-based, thoughtful behavioral interventions with machine learning methods as part of our toolkit, behavioral science is even more well-positioned to positively impact millions of lives in the future. 

Read the full report here.

The post Machine learning-based personalization: An innovation we need to increase impact in applied behavioral science appeared first on ideas42.

People often (erroneously) believe that a few leaders are responsible for the development of an emerging field, an idea, or event in history because of perceived “natural attributes” such as superior intelligence. This is known as “great man” theory–a flawed theory, of course, because in reality it is the tireless work of countless people that causes breakthroughs and progress. Those who are publicly credited may have been intelligent and insightful, but their work wouldn’t have been possible without the many intelligent and insightful individuals who came before them or worked alongside them. Important contributions and breakthroughs can be overlooked, incorrectly attributed, or left out of the story entirely. As a result of bias, those overlooked are often women and people of color, particularly those who are Black. 

In the U.S., Black History Month is a time to reflect on the contributions made by Black people in all walks of life, across all industries and in all parts of our society. It’s also a time to celebrate and amplify the voices of those in the Black community and reflect on those who inspire us, or are engaged in history in the making. This celebration should include our field, behavioral science, which is an amalgamation of economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, and more. Across these fields, there are a number of Black researchers and practitioners who are not as well-known, and as with much Black history in the U.S., they have not received the recognition for their work that they should. This is more evidence, if we needed it, that even those studying human biases (including ourselves) are still subject to bias.

Behavioral science has also made significant contributions to understanding the causes and sources of discrimination and conscious and unconscious biases, as well as discovered additional ways to fight discrimination and biases. Highlighting the Black people who have contributed to our field, as well as research that can continue to be applied, is a small step in our ongoing commitments to racial justice and correcting historical injustices. 

That’s why throughout the month of February, we’ll use our Twitter feed to shed light on Black researchers, thought leaders, and practitioners who contributed to the advancement of the different disciplines that comprise the behavioral sciences, but who have been less recognized publicly for their achievements that make our work at ideas42 possible. We will tweet about one person from history each day, as well as highlight research that either deepened our understanding of discrimination or bias, or were used to create ways to fight them. Both will be updated on this post with a growing list below.   

We encourage you to reach out to us @ideas42 to share additional historical figures or studies. 

While we are celebrating those Black figures in our history throughout February, it is also important to acknowledge the role that the manipulation of human psychology has played in creating and supporting systemic racism. Race is a social construct. It has often been used to manipulate, often very intentionally, aspects of who we are as humans to “other” people and create systems that control and oppress some for the benefits of others. Humans are social creatures. One of the reasons we have been able to “succeed” compared to all other species on earth is our ability to cooperate and work together. However, we are inclined to cooperate and work together with others who we view as being like us, or within our “tribe.” As Muzafer Sherif et al’s 1954 Robbers Cave Experiment showed, it is relatively easy to manipulate people to create “tribal” identities, making yourself think you are better than others, hating others, and even being willing to kill others you do not see as like you. This same basic psychological tactic was used in the creation of chattel slavery in the United States as a means to control and oppress, and has survived to this day as systemic racism and “othering.”

As Michelle Alexander documents in The New Jim Crow [1], early on in the American colonies, the majority of the manual labor on farms and in settlements was performed by a mix of white European indentured servants, African indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and free Black people. Uprisings such as Bacon’s Rebellion, which included alliances between these servant classes, disturbed and instilled fear among the colonial upper class. The reaction was a hardening of the racial ‘caste’ of slavery with the Virginia Slave Code of 1705, giving power to indentured and free white over Black people, socially segregating white colonists from Black, and increasing the number of enslaved Africans to do the most menial and hard labor. It was a deep “othering” to maintain control. 

We share this to emphasize that the systematic racism that still persists today in American society was not an accident, but was driven by an intentional set of actions. We must learn from this history and realize that in addition to shining a spotlight on the many talented Black individuals who have made the behavioral sciences the force for good it can be today, we can also intentionally set up our policies to dismantle this system and its effects.

Please follow us @ideas42 to keep up with (or contribute to!) our social media celebration of Black figures in the behavioral sciences, as well as our dissemination of important research in identifying and dismantling bias, throughout Black History Month 2021. Our list of resources can be found below, and will be updated daily. 

[1]  Alexander is not the only scholar to document these events and their implications; it is well documented by a number of historians.

Highlighting Black figures in the behavioral sciences (updated daily throughout February):

Dr. Kenneth Bancroft Clark

Psychologist, educator, professor, and civil rights activist

Dr. Kenneth Bancroft Clark was a psychologist, and he was the first Black president of the American Psychological Association. He and his wife Mamie Phipps Clark opened an agency called the Northside Center for Child Development, the first full-time child guidance center offering psychological and casework services to families in the Harlem area. The Clarks made significant contributions both in their field of psychology and in the Civil Rights movement. Read more here. 

Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark

Psychologist, researcher, and civil rights activist

Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark was a psychologist who conducted her master’s thesis on self-identification in Black children. She and her husband Kenneth Bancroft Clark then continued this work together, using dolls to study the effects of segregation on African American children. They testified as expert witnesses in Brown vs. Board of Education and other school desegregation cases. Read more here. 

The post Honoring Black Behavioral Scientists and Examining the Psychology of Race in History appeared first on ideas42.

EDUCARE Liberia

Eleanor, a young woman living in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, wants to start a business to improve her family’s life. As a young girl, she saw the women in her life braiding hair – her aunt worked at a hair salon, and her mother taught her how to braid. When deciding what kind of business to start, hair braiding was an obvious consideration. She also noticed that jobs and businesses in other sectors such as construction would require training, so she didn’t consider them, even though they are more profitable than hair braiding and more needed in her community.  Eleanor’s story is hardly unique.  Globally, women are 67% less likely than men to work in industrial sectors- traditionally thought of as male-dominated, even though workers in such male-dominated sectors earn 5-43% more than those in predominantly female sectors. Behavioral science offers an innovative way to consider this problem and creative ways to address it.

Over the past year, ideas42, the World Bank, and the project management team of Liberia’s Youth Opportunities Project (YOP), implemented by the Ministry of Youth and Sports (MYS) and the Liberia Agency for Community Empowerment (LACE) in partnership with Educare Liberia, collaborated to apply a behavioral lens to the Small Business Support (SBS) component of the YOP, which supports urban youth in opening and running small businesses. We developed a memo highlighting the lessons learned from this collaboration, which was generously supported by the RSR Gender-Smart Social Protection Multi-Donor Trust Fund and an anonymous donor.

One aspect of the collaboration focused on understanding barriers women face in reaching their full economic potential and identifying ways to help them overcome those barriers. We found that one of the first steps to opening and operating a successful business is selecting the ideal sector for the business. But fully considering all potential sectors before making a decision was something many SBS participants seemed to struggle with, especially women.

One reason women do not fully consider all potential sectors when identifying the optimal sector in which to open a business is that observed social norms can limit women’s perceptions of their own business options and areas in which they can excel. When women constantly see others around them participating in traditionally female-dominated, less profitable sectors, this can  overshadow the less visible reality that some women have started breaking out of these traditional sectors with success. For example, in Liberian communities where YOP operates SBS, it is common to see women in hair braiding, tailoring, and catering businesses. Women working in these sectors are more visible to participants than women in other roles such as brick-making or construction, even though there are women successfully employed in these other sectors as well. As such, YOP participants often form mental models that hair braiding and tailoring are more suitable for women, leading female participants to not thoroughly consider other, more profitable business sectors when starting their own businesses.

Behavioral science offers insights that can help encourage women to consider all potential business sectors, including male-dominated industries or sectors. In many cases, choices that are perceived as the norm because they are more publicly visible may not accurately represent new trends and possibilities, and in such cases highlighting a positive but hidden trend can make a powerful difference. For example, providing examples of women in male-dominated fields can bring out this real possibility and increase awareness of successful women in such fields. This can help show women the range of options they can consider for their own businesses. In the context of the YOP, designs that include this principle are images of and conversations with women who participated in previous rounds of SBS and are successfully working in fields such as construction.

Another reason women may fail to fully consider all sectors when opening a business is the small hassles associated with breaking into a new sector, especially when women are already predisposed to believing they can only excel in certain fields through observations of other women in their life. For example, we found that the hassle of determining how and where to get training was an impediment to many youth considering new business sectors, but this was especially the case for women who harbored beliefs that there are only certain sectors in which women can excel. Specifically in Monrovia, training is required to partake in some male-dominated business sectors, such as brick making, and women reported that the hassles of finding someone to train them was a barrier to fully considering starting a business in these sectors.

Luckily, insights from behavioral science may again be able to help. One thing program designers can consider is providing clear and simplified information about trainings to participants, especially women.  This can reduce hassles in determining how and where to get this training, making it more likely that they will consider starting businesses in these sectors. In the context of the YOP, one way this design principal is being applied is by having previous SBS women participants who obtained training and entered a male-dominated sectors answer questions from new women participants about the training they obtained.

We intend to test the effectiveness of our designs and will share the broader results next year. In the meantime, we invite you to check out the full memo, “Behavioral Insights for Women’s Sector Choice in Liberia’s Youth Opportunities Project,” for more insights and design principles on how to help women consider and select the right business for them, ultimately improving their economic opportunities and livelihoods.

The post How Can Behavioral Science Help Improve Economic Outcomes for Women? appeared first on ideas42.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.