This is part of a series of conversations with members of the National Innovations Team (NIT), a group of 54 health professionals across government and non-profit sectors in Burkina Faso and Niger. NIT members engage in a hybrid online and in-person applied learning curriculum developed by ideas42, which includes an introduction to behavioral design and hands-on coaching from our behavioral economics experts.

Through the course, members develop and refine innovative solutions based on feedback from end users to address behavioral challenges across a range of health areas. The NIT was established in 2020 by Breakthrough ACTION, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s flagship SBC program.

This conversation features NIT member Emeline Ouedraogo, from the Ministry of Agriculture in Burkina Faso. Emeline’s team works outside the health sector to improve nutrition by tackling behavioral challenges related to food supply. We connected with Emeline in August 2021 to hear about her experience participating in the NIT.

Name: Emeline Wendyam Ouedraogo
Country: Burkina Faso
Title: Technical Assistant, Permanent Secretariat for Coordination of Agricultural Sectoral Policies
Organization: Ministry of Agriculture NIT member since March 2021

What motivated you to join the National Innovations Team?

I am that person who always asks, “but, why?” I wanted to learn another way of doing things, to have a greater impact on the ground, and make a positive change. When Breakthrough ACTION reached out to me about joining the NIT, I accepted because I saw it as an opportunity to do just that.

Was there anything you learned in the course that was completely new or that surprised you?

The ideation phase went so much deeper than anything I’ve ever done before. So often, when we have a problem, we just respond without thinking deeply about the best way to intervene. We apply a solution without exploring what else we could do. For me, the ideation phase was so eye-opening because it was a new way of analyzing things. It challenged the assumptions we often make. It helped us better understand the problem, think exhaustively about how we could make a change, and consider which among those many ideas is best. It pushed us to come up with the best solution to the real problem and move beyond the things we are used to doing.

Can you describe your group’s innovation? How is it different from other programs you’ve worked on?

My group is working on increasing farmers’ use of improved seed varieties, and I really think our innovation is going to make a change. We are going to distribute free or subsidized seeds of improved varieties to producers and have them plant comparison plots. Then, we’ll accompany them throughout the season and assess yields at the end. We’ve done similar things before, but what’s different about our innovation is that, at the end of the season, we’re going to help them to plan for the next season. Through the NIT course, we realized we were missing this critical moment at the end of the season. We assume producers will use the improved variety seeds after seeing the results, but they don’t even when they say they will. This time, we’re going to help them solidify their plans for the next season—maybe even purchase the improved seeds at that moment—in the hopes of changing this behavior.

What else will you need to implement your solution?

We’ll need to mobilize financial resources to acquire everything we need—from seeds and fertilizers to staff who can monitor implementation. We can’t be certain we’ll find those resources, but it won’t be the first time we’re looking for them, either. Often, we’ll have several partners who will see one or two lines in the budget that they can finance, and they’ll take on those activities. That’s why it’s so important that the people who develop our proposals can write them in a way that’s compelling. We can find the resources, but only if we make a convincing case. The challenge is, that’s not always easy to do, and the people who are best at it often leave, because their skills are so valuable. As a result, we have to consistently build our capacity in this area to get the resources we need.

Have you shared information about the course with anyone outside of the NIT?

Yes, I’ve shared it with my colleagues because I find it so interesting, and so, even without being in the group, they all know a little bit about the content! It’s a shame that those who are involved in decision-making don’t have access to this information. I share it with my manager, but we don’t really discuss it at length. It’s just 5 to 10 minutes so that he understands the course. I want to organize something where we sit down and reflect on our approach—really think about what we are doing—but I haven’t been able to do that yet. It will happen when I finish the course.

Any other thoughts or suggestions?

During this course, everyone has learned a lot that is certainly useful in their daily work, but if we limit it to that, it will be incomplete. What would be really, really interesting is to maintain this team and continue to meet periodically. We could identify key behavioral problems and lead the process from ideation through the creation of solutions. This would allow us to build a bank of innovative solutions that we can propose to other partners for different behavioral issues we identify in our communities. I think something like this would be worthwhile to help continue the progress we’ve made so far.

This series is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents are the responsibility of Breakthrough ACTION and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.

The post Building Behavioral Design Skills: Conversations with Breakthrough ACTION Innovators appeared first on ideas42.

Many employees indicate that they want to be a part of a workplace that is socially meaningful in some way.  America’s Charities’ 2017 Snapshot study found that “71% of surveyed employees say it is imperative or very important to work where culture is supportive of giving and volunteering.” More recently, many employees are seeking to work at companies that are advancing equity, diversity, and community.  

At the same time, COVID-19 has accelerated remote work trends for some workers, resulting in a sense of disconnection. While the acceleration of flexible work arrangements has afforded certain benefits for some, it has also created new challenges. For example, in today’s remote and hybrid work arrangements, many workers are feeling more isolated than ever before.  

What if there were a way to help employees feel more connected to their colleagues at work, while also enabling them to support social causes they care about by directly donating a portion of their salary?

Since 2015, our team has been researching donor behavior and designing and testing behavioral solutions that bridge the gap between good intentions and impactful actions in giving. We’re sharing some of the designs from our most recent phase of work and the insights we learned from testing them in real workplaces. Up next: Work for Good, which gives employees the opportunity to support social causes they care about while connecting with their colleagues.

Transforming hours at work into dollars for impact

Work for Good is a workplace volunteer campaign that combines the emotional rewards and shared experience of an in-person, company-wide volunteer experience with the impact and ease of automatic donations. On a designated campaign day, participating employees work  as usual, and choose to donate their salary-equivalent earnings to an organization or cause they care about. Their employer automatically donates earnings from their next paycheck for the number of hours they choose to “work” for the cause of their choice. The campaign is designed to support social connection among  colleagues through shared social experiences like Slack channels, email groups, and in-person gatherings, and a warm glow feeling from doing their  ‘Work for Good.’

Work for Good is uniquely designed to help people follow through on their intentions to give by leveraging three key behavioral design components:

• Frame giving in terms of time
  Donating time activates an emotional mindset that helps people feel more connected and generous compared to donating cash. For example, when giving ‘effort’ (that translates into earnings), individuals have been found to give two to five times more dollars on average, than when giving monetary amounts. Additionally, in our initial online tests with donors, we found that framing the ask to donate in terms of time (e.g. hour-equivalent of your salary) led to significantly greater donation amounts than when asked to donate dollar amounts. We further explored this  insight in partnership with 1% for the Planet on an email campaign A/B test and found that presenting a donation in terms of volunteering time significantly increased click-through rates compared to the option to make a flat monetary donation. This insight is central to the Work for Good campaign, which aims to shift people’s default mindsets away from money, which can trigger loss aversion (i.e. people feeling monetary losses more acutely than gains), and instead to unlock the, warm glow of dedicating time to a cause they care about.
• Alleviate hassles from the giving process
  Once an individual has decided to give, their good intentions can be easily derailed. They may have uncertainty about where or when to donate, or run into too many steps in the process and procrastinate the task for another day. Automating the donation from a paycheck makes the process easy and hassle-free, without relying on sustained attention. In addition, companies that already provide donation matching could effectively double the employee’s impact, making the option even more compelling. Another benefit is that donating future income via payroll deduction reduces the perceived ‘loss’ felt when people donate out-of-pocket.
• Create a shared social experience
  A major benefit of volunteering compared to donating cash is the shared experience and feelings of connection fostered among fellow volunteers. Donating money is often an invisible action, and people may feel uncomfortable sharing the amount they gave. However, participation in the Work for Good campaign is visible and celebrated, and framing it as a volunteer experience makes people more comfortable sharing their engagement with others. This can create new social norms around generosity.  Ideally, the opportunities for social engagements would build on existing organizational culture and social channels. Social components such as dedicated chat channels, emails from the organization’s leadership about the event, or even a physical artifact on one’s desk can build connections between colleagues who are participating in a Work for Good day at the same time.

Shifting the metric of donation amounts from dollars to hours also puts individuals at more equal terms without the social taboos of discussing monetary amounts. For example, instead of saying “I donated $50 to this cause,” employees can tell their peers “I dedicated two hours of my day to this cause.”

In January of 2020, we ran a small internal pilot with Benevity, a workplace giving platform. Over a third of all employees participated, and 88% of those who signed up for Work for Good followed through on donating at least one hour to a charity of their choice. The majority of participants surveyed after the event (93%) said that the recipient of their Work for Good donation aligned with their values and interests, and 73% of those surveyed said they would participate again. Overall, the initial pilot was successful in demonstrating promising participation numbers. 

What’s next for Work for Good?

The Benevity pilot also elevated valuable lessons about the implementation of Work for Good for the future.

• Provide employees with ease and agency to select organizations and causes to donate to: When given the option of selecting a “mission” (cause area) or designating a specific organization to donate to, the plurality of participants (44%) selected the “choose your own” option, signed up for more hours and donated an average of 48.7% more than those who selected a cause area fund of several nonprofits, curated by their employer. Offering pre-validated causes or organizations can still be helpful for employees who want to participate and care about a cause, but don’t have an organization in mind to donate to. 
• Find ways to make Work for Good events feel “different” from a normal work day and strengthen team connections: For our pilot, we generated excitement through Slack and email marketing. Additionally, leaders at the company were encouraged to boost messaging about the event by sharing about the organizations they would be donating to and why. These steps created buzz – 71% of participants who responded to our survey spoke with a friend about the event, and 29% updated their Slack status to indicate their participation. For future implementations, we’d like to explore even more ways to encourage making Work for Good events feel social, special, and different from a normal workday, such as a virtual chat room accessible for the hours an employee is “working for good” or tangible keepsakes like a desk sign or pin.
• Develop a clear explanation of how employees’ salary equivalent donations are calculated: We heard from some participants in interviews and surveys that a clearer explanation of how their salary-equivalent donations would be calculated would have been helpful. Fortunately, employees were not deterred from following through on their donations – 87% of individuals who signed up for the program for at least one hour ended up making their donation, even though they were given the option to modify or cancel.
• Work for Good year-round: We initially envisioned and implemented Work for Good as a workplace campaign, so it could generate a discrete and communal point of engagement and interest. We also believe the solution could be scaled and sustained more regularly. For example, employers could implement ‘Work for Good Wednesdays’, or individual employees could initiate a fundraising drive for a personally identified cause through a “Work for Good Week” at any point throughout the year. Future iterations of Work for Good can explore and test other variations of the core design to tease out more behavioral insights about which features most impact employees’ giving behavior and experiences.

Giving tends to be more top-of-mind at the end of the year for many people. On top of that, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect social connection and how some employees do their jobs. Work for Good can help workers stay connected and infuse additional purpose into their days — whether working from home, an office, or a mix of both. Work for Good lets us re-imagine what it means to ‘dedicate our time’ to a cause we care about, allowing us to both enjoy the personal connections, meaning and thoughtfulness of volunteering while also taking advantage of the convenience, direct impact, and efficiency of monetary donations. We plan to use our insights from the Work for Good pilot for future testing of this design, and in future engagements with workplace giving platforms, in order to continue to unlock additional donor satisfaction and generosity for everyday givers.

Learn about other behaviorally informed giving designs from this series: The Personal Giving Review and Charity of the Month.

The post Work for Good: Turning Hours at Work into Dollars for Impact appeared first on ideas42.

A beneficiary of the South Sudan Safety Net Project (SSSNP) after receiving her cash in Juba
Photo by Janet Maya Mulukwat, UNOPS (South Sudan)

Saving money, or spending it in ways to support long-term goals, is difficult for anyone. Living in extreme poverty makes it even more challenging and is almost inconceivable during a global pandemic that continues to disrupt lives and livelihoods.

In South Sudan, high levels of poverty, exacerbated by decades of conflict, escalating food insecurity, shortages of basic services and recurring natural disasters, inhibits planning for the future for the majority of the population that lives in in poverty. Additionally, the economic and health risks created by COVID-19, and the consequent depreciation of the South Sudanese pound (SSP) meant the value of money was constantly in flux.

The South Sudan Safety Net Project (SSSNP) was launched in July 2020 by the Government of the Republic of South Sudan, in collaboration with the World Bank that funds it and the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) that implements it. The SSSNP provides temporary cash assistance to protect and uplift households experiencing extreme poverty, and is accompanied by Cash “Plus” activities that provide basic trainings on topics such as how to save and manage money. The cash assistance is crucial in meeting immediate needs and strengthening recipients’ financial resilience. However, behavioral science shows that constantly dealing with shocks and worrying about depreciation can deplete the cognitive capacity recipients need to optimally use the money and training provided through the program. To this end, the SSSNP partnered with ideas42 to develop and introduce context-specific behavioral interventions to help recipients make the most of their cash.

A survey conducted with SSSNP recipients revealed that they intend to use the cash transfers for urgent needs, such as food. But they also have mid- to long-term goals, such as expanding a business or improving their home. While achieving long-term financial goals is generally difficult for all, the situation was significantly more challenging in South Sudan during the height of the rapid depreciation of the SSP in 2020, when recipients had to use the cash they received immediately to mitigate losing the value of their money. While recent economic reforms are expected to stabilize the currency, inflation remains high and continues to restrict household capacity and savings behaviors. Given these challenges, the process of setting priorities and taking practical steps to achieve future goals is far from straightforward. Key barriers are listed below:

• Allocating cash to support long-term goals requires prospective memory. Remembering to take a specific action at some point in the future — known as prospective memory — can fail to happen without reminders delivered at the right time. While 99% of SSSNP recipients report having plans for how they will spend their cash, 66% say they don’t follow through once they receive the money, with most reporting that they forgot what they intended to purchase by the time they had the cash in hand.
• Resource scarcity can make it difficult to follow through on plans. Living in poverty saps finite mental energy and cognitive bandwidth needed to make decisions, plan, and budget. As a result, SSSNP recipients may focus on immediate needs at the expense of more future-oriented behaviors that can help them reach their goals.
• Time scarcity can further zap mental bandwidth. In addition to resource scarcity, SSSNP recipients have also been facing time scarcity due to ongoing inflation and depreciation of the SSP in 2020. It’s a significant reason why SSSNP recipients tend to spend their cash transfer right away. Also, 79% of recipients report spending all the cash in a week, with most citing depreciation as the reason. While inflation is a structural problem, it also leads to time scarcity, which also depletes the critical mental bandwidth needed to make and adjust plans during emergencies.
• Living in poverty can trigger identities that limit what recipients believe they can achieve. While cash transfers have been shown to preserve dignity and improve well-being and self-esteem, behavioral science research suggests that participation in a safety net program may trigger a recipient’s identity of “being poor,” which in turn can unintentionally prompt them to behave in ways counterproductive to their own best interests. Many SSSNP recipients believe the stereotype that those living in poverty can’t save or invest: 75% of SSSNP recipients report that people in their community don’t save or make investments “because they are poor.”

With these behavioral barriers identified, the next step for this work is to design nuanced solutions to help SSSNP recipients put their money towards their future goals. Our hope is that by sharing the insights captured from this work so far, other cash transfer programs can find ways to adapt and adopt behavioral approaches to their unique contexts to improve lives of those living in extreme poverty.

The post How Do You Plan for the Future When the Value of Money Has a Time Limit? Initial Insights from Cash Transfers in South Sudan appeared first on ideas42.

Every day, working with a wide range of partners around the world, we use behavioral science to address complex social problems. And each year, we take a moment to reflect on this work, what we’ve learned, and how to build on this knowledge going forward. 

As 2021 draws to a close, here are five takeaways from our work this year.

Design is (still) crucial for truly improving access to relief programs.

High levels of fines and fees imposed by traffic courts are a major strain on low-income drivers. California recently instituted a new online system, MyCitations,  allowing drivers to request a reduced fine without having to go to court. This can provide relief to people experiencing financial hardship, but use of the system was initially low. 

It’s certainly not the first time a useful  program or service has gone significantly underused. Fortunately, finding and addressing barriers that suppress uptake is a classic application for behavioral design. We uncovered a number of behavioral barriers and redesigned key communications materials to help more people learn about the MyCitations system, complete an application, and resolve their fines. 

Some of these materials have already been implemented systemwide, and others we’ll evaluate in 2022. At scale across California, the MyCitations system would serve over half a million people each year who receive traffic violations, and even more across all infraction types—underscoring the impact of systems design on real people’s lives. 

Empowering participants as peer advocates can encourage program uptake.

An unplanned pregnancy during adolescence can dramatically impact a girl’s health and economic future, yet use of modern family planning services among adolescents remains low in many places around the world. Research has repeatedly shown that across many contexts, girls often don’t perceive themselves to have agency in matters concerning sex, family planning, and their reproductive futures. With this in mind, we sought to develop solutions which would put more adolescent girls in the role of advocates for family planning within their peer groups.

In Uganda, we created a refer-a-friend program and innovative materials for clinics. The monthly number of adolescent clients increased on average by 45% (5.4 more per clinic, on average). This suggests that nearly 2,000 adolescents became new family planning users as a result of the intervention during the six months of implementation.

These novel designs  were created with girls’ agency in mind–centering them as both active participants in and recipients of the program. Findings were published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, and we are exploring ways to expand their reach through other family planning service providers.

Making entrepreneurship more inclusive takes care—and it’s well worth it.

In 2021 we were thrilled to welcome our first cohort of entrepreneurs to our Venture Studio as part of a broader initiative to tackle inequality and mobility in the United States called Shared Prosperity Catalyst. Our team has been supporting these talented problem-solvers as they build scalable businesses to address excess costs of poverty. We look forward to sharing more about their innovative solutions in 2022. 

In the meantime, we reflected on the insights from our entrepreneur recruitment process, which we carefully designed to ensure that we were fostering inclusion in every aspect of the process, starting with the application itself . These insights—including designing for scarcity, bolstering transparency, and building in several features to combat individual unconscious biases—can be put to work by any organization seeking to revamp recruitment processes with an eye toward reducing bias and recruiting for lived experience. The process built on our report that proposed more equitable workplace norms, laid out  evidence-based solutions, and suggested new behavioral strategies to close the wage gap.

As we recruit more entrepreneurs to solve complex challenges in the coming months, we aim to continue building on these practices.

Equipping practitioners with the behavioral design approach can take proven interventions to new contexts.

We’ve spent the last decade working with dozens of postsecondary partners to develop behavioral solutions that help students get to and through college. We’ve developed effective interventions, but sending our experts to one or two schools at a time limits the number of students we can reach. 

This year we took the next step to grow our impact and the adoption of proven behavioral insights to help millions of college students across the U.S. with the launch of the Student Success Academy. Through these trainings, we aim to equip the people who know their students and their schools best with tools to develop contextually relevant, behaviorally informed programs, systems, and processes. 

In the first few months of this initiative, nearly 200 people from 40+ different colleges, universities, and non-profits participated in the program—and we look forward to working with even more to make the behavioral approach a ubiquitous feature of innovation in higher education. 

To truly tackle inequality, we must first change the narrative.

False narratives about poverty are deeply ingrained in our societies. They have extensive impact on policies and programs. Narratives about poverty are often at the heart of  the failures that plague even well-meaning programs, such as application processes full of hassles that place an administrative burden on prospective participants, the imposition of sludge such as work requirements, and stigma that can suppress participation and access in the first place. 

Program and policy design based on harmful narratives is destined to fail the very people they are meant to serve. That’s why we launched new initiatives to better understand and then fundamentally change narratives in several large U.S. cities such as New York City, Oakland, and Washington, D.C. This work explores ways to shift poverty narratives at a local level through targeted campaigns leveraging behavioral science research, and crucially, the lived expertise of people in the communities we are seeking to serve.

With a deep understanding of cognitive biases, coupled with our expertise in designing solutions for contexts of chronic scarcity and the partnership of local communities, we can shift harmful, false poverty narratives and create a path for programs and social policy that are more effective and generous. 

Keep reading

There’s always more to learn about applying behavioral science across the issues we focus on  to make the world more equitably healthy, wealthy, sustainable, and just. Keep reading the blog to stay up-to-date on the latest insights from behavioral science and the continuation of this work in 2022.

The post A Look Back on 2021: 5 Behavioral Science Takeaways appeared first on ideas42.

In recent decades, behavioral scientists around the world have partnered with government agencies and large institutions to enhance program impact and solve pressing societal problems. However, this body of empirical research and its practical applications have not usually been accessible to the multitude of people on the front lines of service delivery, crisis response, and community building. The ideas42 Behavioral Design Center (BDC) was established to help New York City non-profit staff identify and ameliorate behavioral barriers that emerge in service delivery and civic engagement efforts, with a particular focus on alleviating poverty. Through workshops, co-design projects, and Office Hour coaching sessions, the BDC teaches staff of community-based organizations (CBOs) how to apply behavioral approaches to reduce these barriers, increase the utilization of their services, and make good programs even more effective.

This is the final post in a three-part series about BDC Office Hours, which allow our small team to provide a diverse array of non-profit program staff and managers with practical, individualized assistance in a timely manner. The first post in this series showcased examples of enhancing communications to better capture the target audience’s attention and make programs salient to people who could benefit from them. And the second focused on overcoming obstacles to client engagement and persistence.  In this post, we’ll be taking a closer look at another of the most common themes:

• Gathering information about clients’ service needs and experiences in order to improve programs

Many non-profits are eager to learn as much as they can about their clients, current or potential, in order to maximize program participation and impact. Common strategies for gaining this insight often take the form of surveying the target audience. Surveys can be designed to inform program development or revision, or to obtain feedback on services received or programs attended. In both cases, there are many important relevant questions that service providers wish to ask, but survey completion is rarely a priority for any of us—particularly people with scarce resources and multiple competing demands on their limited time and attention. Thus, one of the first things we at the BDC encourage survey developers to consider carefully is the purpose and value of each proposed question in a client survey, and the use of design elements that make surveys easy to understand and quickly answer.

Creating a client survey to inform homelessness prevention efforts

Non-profit CAMBA’s HomeBase program provides financial, legal, education, and employment support services to people at risk of homelessness. Early in the pandemic, staff requested our advice in an Office Hour session on a survey they planned to send out to new clients to guide outreach and service delivery. They were eager for guidance on how to maximize client response and the quality of information provided. Based on their goals for the survey, we advised streamlining the survey by focusing on immediate priorities: what services people need right now, and how to contact them. We also discussed how to shorten, organize, design, and disseminate their survey to best capture attention and facilitate response.

Results:

CAMBA revised their survey and the cover email used to invite clients to answer the survey to incorporate our recommendations:

Instead of over 25 questions presented with no introductory explanation, the revised version opened with “How can we help you?”, posed five service-area questions to be answered by checking boxes to indicate service preferences, and a final “How can we reach you?” request for contact information. When the updated survey was sent to two groups of new clients, CAMBA staff reported that 82% of recipients opened the email and 40% completed the survey, including 92% of those who began it.

“The survey has served as a direct outreach tool to identify new HomeBase clients who are also interested in supplemental services in the areas of personal development, employment and financial wellness…the responses have helped us in two main ways: (1) we know which team is best suited to reach out to the specific client and most importantly, (2) the person following-up with the client uses the survey responses to tailor the conversation according to the client’s self-identified needs in each area. Staff have found this to be a more relatable way to communicate with clients about our services. The survey is also providing insight into our clients’ access to technology which helps us tailor how we provide services to each person.” – CAMBA staff member

Improving workshop materials and evaluation survey

In another Office Hour, we talked with staff from Legal Information for Families Today (LIFT) about how to improve outreach, workshop materials, and an evaluation survey for their webinars helping New Yorkers navigate the family court system. Recognizing the many demands on their clients’ bandwidth, we advised staff on how to make the workshop materials easier to use, shorten the evaluation survey, and motivate participants to complete it.

Results:

Based on our conversation, LIFT revised their workshop materials to be more concise, clearly laid out, and highlight very specific action recommendations to facilitate implementation (e.g.  show up an hour before your case is scheduled, instead of “show up early”).

“We revamped the evaluation form based on feedback from you all, and it felt like we got a lot more relevant information. … We spent a long time discussing what was the point of having an evaluation and why we wanted each piece of information. We have now applied this to other feedback forms as well…it is very reassuring to be making design decisions that are based in behavioral science.” – LIFT staff member

In a recent update, staff also reported that in reviewing a new “large-scale survey that asked for feedback on our Legal Resource Guides…I applied some of the things that I learned from ideas42. For example, I encouraged [the survey developer] to identify what question was the most important to us (the problem we are trying to solve) and put it first.”

Staff members at non-profits in New York City, can sign up here for a free BDC Office Hour to discuss how to mitigate any behavioral problems or barriers that might be affecting service delivery. The session may focus on redesigning processes (including data gathering), communications, or other features of the program environment. In addition to helping to address the specific problem identified, we will explain the relevant behavioral principles and strategies at work in the problem and solution so that the practitioner can take what they’ve learned and apply a behavioral lens on an ongoing basis. In this way, these short consultations advance the Behavioral Design Center’s guiding mission to build lasting capacity across the City’s non-profit sector, enabling critical and hardworking organizations to more effectively engage their clients and improve outcomes for the individuals and communities they serve.

Stay tuned to learn more about  the Behavioral Design Center’s ongoing work to bring behavioral insights to more non-profits in New York City.

The post Building Behavioral Science Capacity 60 Minutes at a Time: Better Client Surveys appeared first on ideas42.

The expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), which provides families with payments of $300 per child aged 0 to 5 and $250 per month for each child aged 6-17 from July to December 2021, has helped ease economic stress for many families.  A new nationally representative survey of parents earning less than $75,000 sheds additional light on the benefits of an expanded CTC for low- and moderate-income families. 

The findings from this survey demonstrate that the CTC has reduced scarcity and created much-needed slack for these families. Scarcity is the experience of not having enough of what you need—from not enough money to not enough time. In contrast, slack is the reserves we have leftover after our needs are met. Being able to save money for emergencies creates slack—something to draw upon when unexpected things happen. That monetary slack, in turn, creates cognitive slack. If you aren’t worrying about how to pay the bills, you have leftover cognitive reserves to invest in long-term planning, relationships, or other non-immediate goals. By reducing scarcity, the CTC increases slack—both of which are important for long-term well-being. 

Consistent with other research, the respondents in this survey largely plan on using the money from the CTC to pay basic expenses. The most common ways that respondents say they plan on using either the advanced monthly payments or their refund were to pay for bills, food, and groceries, help pay their rent or mortgage, towards clothing and shoes, and to pay down credit cards or debt. Reducing scarcity for low- and moderate-income families has a variety of benefits, including improved health and school performance, greater college enrollment, and increased earnings in the next generation. 

Not only does the CTC help ensure that families have the resources they need, it helps create slack. The next most common way families said they would use the refund or advance payments was saving or investing the money. Savings can help families weather financial emergencies and income volatility, something that is increasingly on the rise among households in the United States. One study found that families who had as little as $250 in savings were less likely to be forced to move because they could not afford housing payments. Even as little as $100 in savings meant families were more likely to be able to keep their utilities on. 

The benefits of the CTC extend beyond economic slack to creating other forms of slack, including reductions in stress and increased time. Nearly 70% of families who received the monthly payments said that the payments made them a lot or a little less stressed about money.  The percentage rose to 76% for low income families and 72% for Latinx families. 

Living in scarcity forces us to focus on how to get enough of what we need, sometimes to the detriment of other things. If your child breaks their leg, you will forget about cooking dinner or getting to your next meeting while you focus on dealing with the immediate needs—getting medical care. In the same way, when you don’t have enough money to pay rent at the first of the month, other, less urgent bills or goals may be ignored while you focus on keeping a roof over your family’s head. When you are freed from the worry of how to pay the rent, you have more cognitive resources available for other things. You can invest more time in longer-term goals, including caring for yourself and your family. Some respondents, for example, said that the CTC monthly payments freed up time for them to spend with their children and it improved their relationships with their spouse, friends, and family. 

At ideas42, we believe that good policy must be based on sound research and designed to meet the needs of the people the policy is supposed to serve. Drawing on our own research and reviews of the academic literature, we identified three behaviorally informed principles for designing policies and systems for people experiencing scarcity. Well-designed programs should cut the costs to participate, increase slack, and empower participants. 

The CTC does all three of these things. Most families were automatically enrolled, reducing the costs to participate. The CTC doesn’t place restrictions on how the funds can be used—empowering people to make decisions that are best for their families. And, as the current survey shows, the CTC creates slack for low and moderate income families. 

The expanded CTC is set to expire at the end of the year. If Congress doesn’t take action, families will lose this valuable resource. In order to protect the gains we have already seen, Congress must extend the expanded CTC, make full refundability permanent and eventually, make all of these improvements permanent. 

The post The Child Tax Credit Reduces Scarcity and Creates Needed Slack for Low- and Moderate-Income Families appeared first on ideas42.

Vaccines are one of the most powerful and cost-effective public health interventions in the history of medicine. Each year, vaccines save millions of lives and billions of dollars in indirect costs. Yet in the U.S. alone, about 42,000 adults and 300 children die of vaccine-preventable diseases (not including COVID-19) each year. And underserved populations, such as families who are underrepresented minorities and those experiencing poverty, are more likely to have lower rates of childhood vaccination – worsening already significant health disparities. 

So many illnesses and deaths could be avoided if more children were vaccinated for routine diseases in a timely manner. Yet vaccine hesitancy is a persistent problem; in 2019, the World Health Organization named it as one of the ten most important threats to health globally.

The COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated hesitancy regarding routine childhood vaccinations. Between March and May 2020, when most places were under stay-at-home orders, administration of routine childhood vaccinations in the U.S. was significantly lower than the same time period in 2018 and 2019, by as much as 71.3% in some cases. Vaccination rates bounced back later in 2020, once stay-at-home orders had been lifted, but not enough to make up for all the missed doses. Additionally, COVID-19 has sparked new conversations, concerns, and opportunities for misinformation to spread about vaccines. 

Vaccine hesitancy is ripe for behavioral intervention. Over the past several years, ideas42 has examined this problem and explored ways to increase uptake and timeliness of childhood vaccines. We’ve done deep dives into the academic literature and existing field research, as well as conducted research of our own through a combination of surveys and interviews with parents, providers, and other stakeholders. Through this work, we’ve identified cross-cutting behavioral barriers keeping people from taking up vaccines, as well as promising solutions. 

For more on how we identify behavioral barriers, see this blog post.

What are some common behavioral barriers to on-time childhood vaccination in the United States?

• Parents are not actively presented with the decision to vaccinate. If a parent isn’t offered the choice to vaccinate or not vaccinate their children, they’re unlikely to consider it. Yet, in many cases, parents don’t experience this moment of choice, for a myriad of reasons. For example, parents may not regularly take their children to the pediatrician, the doctor may not bring it up, or they may not have friends who vaccinate/openly discuss vaccinating their children.
• Context and framing matter. If vaccination comes up, it’s important that the person who raises the decision is a trusted and reliable source of information, such as a pediatrician families have a good relationship with, a leader in their community, or a fellow parent who has vaccinated their children.
• Many parents – particularly in communities of color – harbor justified mistrust of doctors and the healthcare system. In these cases, parents are more likely to seek advice from unreliable sources, such as anti-vaxxers and unverified internet sources, where they are more susceptible to misinformation. This leads them to conclude vaccines are not right for their children.
• The perceived downsides of vaccination are more salient to parents than the perceived benefits. The pros of vaccinating one’s child – for example, immunity from rare diseases, many of which have been largely eradicated (due to vaccination) and protecting other children who cannot be vaccinated – are less salient and compelling than the cons. Stories about terrible side effects, even if false, can be scary and stick in parents’ minds more strongly than the theoretical benefits. Stories like these also cause parents to overestimate the likelihood that side effects will occur, since they tend to be vivid and easy to remember. And, of course, shots and needles are unpleasant, and no parent wants to see their kid cry. This immediate, uncomfortable experience is much easier to imagine, and therefore the downside is perceived as higher than the unknown risk of the child developing an unfamiliar disease sometime later.  
• Parents overestimate how common vaccine hesitancy is. People, like all humans, follow social norms – that is, do what others do – but norms aren’t always clear. Vaccination is a private, “invisible” behavior, so most parents don’t know how common it is and assume vaccination rates are lower than they actually are. Since vaccine hesitancy is more commonly discussed than vaccination itself, parents may perceive not getting their children vaccinated to be more common and widespread than it is.
• Hassle factors play a significant role. Vaccination schedules can be confusing. Scheduling and getting to appointments can be time consuming and frustrating. Some vaccines require multiple trips to the pediatrician’s office. For parents who are already strapped for time and attention due to juggling multiple responsibilities, these hassles can make it hard to get their children vaccinated, even if they intend to.

So how do we get people to vaccinate their kids?

The problem of vaccine hesitancy and delayed or missed childhood vaccinations is seemingly intractable, and there’s no silver bullet for addressing it. Many adept problem-solvers have been tackling vaccination rates for years, and yet the problem persists. Applying a behavioral science lens sheds light on barriers that may be overlooked, and can contribute innovative solutions.   

The behaviorally informed recommendations below can help increase vaccination rates [1]. They are not targeted to any one specific implementing body; they require action from many groups, across sectors, such as obstetricians, pediatricians, pharmaceutical companies, and community groups, to name a few. A multi-pronged approach is necessary to move the needle on such a difficult behavioral problem. We have categorized the suggestions below by target audience able to implement them, though some of them could certainly be adapted to work well for a variety of actors. Some of these appear in more than one category, but we’ve duplicated them to provide full slates of recommendations by audience. 

Physicians (specifically, OBGYNs, pediatricians, and family practitioners):

• Offer vaccines early and often. If parents aren’t offered the choice, they can’t make one. Use multiple channels (i.e., prenatal and pediatrician visits, social media posts, flyers at bus stations and benefits offices) so parents are exposed to the topic and credible information in several ways.
• Make the benefits of vaccination salient and concrete. Parents are more open to discussing vaccination during high-profile outbreaks. We happen to be in the midst of a high-profile outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease. Leverage conversations about COVID-19 and other outbreaks to illustrate to parents how powerful vaccines can be at preventing illness and protecting their children.
• Work with communities to build trust. Work with trusted community leaders to offer services that are appropriate and desired by historically underserved communities. Listen to their concerns without judgment. Research and practice cultural competence. None of these things will happen overnight, but this work is needed to improve trust and help people become more comfortable seeking the care they need (including vaccinations).
• Make it easy. Offer vaccination clinics in places where families frequently spend time, such as at schools, places of worship, or grocery stores. Simplify vaccination scheduling and administration processes, such as by offering walk-in vaccine appointments and introducing easy online scheduling. Produce easy-to-follow infographics or calendars to help parents keep track of which vaccines are recommended and when.

Vaccine manufacturers:

• Communicate norms and make vaccination “visible.” Show parents the numbers to demonstrate that they would actually be in the minority if they chose not to vaccinate their children. Parents who get their children vaccinated on time should also be exemplified as champions. Encourage them to share about their decisions via social media, collateral such as buttons and bumper stickers, yard signs, and more.
• Work with communities to build trust. Work with trusted community leaders to offer services that are appropriate and desired by historically underserved communities. Listen to their concerns without judgment. Research and practice cultural competence. None of these things will happen overnight, but this work is needed to improve trust and help people become more comfortable seeking the care they need (including vaccinations).

Community groups:

• Make it easy. Offer vaccination clinics in places where families frequently spend time, such as at schools, places of worship, or grocery stores. Simplify vaccination scheduling and administration processes, such as by offering walk-in vaccine appointments and introducing easy online scheduling. Produce easy-to-follow infographics or calendars to help parents keep track of which vaccines are recommended and when.
• Communicate norms and make vaccination “visible.” Show parents the numbers to demonstrate that they would actually be in the minority if they chose not to vaccinate their children. Parents who get their children vaccinated on time should also be exemplified as champions. Encourage them to share about their decisions via social media, collateral such as buttons and bumper stickers, yard signs, and more.

Some of these strategies may seem like no-brainers, yet many of them have not been widely implemented. This may be because they require cross-sector partnerships, shifts in the way care has traditionally been delivered, and unique, creative ways of interacting with patients and communities. However, we believe that these investments, which specifically address the behavioral barriers we’ve identified, can go a long way in addressing the longstanding problems of vaccine hesitancy, delay, and avoidance. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased both the urgency of this problem and created a unique moment of action. Let’s take this opportunity, when vaccines are being discussed more than ever, to tackle pediatric vaccine avoidance–because our children deserve bright futures free of vaccine-preventable diseases. 

[1] Although behavioral barriers are very context- and community-specific, we have identified several that are common and pervasive. We strongly encourage practitioners aiming to increase vaccinations to work with communities to confirm these barriers and identify others.

The post Giving Childhood Vaccinations a Boost appeared first on ideas42.

Which “Friends” character are you? Which Hogwarts house do you belong to? These are examples of fun, short quizzes that people sometimes can’t help but take. Why? We like to reveal something new and unique about ourselves.

How about: What type of giver are you?

Since 2015, our team has been researching donor behavior and designing and testing behavioral solutions that bridge the gap between good intentions and impactful actions. We’re sharing some of the designs we developed in our most recent work and the insights we learned from testing them. Up next: Charity of the Month, which leverages the allure of online quizzes to help people navigate giving decisions.

(I’m a Monica / Ravenclaw / Busy Idealist with an interest in food security, in case you were wondering).

Bringing discovery to the donor

Through our research, we uncovered a number of behavioral barriers to making choices that align with values and charitable giving goals that donors face, including limited attention, choice overload, and a number of small hassles. Because of these challenges, donors may end up giving spontaneously or reactively, rather than taking active steps to align giving thoughtfully with their values, goals, and interests. Rather than reflecting on what causes and types of organizations they are most interested in supporting and proactively adjusting their donations accordingly, donors have a natural tendency to wait for giving opportunities to come to them. We’ve also learned from previous field experiments with giving platforms that offering curated lists of charities can support givers’ goals of being more generous. We hypothesized that taking curation a step further by encouraging donors to think about their donor identity, and then providing personalized, curated charity recommendations and automated donations, we would be able to increase donor engagement, satisfaction, and generosity even more.

Charity of the Month aims to capture donors’ attention, personalize their choices, and then remove the hassles from the giving process by emailing monthly donation opportunities based on their provided preferences and giving goals. First, new users take a quiz to discover their donor identity, answering questions about which causes are most important to them, and which organizational characteristics they feel strongly about (such as grassroots organizations, long-established groups, or organizations that prioritize publishing impact data). Examples of the identity results include education champion or a hometown causes supporter. Users are then asked to select a goal for a monthly donation amount. Their quiz results and preferences are used to create one to three curated donation opportunities emailed monthly. Each month, donors have the option to donate their monthly goal amount to the recommended organization.

Charity of the Month leverages three behavioral strategies to encourage thoughtful giving:

What we learned: Personalization can grab attention and drive satisfaction

We’ve tested Charity of the Month with two different giving platforms, several online surveys, and A/B tests to gauge desirability of the tool and user preferences for different features.

Highlighting personalization helped the tool capture more donor attention, a key challenge to thoughtful giving. A test of this tool in collaboration with 1% for the Planet revealed that framing Facebook ads for Charity of the Month as “personalized” increased the click through rate from the ad to the quiz by 11% (From 1.12% to 1.25%), compared to an ad that did not mention personalization.

Moreover, the quiz kept users engaged. Everyone who started the quiz completed it. The tool was also seen as a source of valuable information. In an online study, we found that participants were more likely to be interested in Charity of the Month if they felt the quiz results accurately reflected their identity. Study participants shared feedback such as, “I loved that [the quiz] matched me with charities I would be interested in” and said the tool is an “interesting way to match me with charities I might care about.” This feedback suggests that users are genuinely interested in the personalized results of the quiz and how they translate to giving recommendations they can act on.

We also found that this tool can increase donors’ satisfaction with their donations and provide opportunities for discovery that they otherwise would not have had. In a survey of users who participated in Charity of the Month on another online giving platform, 61%^[1] said they donated to a charity that was new to them because of their enrollment in the program, and 94% of those who donated^[2] said they felt extremely satisfied with the donations they made through the program.

Using these insights in future testing of this tool

We have seen some promising evidence that the Charity of the Month tool can capture donor attention and increase donor satisfaction, as well as discovery of new charities. There are still additional features of this tool to test to further increase donor engagement, satisfaction, and generosity:

• Sustaining donor attention: Does adding goal-setting, plan-making, and additional actions to the tool to create sustained behavior change?
• Understanding preferences for opt-in vs. opt-out: In an A/B test, users did not show a difference in preference for a subscription model where they had to actively donate every month (“opt-in” model) vs. a model where they were automatically subscribed and needed to take action in order to not make a donation (“opt-out” model). We have only tested opt-in models thus far and would like to explore this feature further to see if it affects donation behavior.
• Building a stronger, automated recommendation engine: Our testing relied on static recommendation lists manually created by our team. Testing this model at scale would require a robust database of non-profit organizations and automated recommendations.
• Understanding whether this tool has long-term effects on giving behavior: So far, we have run two short pilots (one to two months) with giving platforms and haven’t had the opportunity to more deeply explore whether they change giving behavior in the long term. Providing these recommendations for a longer period could help us understand whether donors continue to give to the new charities they are introduced to, and try out other ways to sustain their attention.

Deciding where and when to give can be overwhelming.  A personalized Charity of the Month subscription and quiz could increase charitable donations and donor satisfaction. In particular, we’re optimistic about the value of personalization to capture and sustain donor engagement and generosity, and we look forward to future opportunities to apply these learnings to other giving tools. Making giving tools more behaviorally informed can help donors follow through on their generous intentions and equip more organizations with much-needed funds.

^[1] N=29

^[2] N=15

The post “What Type of Giver Are You?” Personal Donation Suggestions to Fuel Giving appeared first on ideas42.

In a 1962 episode of the classic television show Candid Camera called “Face the Rear,” a group of actors enters an elevator one at a time. Rather than turning around to face the doors, they remain facing the back. The unsuspecting rider and subject of the “prank” who was originally on the elevator now faces a choice: Follow normal conventions and continue to face the door or follow the other passengers and turn towards the back. Their discomfort is apparent. One man looks at his watch, giving him an excuse to slowly pivot towards the back. Another, younger man follows the lead of the actors. They turn to face the side wall and he turns with them.  

This—and many of the other Candid Camera pranks—were informed by a key insight of social psychology—that situations exert a powerful influence that makes us act in surprising, yet predictable ways. Change the situation and you can change behavior.  Almost 60 years, and thousands of research articles and books later, behavioral scientists have carefully refined and added contours to these insights. We have a better understanding of how context shapes behavior and how biases affect our decisions. 

Despite these advances, our policy debates too often focus on changing individual behavior rather than the context in which we all live and work. Governments invest in programs to tell people to lose weight, exercise, and eat nutritious meals while failing to address the lack of green space and affordable, healthy food options that would make following those guidelines possible. Policy makers require people to complete onerous paperwork and take pointless classes in order to receive benefits while ignoring the barriers that can make it impossible to earn a living wage. We admonish people for not saving for emergencies while putting limits on how much they can save before losing benefits like housing and child care subsidies. 

At ideas42, we have been at the forefront of using behavioral science to design real world solutions to create social impact for over a decade. The ideas42 Policy Lab was created to magnify our impact at scale by using insights from behavioral science to design policies that change the context and account for how people actually behave. Initially created as a core part of our broader anti-poverty initiative, Shared Prosperity Catalyst, we will support the development of proven behavioral science-informed policies at the federal, state, and local level, focusing on policies and regulatory changes that will improve economic opportunity for people living in poverty. 

Our Policy Lab is built with the recognition that we cannot truly achieve shared prosperity unless we change the systems that have created inequality in the United States. That is, after all, at the heart of behavioral science—systems produce the context which produces our outcomes. We have to change the system to change the context. Until we do that, we will continue to get the same outcomes, reproducing inequality rather than addressing it. 

Our work has already begun. So far, we have applied insights from our own work in Economic Justice to make behaviorally informed policy recommendations. 

• Expanded Child Tax Credit: We have advocated for an expanded Child Tax Credit that meets families’ needs. We know that families struggling to make ends meet need programs that cut the costs to participate, create slack, and empower program participants. A fully-refundable, monthly Child Tax Credit that automatically enrolls as many people as possible, includes outreach to those who are not automatically enrolled, and does not impose any unnecessary restrictions meets those requirements. Because we know from our research on benefits programs with work requirements that the additional administrative burdens of proving exemption status are often significant barriers that prove impossible to overcome, we explicitly opposed the addition of work requirements to the Child Tax Credit. Adding a work requirement to the CTC could exclude millions of children, including children living with grandparents who no longer work, children of people paid low wages, children of student parents, children of parents with disabilities, or children who have disabilities and require care that makes it impossible for their parents to work. 
• Public Charge Rule: Building on our research on how the announcement of the 2019 “public charge” rule by the Trump Administration spread fear among immigrant communities and reduced enrollment in Medicaid, we joined the Protecting Immigrant Freedom coalition in advocating for the implementation of a new rule that would ameliorate these harmful effects. Under current immigration law, immigrants who are considered likely to become “primarily dependent on the government for subsistence” can be denied entry into the United States or denied the ability to become lawful permanent residents. The law, which has been in place for over 100 years, has roots in racist and xenophobic beliefs about who should and should not become a U.S. citizen. While ideas42 believes the Public Charge Rule should be repealed, as long as it remains law, the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that it is applied without bias or discriminatory effects and that it is not used to create fear among immigrant communities, including those who are not subject to the rule.  

In the future, our Policy Lab will work to expand access to savings for people with low incomes. A variety of barriers exist making it difficult for people with low incomes to save, even when they have extra cash. These range from limits on the assets people can have and still be eligible to receive crucial benefits to the accessibility of activities such as opening savings accounts. We will engage with those directly impacted, as well as leading advocates to design policies that better address the needs of people with low incomes and give them a fairer shot at a more secure financial life.

With our new Policy Lab, we hope to bring behavioral science to the forefront of public policy. For us, shared prosperity is not just a phrase, it is the goal to which we aspire. By creating policies designed to address the realities of the contexts in which people live, we aim to create a more just and equitable society, one in which we all benefit from economic opportunity. 

To learn more about our Policy Lab, reach out to kgarcia@ideas42.org. 

The post Context Matters: Designing Policies for Shared Prosperity with ideas42 Policy Lab appeared first on ideas42.

In recent decades, behavioral scientists around the world have partnered with government agencies and large institutions to enhance program impact and solve pressing societal problems. However, this body of empirical research and its practical applications have not usually been accessible to the multitude of people on the front lines of service delivery, crisis response, and community building. The ideas42 Behavioral Design Center was established to help New York City non-profit staff identify and ameliorate behavioral barriers that emerge in service delivery and civic engagement efforts, with a particular focus on alleviating poverty. Through workshops, co-design projects, and Office Hour coaching sessions, the BDC teaches staff of community-based organizations (CBOs) how to apply behavioral approaches to reduce these barriers, increase the utilization of their services, and make good programs even more effective.

This is the second in about BDC Office Hours, which allow our small team to provide a diverse array of non-profit program staff and managers with practical, individualized assistance in a timely manner. The first post in this series showcased examples of enhancing communications to better capture the target audience’s attention and make programs salient to people who could benefit from them. In this post, we’ll be taking a closer look at another of the most common themes:

• Overcoming obstacles to client engagement and persistence

Many of our Office Hour clients and project partners struggle with participant drop-off—people register for a program, attend some sessions or read some online materials, but then fail to respond to important program emails or texts, stop coming regularly, or don’t take advantage of online or community resources that would help them attain their goals.

Making Student Intake Agreement More Effective

For example, the Goddard Riverside Options Center, which supports New York City students in applying to and completing college, requested BDC help in revising the intake agreement that high school students fill out before beginning the college counseling program. In discussing what problem(s) were motivating the revision, we learned that students were not consistently reading and responding to program emails.  These emails often contain time-sensitive information and requests related to the college application process. Therefore, our recommendations focused on how to make the agreement more engaging to the student reader, and more effective in encouraging consistent attention to program emails and ongoing communication between students and staff.

Agreement before (left) and after (right)

Results:

Based on our advice, the Options Center made significant changes, transforming the form from a text-dense page of eight legal-sounding agreements covering points from the initial phase of the program through the college years, to three short items. The new items, illustrated with icons, focus on facilitating communication between students and counselors, including language about how it benefits the student. To emphasize the collaborative nature of the relationship, the Options Center changed the title of the form from “Student Agreement” to “Communication Plan,” and removed “I will” student commitment statements.  Counselors’ names and contact information are now prominently featured to make it easy for students to reach out to them.

Since making these revisions, program staff reported, “I can say that the conversation about communication and commitment seems much more genuine, inviting and holistic. In the past if felt sort of authoritative or instructional and now it feels much more like a conversation and a true agreement.”

Increasing Engagement with Online Workforce Development Materials

In another Office Hour, Upwardly Global, which provides job search training and resources to help professional immigrants, refugees, and asylees rebuild their careers in the U.S., requested advice on how to increase participation in its online training modules. Program staff were looking for strategies to increase engagement throughout the onboarding and training process, as well as guidance on optimal survey methods for getting course evaluation feedback. We offered suggestions on how to make it easier to select modules by making the presentation of multiple offerings less overwhelming, make the videos more appealing by featuring images of people like the target audience, and highlight users’ progress as they complete learning modules. To increase survey completion, we advised Upwardly Global to shorten it, and add information about the expected time the survey would take, as well as a progress bar.

Results:

A few weeks after our conversation, Upwardly Global staff shared via email, “We found the office hours session extremely valuable and timely for several ongoing projects at various stages of implementation! We have been actively preparing for the implementation our new Learning Management System. Based on our BDC office hours conversation, we have been applying the advice on 1) reducing intention-action gaps and 2)… adding a clear visual progress tracker that shows completed steps and next steps to these emails…we continue to explore options for how to effectively present our learning content in the new environment, keeping in mind the principle of paradox of choice and referring back to considerations for choice architecture. In developing the survey [for collecting course feedback], we considered much of the advice supplied from BDC, including narrowing down the number of questions and …explaining the value of sharing feedback.”

In addition to helping these and other clients address the specific problems presented to us during the Office Hour, we use the time to explain behavioral principles and strategies that can be applied to a variety of communications and operational challenges. Our short consultations help advance the BDC’s overarching mission to build lasting capacity across the City’s non-profit sector, enabling valued organizations to more effectively engage clients and improve outcomes for the individuals and communities they serve.

The next post in this series will showcase Office Hour consultations focused on helping programs learn about clients’ experiences in order to improve programs and service delivery. Stay tuned!  

The post Building Behavioral Science Capacity 60 Minutes at a Time: Enhancing Participant Engagement appeared first on ideas42.

If you don’t own coal stocks or invest in pipeline companies, you may not think of yourself as a fossil fuel funder. But U.S. banks are the biggest lenders and underwriters of fossil fuel projects globally, meaning the money in your checking and savings accounts could indeed be funding projects like deep-water drilling, pipeline expansion, and tar sands oil extraction. 

The good news for those concerned about such realities is that alternatives exist. A growing number of financial institutions have pledged to avoid funding fossil fuel infrastructure, now and in the future. Concerned consumers can switch to ‘climate-friendly’ institutions in order to better align their financial decisions with their environmental values. Moving money into climate-friendly institutions reduces the capital available for financing fossil fuel companies, and signals to the financial sector more broadly that a sustainable future matters to many customers. 

But few consumers—even those who care deeply about the climate—have made the switch to a “sustainable” deposit account. In 2019, we identified several behavioral barriers contributing to this. Unsurprisingly for those familiar with behavioral science, we found significant last-mile barriers as motivated consumers who wanted a new bank still struggled to follow through on that intention. 

But the challenges were bigger than intention-action gaps. For example, we found that many people had misperceptions about banking in general and what sustainable banking meant, and they underestimated the collective impact of taking action. Switching to a climate-friendly bank wasn’t even on the table for most folks.

Main behavioral barriers that prevent well-intentioned consumers from switching to sustainable bank accounts (ideas42, Bank on What You Believe).

First: what is a sustainable bank?

Organizations and advocates  often attempt to get others to take action on an issue with education or awareness campaigns. It’s a classic error. Evidence shows that more information alone doesn’t usually lead to action, and often individuals already have the understanding they need. But in this case, we did see evidence of an awareness (or recognition) problem standing in the way of behavior change: in our initial research, interviewees thought sustainable banks were the ones that offered paperless statements, and saw choosing where to bank as a value-neutral decision. Even among activists, many large banks had been labeled “bad,” but there was little guidance about what banks were “good.”

So we partnered with Purpose, Fernandez Advisors, Presente.org, Sol Nation, and Grow Brooklyn to launch Bank for Good, a consumer-facing effort to inform people about the existence of banks near them that would be suitable options for switching to sustainable deposit accounts. 

The coalition designed Bank for Good with racial, economic, and environmental justice as core parts of its effort. Communities of color have experienced historic discrimination from financial institutions and disproportionate impacts from climate change and polluting facilities. Because we were working at the intersection of finance and climate, this approach was critical. For example, Bank for Good’s messaging and brand identity emphasized the connection between racial and climate injustice, and the bank filtering tool included the ability to search for Black-owned or -led institutions.

The resulting campaign and website, bankforgood.org, leverages behavioral insights, as well as proven marketing and organizing principles, to make it clear to consumers what sustainable banking is, why it matters, and how to make the switch.

Bank for Good: raising awareness and creating tools to make switching banks easier

Like many campaigns, Bank for Good aims to raise awareness through a strong brand identity and marketing on social media and news outlets. Purpose developed and tested seven research-driven message strategies that addressed recognition barriers by focusing on why sustainable banking matters. Testing showed that messages about social justice and increased community power drew the most engagement, compared to messages that focused on other aspects of climate action and impacts. While this might seem counterintuitive, other research has found similar outcomes — talking about the climate crisis directly is rarely the most effective way to prompt action.

Bank for Good also, crucially, provides its audience with clear guidance on better banking options. Paid media and partner messaging directed individuals to bankforgood.org, where design features aim to reduce the hassles of finding and opening an account with a climate-friendly financial institution. Users can easily search financial institutions pledging not to fund fossil fuel projects, and filter to find one that matches their specific needs (e.g. physical location and account features), and values (e.g. Black-owned or -led, Community Development Financial Institutions, and/or B-Corp institutions). We also offer a simple text message reminder signup to help coach people through the arduous switching process.

More is needed to overcome hassles of making the switch

In the end, despite high levels of engagement with the marketing campaign, the number of new accounts actually opened was limited, and few visitors signed up for the reminder tool. We did see more action among users who saw ads more than once, suggesting people may need more time and repeated exposures to act. 

This isn’t a surprise — while the campaign did help raise awareness, we know that the last-mile problem of converting intention into action is critical. Good intentions are not enough for consumers to follow through on opening a new deposit account; urgency is lacking. Most significantly, the real-life hassles associated with making the switch to a new bank account remain high. 

Our website and reminder tool are not enough to overcome these challenges. Solutions that directly reduce these barriers should be a priority; for example, policy changes can help increase the portability of consumer financial data, and make it easier to close one account and open another. 

Sustainable banking and behavioral science going forward

Bank for Good will continue to look for and prioritize opportunities to drive highly activated audiences, seeking to align their financial decisions with their values, to bankforgood.org. For example, the Bank for Good financial institution search tool has been embedded into the Stop the Money Pipeline website, so the coalition can help their members more quickly and easily find an account aligned with their needs and values. We aim to work with a wider range of partners to increase use of the tool at a broader scale. Importantly, we will also  test additional behavioral innovations to address the lingering intention-action gap for consumers interested in switching to sustainable deposit accounts. 

To learn more about this work, check out our insights presentation and recording. If you would like to be part of Bank for Good’s next phase, would like to embed our search tool on your website, or are interested in more of the specific insights gained from the campaign, please reach out to the team at sustainablebanking@ideas42.org.

The post Bank for Good: The Behavioral Insights Behind a Campaign to Align Financial Decisions with Environmental Values appeared first on ideas42.

The first monthly payments of the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), enacted as part of the American Rescue Plan, lifted 3 million children out of poverty. Rather than receiving the child tax credit in a lump sum as part of their tax refund, families received the credit through monthly deposits into their accounts or by check. Unlike the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, there are no complicated bureaucracies or unnecessary and demeaning enrollment requirements. These no-strings-attached payments ensure that families with children have money when they need it and trusts them to use the funds to best support themselves. The child tax credits are also fully refundable, meaning families will still receive the credit even if they don’t earn enough money to owe taxes. This is critical to helping keep all families out of poverty. Unfortunately, unless Congress takes action soon, families will lose this important tool, potentially plunging millions of children back into poverty. As of now, the expanded CTC will expire at the end of 2021.  

For the CTC to continue to be effective, it must be designed to meet the needs of those who are struggling the most. Utilizing our own research and reviews of the academic literature, ideas42 identified key principles for designing programs for families experiencing economic hardship. Families that are struggling to make ends meet need programs that cut the costs to participate, create slack, and empower program participants. The House Ways and Means Committee recently approved a portion of the Build Back Better Act that would expand the CTC through 2025. This proposed expansion follows the principles necessary to ensure that families experiencing poverty will benefit from the CTC. The provisions work in tandem and Congress must not weaken them. 

Easy Enrollment Cuts the Cost to Participate

Families in poverty do not just experience financial insecurity; they also face additional burdens on their finances, time, and cognition that those with more resources do not.  People living in poverty might have to spend extra money to cash a check without a bank account, spend extra time to buy food without a car, or use unreliable public transportation to get to work. Because of these additional burdens, even seemingly small hurdles can be insurmountable. Cutting the costs to participate in programs, as the CTC does, is particularly important for people who have the fewest resources. 

The Build Back Better Act would ensure that those who need it the most receive the benefit by cutting costs and making enrollment easier. This includes: 

• Continuing to use and expand upon automatic enrollment. Under the proposal, the IRS will be permitted to use not only information from tax filers, but also information from other government programs to automatically enroll children. In 2021, 729,000 children from families with the lowest incomes were automatically enrolled. However, the families of 4 million or more children—those whose families were not connected to the tax system—were not automatically enrolled*. Reaching all children is critical, and giving the IRS the tools to expand the automatic enrollment will help do that.
• Ensuring that there is an easy-to-use online portal. Through this site, families can sign up for the monthly CTC or make updates when their family circumstances change, such as the birth or adoption of a child or a change in marital status.
• Establishing presumptive eligibility by creating a period of time where caregivers who properly claim the credit when a child enters their care and is expected to remain in their care for at least a few months will be eligible to receive the credit and not be required to pay back any funds if it is later determined that they were not eligible for the credit.
• Creating a grace period for new caregivers to receive retroactive benefits if they did not enroll as soon as they became eligible.
  
• Increasing funding for outreach so that all families know about the CTC and have the support they need to sign up for it if they are not already enrolled. 

The CTC Creates Slack When Families Need It

By definition, people in poverty lack slack, or excess of a resource like money or time. Anyone might face an unexpected medical bill, but people in poverty lack slack to pay this bill and others on time. Creating slack for those living in poverty improves their ability to absorb shocks and support their families how they best see fit. 

To create slack, the Build Back Better Act:

• Maintains the credit increases until 2025. Increased cash creates slack to prevent families from falling further behind. This will lift an estimated 166,000 children out of poverty. The CTC reduced severe food insecurity among eligible families by approximately 30%. Experience from other programs that get money in the hands of the families improves infant and maternal health, child educational outcomes, and future earnings. Importantly, families are trusted to spend the credit how they see fit, which is good for them and the economy: this is estimated to boost consumer spending by $27 billion, generate $1.9 billion in revenues, and support over 500,000 jobs.
• Continues monthly payments. The monthly payments create predictability that allows families to plan ahead and ensures funds are available when recurring bills, like housing, food, and childcare, are due. The less money a family makes, the more valuable both the money and its predictability are to a family. Large lump sum payments are less helpful; for example, a benefit in December isn’t helpful if an unexpected bill is due by October. Monthly payments help families absorb shocks through the year to avoid and reduce debt. Fully, 43% of families report using their credit to pay off debt.
• Protects families, who through no fault of their own, receive more money than they were eligible, from having to repay the money. 

The CTC Empowers Families and Respects That They are Experts in their Own Lives

The House Ways and Means proposal better empowers low-income families by reframing harmful poverty narratives and promoting equity, particularly for families with the lowest incomes, families of color, and immigrant families. Too many anti-poverty programs embed paternalistic work requirements, drug testing, or invasive questioning. The CTC does not—and should not—include these practices, which perpetuate harmful poverty narratives. 

Instead, the proposal includes provisions that undermine harmful narratives and empower marginalized groups. These provisions:

• Keep the credit permanently refundable. A refundable credit means that families who do not file taxes, or enough taxes, can still receive the benefit, lifting an estimated 2.2 million children out of poverty. This also undermines narratives that families must reach an income threshold to “earn” the benefit. To the contrary, families with the lowest incomes were most likely to use the credit to buy necessities like food or rent.
• Increase access for families of color. Socioeconomic inequity is inextricably connected to racial inequity. To undermine harmful poverty narratives, we must close racial gaps. The expanded CTC cuts poverty rates in half for Black children. It also reduces food insecurity rates by 3.8% among Black households with kids and 5.6% for Latinx households. The current proposal continues to close racial gaps and promote equity.
• Remove requirements that excluded immigrant families. The proposal expands acceptable documentation so that previously excluded immigrant families, an estimated 1 million children, can access the benefit. This targets harmful narratives and affirms that all families, regardless of immigration status, deserve access to the benefit.

Conclusion

The temporary 2021 CTC expansion is an effective anti-poverty policy with immense social and economic benefits. The Build Back Better Act leverages behavioral science to help families even more: it cuts costs to participate and increases access, creates slack to improve the CTC’s effectiveness, and reframes harmful narratives and empowers families to promote equity. All of these pieces are necessary for the CTC to address poverty. Congress must pass this legislation and not permit any changes that would weaken it.

*Cox, C., Caines, R., Sherman, A., & Rosenbaum D.  (August 2021) State and Local Child Tax Credit Outreach Needed to Help Lift Hardest-to-Reach Children Out of Poverty. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The post Meeting Families’ Needs: The Child Tax Credit Cuts the Costs to Participate, Creates Slack, and Empowers Families appeared first on ideas42.

Think about your charitable giving over the past year or so. Did you donate to a friend’s cause? Did you volunteer your time? Did you support a friend, family member, acquaintance, or stranger in need? Looking back on it now, does your giving reflect who you are and what you care about? 

These are probably hard questions to answer. You may give to many different organizations or causes over the course of the year—some planned donations, others spontaneous. You may have donated to causes that you’ve been supporting for years, and others linked to a specific event or experience that touched you. Your record of donations may be scattered: in emailed receipts, a self-maintained spreadsheet, notations in a checkbook, or perhaps a dashboard for a donor-advised fund or workplace giving platform. 

Without a clear and comprehensive view of your past giving activity, it can be hard to take stock of the important causes you’ve contributed to and see how well your giving reflects your goals and values. And lacking a “big picture” view can make it even harder to plan or adjust your giving going forward to follow through on generous intentions. Many people don’t give as much or as intentionally as they’d like. We’re seeking to unlock donor generosity. 

Since 2015, with the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, our team has  been researching donor behavior and designing and testing behavioral solutions that bridge the gap between good intentions and impactful actions. Over the next six weeks, we’ll share some of the designs we developed during our most recent phase of work and the insights we learned from testing them. Up first: The Personal Giving Review.

Providing a holistic view of giving

Many donors never get the opportunity to take a step back and view the picture of their giving in its entirety. Looking at this challenge through a behavioral science lens, we hypothesized that providing people with timely and actionable feedback about their giving could paint a clearer picture and ultimately help them give more generously and intentionally. This idea was supported by online surveys, where we heard from donors that they generally don’t track their giving and would value even simple feedback about it.   

We developed a concept called the Personal Giving Review—a tailored, behaviorally-designed compilation of a donor’s past giving. It includes several features to help donors reflect on their past giving and align their future giving with their goals and values, presenting giving behavior as a reflection of their philanthropic identity. It also provides prompts for donors to think about how they want to continue to give, give more thoughtfully, and how to act on these intentions. The design is flexible, customizable to include the elements that resonate most with different donor audiences, and the information can be delivered by email or through an online platform’s account dashboard.

The Personal Giving Review leverages three behavioral strategies to encourage thoughtful giving:

What we learned

We’ve tested variations of the Personal Giving Review with multiple giving platforms. An early version of the concept increased the rate at which donor advised fund (DAF) account holders contributed to their DAFs by almost 12%; it also increased the rate at which a key subset of donors (those with higher levels of contributions into their accounts than grants out of their accounts) granted out funds by almost 8%. 

In further testing, we found that elements like badges that celebrate specific donation activity such as recurring donations or support for internationally focused charities can capture donors’ attention and interest. However, we saw that it is unlikely that learning about the badges in a single email is enough to motivate donors to pursue earning badges through their giving behavior. Instead, additional reminders through subsequent (perhaps quarterly or biannual) emails will keep the idea of earning badges more salient to donors. We also recommend providing easy ways for donors to take immediate action to donate or schedule donations after receiving the Review.

How can we use these insights to fine-tune holistic donor feedback and encourage thoughtful giving?

We’re building these insights into new iterations of the Personal Giving Review: 

• Choose a delivery channel that will support engagement. For instance, placing the Review on a dashboard can be a great strategy if donors regularly engage with their accounts that way; it’s likely to be less effective if dashboards go unused or if there is no prompt to check them.
• Consider ways to adapt the features for a specific donor population. Sending the Review to newer donors could guide their giving behaviors before they’ve developed habits related to a particular platform. The badges and benchmarking on the Review could be customized to specific cause areas (such as giving to environmental organizations) or other donor interests (like how their giving compares to others in their city or state).
• Test options to promote sustained giving. Depending on the platform, the Review could suggest action steps, like making a plan for giving over the coming year, to prompt further engagement with the platform and sustained giving.  

Because the Personal Giving Review is a flexible tool, there are many opportunities to incorporate new features that resonate with different audiences and integrate with different giving platforms. We hope that other giving platforms adopt and adapt this tool to provide a holistic view of users’ giving in a way that meets the needs of the platform and its users, and in turn, unlocks even more generosity.

The post Can a Personalized Overview of Past Giving Make Us More Generous? appeared first on ideas42.

This fall, for the first time in over a year, many colleges and universities invited students back to campus. The opportunity to return to campus offered some semblance of a more traditional college experience, and importantly, helped address the disproportionate burden that campus closures placed on low-income, first-generation, and international students, among others. However, significant challenges to student success—both old and new—remain.

To help students overcome these barriers on their path to graduation, it’s essential that higher education professionals are prepared to help students—particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds—succeed on their academic journeys. At ideas42, we’ve spent the last decade working with dozens of postsecondary partners to develop behavioral solutions that help students get to and through college. We’ve developed effective interventions, but sending our experts to one or two schools at a time limits the number of students we can reach. Now, we’re taking the next step to grow our impact and the adoption of proven behavioral insights to help millions of college students across the U.S. with the launch of the Student Success Academy.

The Student Success Academy equips college and university administrators with practical tools to independently incorporate behavioral science into student success work. We’re taking our expertise, born from years of rigorous research and replication, and putting it in the hands of those best positioned to positively impact the lives of millions of college students across the country. 

Case Study: Using Behavioral Science for Student Success

It’s 2021, and Veet recently entered his second year at the University of Maximegalon. After a long first year that featured countless Zoom classes, minimal social support, spotty internet, and younger siblings also learning from home, Veet anxiously returned to Maximegalon’s campus this fall. 

While some aspects of campus life were exciting, like getting to meet other students in his dorm and joining a club, the new year presented its own challenges. Upon arriving on campus, Veet struggled to feel like he belonged. He was unsure how to navigate all the in-person resources and failed to take early advantage of academic services like tutoring. And he was overwhelmed by the mental and emotional challenges of navigating in-person college during an ongoing pandemic.

Fortunately, administrators at Maximegalon were equipped with the knowledge and skills to quickly spot and address these challenges. They were able to design solutions to support students like Veet that reflected the realities of Veet’s unique context and challenges as a student in 2021. Solutions such as:

• Recruiting teachers to give students personalized referrals to the tutoring center before grades become a barrier to persistence.
• Highlighting stories of how common it is for students to struggle in college—and how much those students benefited by asking for help; and
• Sending clear reminders for key financial aid deadlines, helping students to maximize their aid eligibility.

These interventions were effective because they directly targeted the barriers that Veet and other students were facing. But how did Maximegalon gain this insight so quickly? That’s the power of our Student Success Academy: putting behavioral science tools and insights directly into the hands of college administrators who know their students best.

By now, you probably realized that Veet isn’t a real student, and Maximegalon isn’t a real institution. But the solutions above are real examples of how we’ve used behavioral science to support students through our work with real colleges and universities. Now, rather than working with one school at a time to develop bespoke behavioral interventions for them, we’re using the Student Success Academy to teach higher education professionals across the country to use an evidence-based behavioral design process to develop effective solutions on their own.

By providing college administrators with tools to explore and address the unique challenges that their students are facing, we believe we can help even more students obtain quality post-secondary degrees or credentials that improve their economic well-being. 

The Student Success Academy launched our first session on September 21, 2021, with over 40 higher ed professionals from nearly 30 different organizations around the country. The five-installment masterclass is the first of what will be many opportunities for professionals to learn more about how to use behavioral science to help their own students. We’ve increased access to similar programming—including customized trainings and small group intensive coaching—and we look forward to sharing takeaways from our first masterclass later this fall. 

We know that behavioral science on its own can’t solve all of the challenges that students face. Yet, many systemic reforms often fail to account for invisible barriers related to human behavior. Behavioral tools and insights can contribute to any conversation about supporting students, from the smallest nudge to the largest policy change. We’re confident that everyone can learn and apply insights from behavioral science, and we look forward to partnering with colleges and universities around the country to exponentially increase the number of people who can use these tools to support students using these methods. 

Interested in learning more about our Student Success Academy? Reach out to us at education@ideas42.org or sign up to receive future updates. You can also tweet us at @ideas42 to join the conversation.

The post Introducing the Student Success Academy: Developing Behavioral Design Capacity in Higher Education appeared first on ideas42.

In recent decades, behavioral scientists around the world have partnered with government agencies and large institutions to enhance program impact and solve pressing societal problems. However, this body of empirical research and its practical applications have not usually been accessible to the multitude of people on the front lines of service delivery, crisis response, and community building. The ideas42 Behavioral Design Center (BDC) was established to help New York City non-profit staff identify and ameliorate behavioral barriers that emerge in service delivery and civic engagement efforts, with a particular focus on alleviating poverty. Through workshops, co-design projects, and Office Hour coaching sessions, the BDC teaches staff of community-based organizations (CBOs) how to apply behavioral approaches to reduce these barriers, increase the utilization of their services, and make good programs even more effective.

Office Hours are a particularly efficacious approach as they allow our small team at the Behavioral Design Center to provide a diverse array of non-profit program staff and managers with timely, practical, individualized assistance in a relatively short time. These one-hour sessions also provide a low-stakes channel for non-profits to approach our team—much like the open-door periods in academia they’re named for. While the problems brought to our Office Hours vary based on the service field and program context, several common themes have emerged in the three years we’ve held them. We’ll be taking a close look at a few of them over a series of pieces examining the Behavioral Design Center’s approach, beginning here with one of the most common themes:

• Capturing attention and facilitating responsive actions to communications

We are asked quite often for assistance with communications in order to increase the number of people who read, respond, or take a desired action— from clicking to learn more, providing information or signing up for a program, to voting or volunteering.

Making Online Communications More Engaging

For example, last year the Long Term Care Community Coalition (LTCCC), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving quality of care, quality of life, and dignity for elderly and disabled people in nursing homes, assisted living, and other residential settings, sought our advice on how to make its website easier to navigate and its communications more engaging for older adults and their family members. During the Office Hour we discussed strategies to simplify online content and make it easier to find relevant information and take action. We encouraged staff to:

• Start by determining what information their target audience is looking for and the actions they want or need to take, and organize everything on the website around those actions

• Collect data regarding what emails and website content are most appealing through user testing, A/B testing, and analysis of click and open rates to guide ongoing revisions and new outreach

Results: In the months following our conversation, LTCCC:

• Redesigned and reorganized its website to create a more user-friendly experience, including reducing menu options; revising or adding distinct content pages; adding images for social media sharing, and improving mobile and tablet compatibility.
• Incorporated recommended design elements in emails to highlight key information and increase visual appeal and ease of engagement
• Did A/B testing of alternative versions

Nearly a year after the Office Hour, LTCCC’s Communications Director reported that “LTCCC has since made tremendous progress on our website (nursinghome411.org), email campaigns, webinars, and more. Your advice (simplifying the website, email subjects, etc.) has been invaluable….we’re seeing significant returns on web traffic (doubled!), social media engagement, email clicks, etc.”

Encouraging the Desired Response

In another Office Hour, RIP Medical Debt, a non-profit supported by anonymous donors who pay off medical debt for those in need, asked for help improving the letter they send out to inform beneficiaries that their debt had been repaid. In discussing the desired outcomes of the letter, we learned that there were two. First was convincing recipients of the debt relief that the program was not a scam, and second was collecting personal stories from recipients for use in ongoing outreach to publicize the crisis of medical debt, de-stigmatize it, and encourage potential donors to help provide more relief for more people. The original letter RIP showed us focused on the first objective, and only mentioned the request to “share your personal experience” in passing near the end. The request was framed in terms of expressing thanks rather than an explicit ask to support the mission and ability of RIP to help more people.

During the Office Hour session, we offered a number of recommendations to strengthen the letter and better engage readers, including ways to reduce stigma, make the text easier to read and digest, and motivate action by highlighting the value of the stories, and perhaps offering a gift card incentive.

Results: Based on BDC recommendations, RIP first revised its original letter and then created a separate letter focused solely on requesting stories to send out after the initial notification of debt relief. Both versions:

• Highlight the rationale for requesting personal information—how “Your story can make a difference”—and the action steps needed to respond.
• Shorten and lay out the text in a more engaging format, using more open spacing and bolding and bullets for key information
• Make it easy to act by providing a direct link to a website story form, QR code, and email reply options

The first version also provided the incentive we suggested of being entered in a gift card raffle to people who share their stories.

“Since making the changes to our abolishment notices earlier this year, RIP Medical Debt has significantly increased our beneficiary response rates. We only received closer to three letters every month when using our previous letters and would receive only a handful of virtual responses every week.

We now have approximately 20-30 messages coming in every day through our various virtual portals and 10-16 letters coming through the mail every two weeks. Many of the new relief recipients who reach out to us are interested in speaking further about their experiences.”

By teaching Office Hour clients how to apply behavioral approaches to their program context, we have helped them address the specific challenges they brought to us. In addition, this work is an integral part of advancing the BDC’s overarching missing to build lasting capacity across the City’s non-profit sector.  Thus, we have been pleased to learn that a number of these clients and other CBO staff we’ve worked with are now applying a behavioral lens and design strategies on an ongoing basis to illuminate behavioral barriers, improve existing operations, and design new programs, procedures, and communications.

In upcoming posts, we’ll showcase Office Hour consultations focused on helping programs learn about clients’ experiences in order to improve service delivery; and overcoming obstacles to client engagement.

The post Building Behavioral Science Capacity 60 Minutes at a Time: Improving Communications appeared first on ideas42.