This year, we mark one decade of an overlooked occasion with outsized impact: Giving Tuesday. During this season, we come together to donate to causes we care about, an altruistic extension of the previous days of indulgence in the United States and a socially conscious way to use any bonus cash we’ve accrued. In 2021, about 35 million Americans donated on Giving Tuesday alone, amounting to over $2.7 billion in collective donations, jump-starting a generous period through December.

At ideas42, we believe in the power of behavioral science to make it easier for people to achieve their charitable giving goals. On Giving Tuesday, many people feel excited about the call to give, but taking action can still feel challenging. In our work with donors, we’ve found that actual giving behavior is not always aligned with the giver’s own values. Instead of giving strategically to causes we care about, for instance, we often donate spur-of-the-moment when a direct solicitation moves us. Yet relying on reactionary donating can bias our decision-making away from deserving and effective charities.

So how can you give intentionally and make the most of your donations? Here are four considerations rooted in behavioral science to help you be more generous and impactful this giving season.

1. How much can I spend?

   Good news! You probably have more to spend on donations than you think. As a first step, take a few minutes to think about how much of your budget you can set aside for charitable giving. Planning your budget will ensure you maximize your charitable donations while preventing you from spending more than you intend to.

   Try putting your giving budget in tangible terms—ordering takeout once a week, going to the movies twice a month, or taking a cab instead of public transportation a few times a year. This will help you steer clear of mental shortcuts that limit your desire to give.

2. What causes matter to me?

   Charitable giving is emotional, so it’s helpful to think about what motivates you to give. This will help strengthen your connection to your giving practice and make it more sustainable over time. Once you determine what drives you and what issues you want to focus on, search for organizations that serve those causes, communities, or geographies. To broaden your impact past the most visible causes, challenge yourself to consider organizations that you usually wouldn’t.

   You can direct your whole giving budget to a single organization, or you can distribute it across a few if that feels better to you. With thousands of options to choose from, it can be hard to choose which organizations to support. One way you might consider distributing your donations is by thinking of a range of causes: one cause in need of urgent aid such as a global crisis or natural disaster, one organization in your area that serves a community you care about, and one organization focusing on solutions that address the root causes of societal issues through advocacy and policy change.

3. How can I multiply my impact?

   Your donation is great, but why not triple it? One of the most powerful mental shortcuts we use when making a decision is to look to what people we trust are doing. Your friends and family may be feeling overwhelmed by the many causes and organizations seeking donations this season. You can help them and increase your impact on the causes you care about by letting your network know where your donations will be headed. To reduce friction that may cause people to give up on donating, make it easy for them: share a direct donation link or post your fundraiser on social media.

4. How can I have an impact throughout the year?

   So you gave your budgeted amount to your favorite causes and shared these causes with your friends and family. Nice! Now can you keep that up all year? It’s going to be harder than you think. Even if we have the best intentions of incorporating a practice of charitable giving into our lives in the new year, we get busy, and grand plans of finding a new and exciting cause to donate to each month get overshadowed by laundry, doctor’s appointments, and birthday parties.

   But you can stop giving from being crowded out by setting up a recurring donation. Setting recurring donations is a smart way to take the burden of remembering off your future self. Even small monthly donations will make a big difference in your overall giving by Giving Tuesday next year.

* * *

Once you’ve hit that last “Donate” button (and checked “Set recurring donation”), take a moment to pat yourself on the back and feel good about what you did. Giving isn’t a requirement, and it comes from the generosity you feel toward people and causes that need help. The warm glow we feel from giving can be a big motivator for continued generosity, so don’t forget to let yourself enjoy it.

The post 4 Tips for Making the Most of This Giving Season appeared first on ideas42.

While most rural pregnant women in Liberia intend to give birth in a health facility, there are many barriers that often prevent them from following through on this intention. Facility-based childbirth requires extensive preparation, from determining when and how to leave for the facility to saving for the cost of transportation and drugs and medical supplies required at the facility. This can create delays in receiving care throughout the course of a woman’s pregnancy and ultimately in arriving and receiving care at the time of delivery. 

In tackling this challenge, our Global Health team, working through the USAID-funded social and behavior change project Breakthrough ACTION, learned about the important and influential role of traditionally trained midwives (TTM), community-based health workers who support and counsel women during pregnancy and often accompany them to the facility both for prenatal care and at the time of labor and delivery. Pregnant women primarily seek advice from the TTMs during pregnancy as a trusted source of information.TTMs often the first point of care during pregnancy, and they advise women on when to leave for the facility for delivery. 

To support women in identifying the necessary logistics and developing a plan to reach the health facility at the time of labor, as well as saving the funds required to support the plan, we conducted a collaborative co-design process to develop a suite of ideas. The co-design process engaged officials from the Liberian Ministry of Health, health care providers, TTMs, and pregnant women and their families. Many of the ideas  leveraged the important relationship between women and TTMs; however, we were faced with a design challenge given the realities of the rural Liberian context:

How do we create an easy to use, engaging tool for childbirth planning and saving — which is institute and can be used by a low literacy population — and needs minimal support and training?

We decided to leverage the tradition of Liberian storytelling to create stories that could be retold by TTMs and could convey the importance of planning for facility-based delivery. Liberian storytelling is a traditional improvisational and participatory oral art form used to share important lessons, oral history, and customs. To develop compelling and memorable stories in a familiar Liberian tradition that could impart important details about how to prepare and save for facility-based delivery, the project worked with Gbahtou Comgbaye, a Philadelphia-based Liberian storyteller. 

Enjoy an excerpt from one of Gbahtou’s stories, “Red Deer, Black Deer,” and see how Gbahtou develops these stories in the video below.

To explore Gbahtou’s other stories and learn more about our other facility-based delivery designs visit our design guide.

The post The Art and Science of Planning for Facility-Based Childbirth in Liberia appeared first on ideas42.

ideas42 was founded nearly 15 years ago on the belief that many of the world’s greatest challenges, particularly those that disproportionately impact those with the least, could benefit from behavioral solutions.

Poverty, education, health, the justice system—across all of these issues and more, persistent inequalities resisted easy resolution. We’ve been at the forefront of pioneering an approach that centered insights about how people actually live and was sensitive to the contexts that shape people’s lives. Now, we’re more sure than ever that behavioral science has an irreplaceable role to play in building a more just world where everyone can thrive. 

What evidence do we have to support that? 

Our 2022 Impact Report showcases the broad range of our work and details how our approach to behavioral design is changing the world. Over the past decade, we’ve refined our work to be even more focused (and ambitious) on how we can counter global inequality.

Closing the gaps that create inequality using behavioral science is our North Star. In everything we do, we ask, How will this move us toward a more equitable world? Though ideas42’s work covers a range of issues, across all of them them our organizing principle remains the same: to remove barriers that perpetuate inequality.

What does this look like in practice? Here are just three Spotlights—representative case studies, chosen from dozens of insights—that showcase what we’ve accomplished and, most importantly, model how ideas42’s approach to behavior change can create impact across a broad range of contexts and in ever more ambitious ways. Recently, we’ve worked to:

1. End mistreatment in maternity care. In 2018, our Global Health team collaborated with birthing women, care providers, health administrators, and policymakers in Zambia to identify why women are often mistreated during childbirth. Our team then worked with the organization Safe Motherhood 360+ as part of the Breakthrough RESEARCH portfolio funded by USAID to develop four solutions that reduced abusive care, increased pain management support, and fostered greater empathy among providers.
2. Boost college students’ success. Our U.S. Education team has found time and again that seemingly minor issues—like procrastinating on an application deadline or being slow to make new friends on campus—can accumulate to push down overall graduation rates. After generating, applying, and testing dozens of behavioral insights to raise college completion rates, we’re scaling up our approach to help millions of U.S. students stay on track and earn degrees.
3. Redefine the narratives of poverty. Tens of millions of Americans live in poverty, struggling to make it from month to month, day to day. Through surveys and focus groups in six cities across the United States, we’ve worked to rigorously examine narratives behind systems that keep people in poverty and limit their ability to lead lives of their own choosing, so those narratives can then be changed. Now, our priority is to move from understanding negative poverty narratives to helping foster positive ones. From our perspective, this is the next frontier in behavioral science. 

We haven’t accomplished these successes (or taken steps in our ever-more ambitious ongoing efforts) alone. We are grateful to our partners, funders, collaborators, and the growing behavioral science community for working with us to fulfill our mission. Because you share a vision for a future where inequality is a thing of the past, we’re optimistic about what’s to come. 

Learn more about our work in our latest impact report or by contacting us at info@ideas42.org.

The post Using behavioral science to close the gaps that create inequality appeared first on ideas42.

The nature of work is changing, and so are the skills required to be successful. While technical or ‘hard’ skills are essential for most jobs, there is growing evidence that ‘soft skills’ such as problem-solving, teamwork, and resilience play a key role in job market success. This is especially critical in low- and even middle-income settings, where employment options can be informal, scarce, and unpredictable. 

Soft skills, sometimes referred to as transferable skills, employability skills, or non-cognitive skills, are non-technical skills and competencies that help people navigate their environment, interact positively with others, and perform well in the labor market. To date, we’ve worked on soft skills development programs that include persistence, teamwork, communication, resilience, self-efficacy, and problem-solving.

Soft skills, and even qualities typically deemed ‘personality traits’ like perseverance, are skills that can be learned. This is why many workforce development programs include ‘soft skills’ and ‘life skills’ trainings as part of their curriculum. However, as we know from behavioral science, an introduction to a skill does not often lead to a person adopting and using it—decreasing the effectiveness of these programs and increasing the obstacles job seekers face as they try to stay competitive in an unpredictable market. 

The designs of traditional workforce development programs are rife with behavioral barriers job seekers must overcome before they can adopt and use their new skills in the workforce. From the hassles associated with learning about, applying to, and, ultimately, enrolling in the program to begin with, to then attending and actively participating in it, job seekers juggling competing priorities may find themselves unsuccessful at completing every step–even if they have a clear intention. And then, completion of the training is not enough, as successfully utilizing new skills requires that the lessons are salient in the moments they need to use them.

The good news is behavioral science provides a clear—and often more cost-effective—path to designing workforce development programs that help job seekers overcome such obstacles and gain the benefits the programs were made to provide. Seemingly small changes to programs, such as adjusting program timing or reframing its benefits, can have outsize impacts on successful job seeker participation when informed by behavioral science.

Here are just a few examples of some of the common behavioral barriers job seekers face with workforce programs, and some solutions that could overcome them: 

1. Problem Structure and Timing

Soft skills cannot simply be learned from a book: learning them requires experiential, active learning approaches. Ample time for practice, feedback, and reflection are necessary for ensuring these skills are top of mind, especially for job seekers experiencing resource or time scarcity. Interactive trainings, such as personal initiative trainings, are an important alternative as they allow participants to learn by doing — bridging the “know-do” gap so that people are better equipped to apply the right skills at the right time. Programs should also include follow-up refreshers, reminders, and nudges such as prompts to think about soft skills, to maximize retention and practice.

2. Complex Curriculums 

All people have limited attention. The more their attentive capacity is stretched, the more difficult it is to process new information. Participants in workforce programs likely have numerous priorities in their day-to-day lives that compete for their attention. Adding in long and comprehensive soft skills lessons may be overloading participants with unnecessarily detailed and complex information that inadvertently hinders learning. Behavioral insights point to ways programs can make key lessons easier to learn, absorb, and apply. For example, using shorter formats delivered in channels that meet participants where they are. We’ve previously designed an effective mobile-based training that simplified financial management lessons into digestible rules-of-thumb for participants to follow. 

3. Priming Negative Identities

Programs may, intentionally or unintentionally, ‘prime’ identities that individuals hold, and subsequently reinforce false narratives or stereotypes associated with that identity, which could prevent learning and action from taking place. Priming could lead job seekers to behave in ways that are associated with negative stereotypes of that identity and limit their perceptions of what they can achieve. To combat this, behaviorally designed programs should promote positive self-identity by highlighting positive social norms and/or adjusting program components to account for different identities. For example, when we worked to support women in Liberia to start businesses, we found that women perceived they had limited opportunities in traditionally male-dominated fields. As a result, we designed posters portraying women in male-dominated fields, such as brick-making, construction and electronics shops, and included testimonials from previous female participants as advocates for the training.

Soft skills can add tremendous value to people seeking to stay competitive in a rapidly shifting job market, but workforce programs seeking to teach soft skills must be designed to support individuals throughout the process of learning, developing, and applying such skills. Behavioral science is a cost-effective solution for strengthening and scaling soft skills programs by redesigning the program around how job seekers really live, think, and behave.

At ideas42, we are actively looking for avenues to incorporate behavioral science insights to improve the impact of workforce development programs, and by extension the economic well-being and stability of the lives of people around the world. Interested in partnering with us to enhance the design of your program? Email us at livelihoods@ideas42.org.

The post Why Soft Skills Development Programs Need Behavioral Science appeared first on ideas42.

The words spoken by public government officials matter; and more often than not, such words have real-life implications for the decisions people make and the actions they do or don’t take.

For example, much attention has been paid to President Biden’s recent declaration that the pandemic is “over”. On a recent episode of the broadcast news program 60 Minutes: “We still have a problem with COVID-19. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over . . . If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” And although the president walked these statements back a few days later, the weight of those words were already felt, and the potential damage already done to current risk mitigation efforts.

While there may be nothing inherently untrue about any of these statements, their sentiment reinforces a pre-existing mental model Americans have of pandemics – in particular, regarding the behavior changes called for in the interest of public health over the last two years. In this case, the mental model of intentional risk mitigation acts such as public masking, staying up to date on vaccinations, and staying home when sick will no longer be necessary once the pandemic is over.

Declaring the pandemic over has created further division among two camps in the country. Those who agree with President Biden’s recent sentiments feel the emergency state of COVID-19 has stabilized and essentially ‘downgraded’ into an endemic disease, easily manageable like the seasonal flu (which continues to kill thousands of people each year). Those who disagree feel the pandemic is still widely unpredictable and dangerous, as evidenced by the fact that in addition to killing nearly 400 Americans from COVID-19 per day, it continues actively mutating and impacting people across the globe. Regardless of one’s position in this division, declaring the pandemic “over” has complicated the ongoing – and still necessary – public health efforts to fight COVID-19.

However the status of the pandemic is labeled, it continues to be a public health crisis in part because much of the early burden for risk mitigation was placed on individuals to change their behaviors (e.g. wear a mask, social distance, get vaccine/booster shots, etc.). It’s no surprise that as a population, we’ve grown somewhat complacent over time as the COVID-19 death toll no longer dominates our news or social media feeds. Much of this is understandable– gradually we will habituate to almost any new situation over time, even an emergency state. Moreover, the physical, social, and emotional toll of the pandemic has been difficult for many to bear and people are ready to move on. However, an authority making a declarative statement about the pandemic’s end has real-world implications for the way people perceive and respond to an ongoing crisis. Predictably, it can undermine behavioral recommendations made by public health officials to mitigate disease spread and protect its most vulnerable populations by making common-sense strategies – like wearing a mask in public when sick – seem less necessary. It also renders a government-run public health system that already suffers from lack of trustworthiness even weaker.

Beyond that, there are two key psychological principles — confirmation bias and decision fatigue — that help inform how people’s perceptions are formed, leading to behaviors that are either curbing the spread of COVID-19 or inadvertently contributing to its spread.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is the process of seeking or interpreting evidence in ways that align with existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis at hand. It explains our tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas, and dismiss information that goes against those beliefs. Initially, widespread social media misinformation and medical distrust amongst some communities had a significant impact on people’s interpretation of whether or not they should adhere to standard risk-mitigation guidelines. President Biden’s recent remarks about the pandemic being “over” merely caused people to strengthen their existing personal beliefs about basic risk mitigation behaviors–people who agreed feel justified in discontinuing those behaviors, and people who disagreed feel justified in continuing them. Confirmation bias helped entrench existing inclinations to disregard COVID-19 recommendations, at precisely a time when we need more people to increase risk mitigation behaviors.

To address confirmation bias, change the context

Our first recommendation is to reframe “COVID-19 mitigation behaviors” as “behaviors that further public health.” In particular, the group of people in the “movable middle” may have been taking certain actions (such as wearing a mask, handwashing, and covering up coughs and sneezes) because they felt temporary and limited to the context of a pandemic. This group is probably most likely to stop those behaviors once that context is removed, especially if they see those behaviors as burdensome. Now that we’ve had a statement from the president declaring the pandemic to be over, many of these people will now see that as a reason to let go of those behaviors, even though many of them are basic public health practices that are beneficial even outside of a pandemic.

One potential way to address this response to the changed context is to work on detaching public health behaviors from the specific context of the pandemic. For example, sharing messaging that reframes what was previously “COVID-19 risk mitigation behaviors” as general “public health behaviors” that are evergreen. Repeating this evergreen advice and increasing coordination between public health entities/figureheads so that their messages are clear, consistent, and do not conflict can also help counter repeated misinformation and the confusion of ever-changing public health guidance.

Relatedly, we need to acknowledge that for many people (including people who are immunocompromised, elderly, or chronically ill), COVID will remain a major risk for the foreseeable future. We cannot leave these populations behind in our efforts to create a new normal. The early days of the pandemic forced us to confront the fact that many essential services have not been equally accessible to all, and many changes were made to increase accessibility–including more flexibility for things like telehealth services, paid sick leave, and virtual participation in classes, conferences, and other events. However, many of these options have gone away over the past year, taking with them many people’s ability to meaningfully participate in society and access essential services. Rather than viewing these options as pandemic-limited, we must reframe these accommodations as evergreen and continue to push for maintained (and improved) accessibility, which will be beneficial even in a COVID-free world.

Decision Fatigue

Decision fatigue describes the act of choosing between options depleting self-control. It refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision-making. Since the onset of the pandemic, many people have been forced to make staggering pandemic priority decisions in a rapid and constantly changing environment. The pandemic has also made the process of making routine decisions seem unavoidably non-routine. Yet, following President Biden’s remarks, it seems that making mundane decisions should become easier. But at what cost or risk?

Should we attend our favorite band’s concert next summer, or would it be a safer bet to ask Alexa to shuffle their greatest hits? Should we continue to get booster shots, or run the risk of getting exposure to and passing on immune-evasive variants to vulnerable populations? These are examples of a number of decisions that add up to a state of decision fatigue, which wouldn’t ordinarily be part of our daily lives if it were not for the COVID-19 pandemic.

To address decision fatigue, increase slack

To help the group of people who might be fatigued from the past 2 ½ years of COVID-19 avoidance, we can find ways to reduce the burden on individuals to take action. This involves refocusing efforts away from only promoting the take-up of individual behaviors, spending more time on changing the behaviors of groups and organizations. For example, pushing for upgraded HVAC systems for improved ventilation can help remove some of the burden of individual masking at all times indoors.

As we shift to a new phase of the pandemic, complacency threatens to take away many of the gains we’ve made fighting COVID-19 over the last 2 ½ years and exposes us to continued and greater public health consequences in the future. It will take proven, behavioral science strategies to keep people safe. Regardless of what we believe the current status of the pandemic is, we still need the government and public health institutions to communicate clear, reliable messages that protect its residents and prepare us for the next health crisis that will inevitably arrive. This will require messaging that better frames peoples’ perceptions and does not discourage them from engaging in risk-reducing behaviors.

The post What it means to say that the COVID-19 pandemic is “over” appeared first on ideas42.

This is part of a series of conversations with members of the Niger and Burkina Faso National Innovations Teams (NITs), a group of 54 health professionals across government and non-profit sectors. 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 Burkina Faso and Niger NITs were established in 2020 by Breakthrough ACTION, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s flagship social and behavior change program.

This spotlight features Hamsatou Moumouni Moudi, head of the Communications and Public Relations Division at the Ministry of Public Health, Population and Social Affairs in Niger. During this interview, she explains how the knowledge she has received is being disseminated within the Ministry of Health, within other organizations, and as a trainer at the Institute of Public Health to a new generation of communicators.

Name: Hamsatou Moumouni Moudi
Country: Niger
Title: Communications and Public Relations Head
Organization: Ministry of Public Health, Population and Social Affairs

What motivated you to attend the training for both cycles? 

My team designs media and communication tools that promote behavior change, but we’ve often been confronted with behavioral barriers and constraints getting the community to change their behaviors. No matter how much we raised awareness, there has always been a certain reluctance. In other words, we haven’t been able to change the community’s behavior the way we intended to. We knew that something was wrong with our approach, and we wanted to understand why. We recognized the need for innovation. Breakthrough ACTION has really helped us develop innovative solutions that have the potential for impact. My motivation is to learn and adopt innovative approaches that will improve our communication strategies and results.

Is there anything that surprised you about cycle 1, cycle 2, or the refresher training?

What surprised me the most was learning about the importance of the development process—the process of engineering of materials—during the design phase. Now, I understand that outreach alone does not lead to behavior change, and that design is an integral piece to behavior change approaches. You have to go beyond believing that just because someone becomes aware of an issue, you’ve consequently convinced them that it’s an issue that impacts them and they will now decide to change their behavior in response to it—or that deciding they’d like to change their behavior means that they will follow through with it. Before, we believed people when they said they had made a decision and believed that they would act on it. We really thought that they would do it, that they couldn’t not act according to it. Now, I’ve learned that making a decision is simply not enough to change people’s actions, you have to continue to nudge them toward it.

Is there anything different in the way you now work?

Admittedly, we used to produce communication materials and then think the problem was solved. All that was left to do was to display the material. Then, once that had happened, we believed we had sufficiently raised awareness. Now that we’ve joined the National Innovation Team, we’ve learned how to do real design, which calls on a lot of other expertise in areas like psychology and sociology—aspects that help us better understand our intended audiences and stakeholders. Since then, I don’t take design lightly and I don’t rely on pretense. Instead, I carefully investigate the context, which is often not an easy thing to do. Incorporating behavior goes beyond people’s knowledge and attitudes, and allows me to create more effective designs. For a long time, we allowed ourselves to design without considering the socio-ecological context, but now we realize that every aspect of this context has its own purpose and deserves to be explored further.

Can you give an example? 

We’ve started paying much more attention to mood, physical environment, and social context. We’ve also learned how to account for chronic scarcity. We didn’t consider these things before. For example, we’d often approach organizing events around increasing visibility. We didn’t think about how there could be specific moments or new things in people’s everyday lives that could push them to take action. We learned this through the NIT training.

What has been most useful for you, and what will be most useful to you in your daily work?

Our department is at the macro level of the ministry and is attached to the General Secretariat. This means we’re in charge of coordinating all forms of communication, including responding to any government communication concerns. With the arrival of Breakthrough ACTION, we’ve created another group to coordinate social and behavior change communication specifically. For example, if the nutrition department wants to design new tools, we submit the designs to this group for validation. Now that I’ve learned that design requires much more innovation, I make sure that we use NIT-trained colleagues in the development of new designs and prototypes. We’ve stopped doing things the way they used to be done in how we approach developing communication tools. We also make sure partners understand it takes time to incorporate innovative approaches into project planning and implementation—and that good design necessitates it. I’ve also since adapted the way I teach at the National Institute of Public Health to incorporate what I’ve learned through the training and teach my students innovative approaches. The training has all had a big impact on my philosophies and approaches to my everyday work.

Do you have any other thoughts on the course? 

Soon, we’ll be revising the curriculum in our health worker training institute and are counting on Breakthrough ACTION to help us set up a pool of trainers. Through this training, they will learn how to innovate in the field and will be prepared to practice and implement innovative approaches using behavioral economics. Creating small groups that receive more training after the original workshop could be helpful so that some trainers are able to deepen their mastery of design and provide ongoing training and supervision to others on the ground.

The post Building Behavioral Design Skills: A Conversation with Breakthrough ACTION Innovator Hamsatou Moumouni Moudi appeared first on ideas42.

Rigorous impact evaluations are essential to determining program effectiveness. Yet, they are often time-intensive and costly, and may fail to provide the rapid feedback necessary for informing real-time decision-making and course corrections along the way that maximize programmatic impact. Capturing feedback that’s both quick and valuable can be a delicate balance.

In an ongoing impact evaluation we are conducting in Ghana, a country where smoking rates among adolescent girls are increasing with alarming health implications, we have been evaluating a social marketing campaign’s effectiveness at changing girls’ behavior and reducing smoking prevalence with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Although we’ve been taking a traditional approach to this impact evaluation using a year-long, in-person panel survey, we were interested in using digital feedback as a means to collect more timely data on the program’s reach and impact. To do this, we explored several rapid digital feedback approaches including social media, text message, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) surveys to determine their ability to provide quicker, more actionable insights into the girls’ awareness of, engagement with, and feelings about the campaign. 

Digital channels seemed promising given our young, urban population of interest; however, collecting feedback this way comes with considerable trade-offs. Digital feedback poses risks to both equity and quality, potentially reducing the population we’re able to reach and the value of the information we’re able to gather. The truth is that context matters, and tailored interventions are critical when collecting feedback, just as they are when designing programs. Below are three lessons to consider when adopting digital feedback mechanisms into your impact evaluation design. 

Lesson 1: A high number of mobile connections does not mean the target population has access to mobile phones. 

Despite an exceedingly high number of mobile connections in Ghana, numbers nearing 133% of the population in 2021, most urban, adolescent girls don’t have consistent mobile access. In fact, only 44% of the teenage girls we interviewed had regular access to a mobile phone, and even fewer had internet access. This gap in access was especially prevalent among younger girls, as well as girls that were not enrolled in school due to experiencing extreme poverty, living in a parentless household, or recent migration. Knowing this, mobile- and internet-based surveys would have excluded their critical perspectives from program feedback. 

Lesson 2: High literacy rates and “official” languages do not mean most people are able to read and write easily in a particular language.

English may be Ghana’s official language, but it’s not the most widely spoken language in the country. Even though Ghana’s adult literacy rates have been steadily rising, we found gaps in English literacy among urban teenage girls. Reading and writing were especially difficult for girls from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, due to barriers preventing them from accessing formal education. However, reading comprehension remained difficult for some girls enrolled in school, because the language they’re often taught to read in at school, English, differs from their primary spoken language. This made text message and IVR surveys, where participants would need to enter responses on their phones, difficult.  

Lesson 3: Gathering data on taboo topics may benefit from a personal touch. 

Reaching people through automated digital media provides an exciting way to reach more people faster than through traditional, in-person surveys. However, digital surveys limit the depth of information able to be communicated and collected, with text message surveys limited to 160 characters and IVR surveys shortened to hold the respondent’s attention. Text-based questions are also more likely to be misunderstood, with little to no opportunity to provide clarity. Finally, digital surveys don’t allow for the same level of trust to be built with a participant that in-person surveys do, which may leave sensitive groups like teenage girls less likely to respond freely about taboo topics, like smoking and intimate relationships. 

Ultimately, digital feedback mechanisms are a promising option for generating rapid feedback at scale, but there are important equity and quality trade-offs to consider before implementing them. Because of this, program evaluators must keep context top of mind, considering who the target population is, their level of access to mobile phones, and the level of sensitive or complex information needed when implementing them. For feedback that requires a wide range of perspectives, explores taboo topics, or necessitates high-level comprehension, in-person surveys or mixed-method approaches will be more effective at producing the high-quality data necessary for maximizing impact.

The post Is digital feedback useful in impact evaluations? It depends. appeared first on ideas42.

New census data adds to the growing body of evidence showing that the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) helped reduce childhood poverty. In 2021, child poverty fell to a record low of 5.2%, a 46% decline since 2021. Yet, despite this success, Congress failed to extend the CTC, leaving families without this much-needed support.  

In fact, the end of monthly CTC payments created significant hardship for many, according to a new survey* of families making under $75,000 a year (ideas42 supported this survey work as part of our commitment to understanding the benefits of the CTC). Sixty percent of families stated that it has been more difficult for them to pay their expenses since the monthly payments expired in December 2021. These families reported they had trouble:

• Affording food and groceries (66%)
• Paying bills (65%)
• Buying clothing and shoes (49%)
• Paying their rent or mortgage (40%) 

More than half of the families who earned under $25,000 reported experiencing food hardships, such as difficulty affording more or higher quality foods, or visiting food banks or food pantries. 

Unsurprisingly, parents who had received monthly payments in 2021 reported increased financial stress since the monthly payments ended. By reducing scarcity and providing no-strings-attached monthly payments, the expanded CTC created much-needed slack for families with low- and moderate incomes. It was especially important for those earning the least. Taking the payments away left many families struggling and experiencing increased levels of stress, as they had to worry more about how to pay their bills or put food on the table.

There is still time for Congress to right this wrong and extend the expanded CTC. In recent days, there has been a renewed push from Democratic Congressmembers and the Biden Administration. The CTC is a behaviorally informed policy with plenty of evidence demonstrating that it reduced child poverty. Americans across the political spectrum overwhelmingly support the CTC. Congress must not let 2022 end without extending the CTC.

*The Center for Law and Social Policy collaborated with IPSOS to conduct these surveys, in partnership with University of California, Berkeley, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, the Children’s Defense Fund, ideas42, the National Women’s Law Center, Prosperity Now, UnidosUS, and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

The post Policy Lab: Ending the Child Tax Credit Has Already Caused Hardships appeared first on ideas42.

America’s staggering economic inequality, particularly impacting people of color, and the
the financial instability of most individuals and families in the United States, show that our society is not on a sustainable path to prosperity. Historically, many philanthropists, NGOs, financial institutions, and other industries working to support economic mobility have approached financial health from a purely financial perspective, generating specific products, tools, or financial education aimed at helping people with lower incomes save, reduce debt, achieve home ownership, or manage money. But the fact is, for a person experiencing poverty, it’s nearly impossible to think about savings or planning for the future when they don’t know if they’ll have enough to eat this month.

To truly make an impact, we have to examine the larger context in which people make their
financial decisions, as well as address the systemic and structural barriers that prevent shared prosperity and have contributed to and amplified the racial wealth gap.

Of course, it matters whether a person is able to weather emergency expenses, afford to buy a house, build credit, or save for retirement. But equally important is what kind of neighborhood they live in, where they can send their kids to school, and if they have a reliable job with predictable hours that provides a living wage and affordable healthcare.

Traditional approaches to financial health have failed to account for the environmental, health, and social circumstances that impact a person’s overall wellbeing. That’s like clearing a street of litter each day without considering how to prevent litter from being dropped in the first place.

A deeper understanding of human behavior, and how people make decisions and take action in the real world based on their environment or context, can shed light on innovative ways to
address the myriad of factors that contribute to poverty both in the immediate- and long-term.

Reduce the excess cost of poverty

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the complex and deeply rooted inequities and structural
issues that have made it all the more challenging for people with lower incomes to escape the
cycle of poverty. The fact is: there are many excess costs faced by people with low
incomes making it more expensive to be poor in America.

Here are just a few examples. Across the U.S., those with less pay more in total for the same
quality of housing, yet they have access to lower-performing schools. Living in poverty means less access to healthcare and worse health outcomes. And basic financial services cost
significantly more for the 50 million people who are unbanked or underbanked in the U.S. than for others. While the unbanked population has declined in recent years, it’s important to note that unbanked rates for Black, Latino, Native American, and Alaska Native households remain substantially higher than for white households.

New, scalable technologies and tools that help reduce the many excess costs, be they financial, psychological, or time-bound, faced by people with lower incomes is one strategy for meaningfully improving financial mobility and overall well-being.

Nobody understands the excess costs of poverty like people who have directly experienced them. If we want effective solutions, those with lived experience must be directly involved in designing them. Yet they are often excluded from the problem-solving process. It’s critical that the development of new tools be driven by people from a wide diversity of backgrounds who have personally experienced the multiple decisions and challenges of living with lower incomes.

Craft evidence-based policy

Addressing systemic problems also requires changing public policies that have made financial inclusion and wealth building challenging, particularly for Black, Latino, and other historically marginalized communities. Public policy sets the rules of the road: it forms much of the context people must navigate, and it creates economic subsidies and incentives.

Policy decisions contribute to systemic racism and inequality, and continue to fuel inequality by giving the vast majority of economic subsidies for asset and wealth building to the wealthiest. In 2019, more than half of the $645 billion spent by the federal government on asset and wealth building went to the top 5% of income earners, while families with low incomes received very little.

More than half of the coronavirus emergency funds for small businesses went to just 5 percent of recipients, with about 600 mostly larger companies, including national chains receiving the maximum amount of $10 million dollars. In contrast, only 25% of funds were distributed in amounts of $150,000 or less.

If using billions of federal dollars to enable upper-income households to further build assets and wealth is desirable, then helping lower-income households build assets and wealth should be too. And the fact is, a more even distribution of wealth would benefit the economy and all Americans.

Let’s put it another way. According to the Brookings Institute, if Black and Latino Americans
held a proportional share of wealth, it would amount to $12.68 trillion in household wealth,
rather than the actual sum of $2.54 trillion, underscoring the economic potential of closing the racial wealth gap.

Evidence-based policy would help achieve this, but is often not widely supported due to
harmful false narratives about poverty.

Change false narratives of poverty

Why is there such resistance to public policy that supports everyone? False narratives about
poverty contribute to the wide discrepancies in who benefits from government spending. In the U.S., perspectives on poverty are deeply influenced by ideals of the “American Dream”: those who work hard prosper and become successful. As such, it is often wrongly believed that anyone struggling financially must not be working hard enough or are personally at fault in some way. This fuels a harmful narrative of the “undeserving poor” in our society that impedes the will to make broad policy changes.

In reality, living in poverty and trying to navigate a way out is incredibly challenging, and it’s
even harder if you are a Black American. Shifting the narrative from the people in poverty to
the context of poverty underscores that circumstances are often outside of most people’s
control. In order to create public will for policy solutions that can meaningfully tackle poverty for everyone, we need messaging and tools for changing deeply embedded, false cultural narratives about the causes and impact of poverty in the U.S.

Only by going beyond traditional financial solutions and taking steps to systematically tackle the complex drivers of poverty in three parallel efforts—reducing excess costs of poverty with
technological tools, relying on evidence to create policy that helps lift people out of poverty,
and changing harmful narratives about poverty—will the U.S. make meaningful progress on
reducing inequality and increasing economic mobility and prosperity for all.

Josh Wright (Executive Director, ideas42) and Bonnie Wallace (Head of Financial Health
Philanthropy, Wells Fargo) work together to create Shared Prosperity Catalyst, a multi-year initiative to bring financial health and prosperity to all in the United States.

The post Prosperity for All Starts with Making It Less Expensive to Be Poor In America appeared first on ideas42.

Last Tuesday, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022—a major piece of legislation that will address the climate change crisis, reduce health care costs, and make our tax system fairer. While these are important measures that will help many families in the United States, the bill falls short of what is needed to help those with the fewest resources. Notably, the bill did not include the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC)—which successfully reduced monthly child poverty by 30% when it was in effect.

Enacted as part of the American Rescue Plan, the expanded CTC provided monthly payments from July to December 2021 to families with children. The CTC benefit was increased from $2000 per child to $3,600 per child aged 5 and under and $3,000 per child aged 6-17. The American Rescue Plan also closed a hole that had kept one-third of children and half of all Black and Hispanic children from receiving the CTC because their families earned too little to be eligible.

Families who received the CTC used the money to pay for necessities, such as food, rent, and clothing. Families reported increased well-being, reduced stress, and more time to spend with their families. Yet, politicians allowed the expanded CTC to expire in 2022 and have, once again, failed to extend it. In many ways, this is not surprising.

Much of what made the expanded Child Tax Credit successful—automatic, no-strings-attached payments that disproportionately benefited Black and Latino people and those with the fewest resources—left it vulnerable.

As a nation, we mythologize the rugged individual who is able to succeed by perseverance alone. Handouts, too many believe, make people weak.  

At behavioral science non-profit ideas42, we’ve found that people hold a host of narratives about poverty—stories we have gained from the media, our schools, our families, and our communities—about why people are poor. People are more likely than not to believe incorrectly that there is a lot of fraud among people who receive public assistance and they are roughly split on whether public assistance programs “make people lazy.” Although these beliefs are demonstrably false, they nevertheless continue to hold sway, particularly when it comes to policymaking. Programs that benefit people living in scarcity and people of color have a hard time garnering support. And people often want to add unnecessary hurdles that make the process of getting these benefits even harder.

Senator Manchin, who had outsized power in deciding what was included in the Inflation Reduction Act, tends to hold fast to these false narratives. Manchin refused to support the expanded Child Tax Credit, telling CNN last year, “There’s no work requirements whatsoever. There’s no education requirements whatsoever for better skill sets. Don‘t you think if we’re going to help the children that the people should make some effort?” Despite all evidence to the contrary, he also claimed that parents would use the CTC to buy drugs. Senator Manchin is not alone among politicians to adhere to these false ideas. Politicians from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to Donald Trump have expressed similar attitudes to justify policymaking and make it hard to access benefits. 

As long as politicians let these false narratives about poverty drive their policy decisions, they will continue to make the lives of people living in scarcity harder.

The Child Tax Credit reduced child poverty, increased labor force participation, and would be a net gain for the economy. Yet, despite the evidence, Senator Manchin and others refused to extend it. They let their biases and beliefs about poverty get in the way of good policy making, creating barriers to economic security for people with low incomes. American families should not be held hostage by false poverty narratives. Congress can still extend the CTC and keep more families from being pushed into poverty. 

Kelli Garcia is the Policy Lab Director at ideas42, a nonprofit that applies insights from behavioral science to address complex social problems.

The post Poverty Narratives Killed the Child Tax Credit appeared first on ideas42.

We are now over 900 days into the global pandemic that is COVID-19. Meanwhile, there has been hope for many with the introduction of vaccines and boosters; reintegration into society via hybrid working arrangements; and the resumption of sporting events, concerts, and international travel. A semblance of normal life has returned for most, yet we’re still left questioning what’s to come, what to do next, and what to believe. 

In light of the American public’s reaction to the original pandemic response, health experts in the United States (and globally) are beginning to explore new approaches to address current and future major health crises. This post aims to reflect on the U.S. Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) newly announced Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA), in addition to sharing several suggestions informed by behavioral science, focused on better communication strategies for future disease outbreaks. 

The CDC officially launched the Center for Forecasting and Outbreaks Analytics (CFA) in April 2022. The overall goal of the CFA will be to “enable timely and effective decision-making to improve outbreak response using data, modeling, and analytics.” The new center will be led by experts in information and data analytics, disease modeling, and communication specialists. Their responsibilities include sharing access to and use of data for public health decision makers on the front lines of mitigating high-risk health concerns.

Amidst the many challenges (and several success stories) Americans experienced following their government’s original pandemic response, one thing is certain: the shortcomings were compounded by a lack of public data, which led to many health experts and government officials making moves without clear information or guidelines.

Having data collection processes at the onset of COVID-19 was important for a number of reasons. It could have helped people understand the impending impact of COVID-19 more clearly, and also inform a more appropriate response to the planning and allocation of resources for those in need. Even so, it’s evident the U.S. bungled the initial response around combating misinformation about how the disease is spread, social distancing, mask wearing mandates, coronavirus testing and contact tracing, and eventual vaccine hesitancy and booster uptake. 

The fact that initial decisions were made without previously established public health data collection systems likely accelerated the rate of disease spread and preventable deaths. However, now that we have collected, monitored and evaluated data over the past two and a half years, we have evidence that large pandemics are more likely than we may have previously considered. Thus, it’s important to recognize that public health decision making and messaging will be further strengthened by the support of data that is detailed and generated in real time for emerging disease outbreaks. 

This global health crisis has required large-scale behavior change, which means messaging around health recommendations needs to be nuanced. Effective communication is essential to the success of monitoring and evaluation during and after the implementation of any program. Insights from behavioral science can be used, with the support of public health experts, to help inform strategies around delivery of particular recommendations that will require changes in human behavior.

Communication competency refers to the effective expression of ideas using oral, written, visual, and non-verbal communication methods, as well as the listening skills to gain deeper understanding and recalibrate communication as needed. As previously mentioned, having the right data and information isn’t enough to get people to act (or change their actions). Practicing communication competency requires differentiating between various forms of communication behavior that is appropriate and effective for a given situation. Thus, effective communication provides added value in areas of demonstrating understanding, preventing conflict or confusion, improving engagement, and solving difficult problems.

The following are several behaviorally informed approaches, that take all of the above into account, for consideration when developing new messaging strategies in response to future public health crises.

Key Recommendation 1: Authenticity

Authenticity and transparency go hand-in-hand when it comes to communication competency. Perceptions of authenticity can affect the way we form judgments or how we might make decisions around certain actions and behaviors. Although there are many dimensions to authenticity – in this context, the way a message is perceived as authentic or inauthentic comes down to whether it is delivered in ways that resonate with and matter to the audience. If the messenger, whether a leader, media source, or public health agency, comes across as genuine, the audience is more likely to trust the message.  

Authenticity: When developing authentic communication and messaging, we suggest utilizing the 4C view of authenticity (consistency, conformity, connection, and continuity). Examples of the 4C view of authenticy in application at the individual level are included in the link for reference.

Key Recommendation 2: Transparency

Transparency, on the other hand, refers to a messenger’s capacity to share important information with all stakeholders so they can make timely and informed decisions. However, no matter how hard we try to be accurate and authentic with content and delivery of our messages, we may encounter challenges due to the spread of misinformation. Countering misinformation and potential data errors with transparency fosters opportunities for rebuilding the public’s trust and confidence after trust has been breached.

Transparency: As opposed to being hesitant about communicating difficult concepts or strategies with the general public, we suggest that healthcare experts be clear about the uncertainties while acknowledging that scientific advice is subject to change with emerging evidence. 

Key Recommendation 3: Empathy

Lastly, having an empathetic approach has profound implications for understanding the unique realities of lived experiences, motivators and/or stressors of populations from a diverse array of cultures and other identities during difficult times like a global pandemic. Empathy is the complex capability of individuals to understand and feel the emotional states of others, resulting in compassionate behavior. Empathy requires cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and moral capacities to understand and respond to the suffering of others. Thus, demonstrating empathy and trustworthiness in  communication has potential to yield behavioral outcomes favorable to all regardless of race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or national origin. Moreover, we must be aware of and make sincere attempts to simultaneously lead with humanity and empathy while leaning on the data and measurable statistics when designing and iterating on future communication strategies touching on serious  healthcare topics that impact humans worldwide. 

Empathy: In the process of communicating difficult challenges or positive successes, communicating with empathy means prioritizing people and their well-being, while also making decisions that are in the public’s best interest. Additional examples of expressing empathetic communication include: actively listening, acknowledging people’s doubts and fears, offering flexibility for varying perspectives, seeking out opportunities to learn and grow, and lastly, choosing the appropriate medium to disseminate information. 

While the United States’ dismal pandemic response has made it clear that new systems and approaches to combat future health crises will be necessary in order to repeat such a devastating outcome, we are optimistic that shifts toward applying such behaviorally informed recommendations as these will yield better results when developing messaging for future public health emergencies. 

Interested in learning more about implementing a behaviorally informed communications strategy in your public health work? Email us at ushealth@ideas42.org.

The post Better Messaging About Future Public Health Emergencies Using Behavioral Science appeared first on ideas42.

This is part of a series of conversations with members of the Niger and Burkina Faso National Innovations Teams (NITs), a group of 54 health professionals across government and non-profit sectors. 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 Burkina Faso and Niger NITs were established in 2020 by Breakthrough ACTION, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s flagship social and behavior change program.

This spotlight features Bouraima Gnanou, who is part of a group working to increase the rate of antenatal care (ANC) visits in rural communities in Burkina Faso. In this interview, Bouraima discusses the effects of this training on his daily work as a communicator and Technical Advisor in the Department of Communication at the Ministry of Health (MOH) Burkina Faso. 

Name: Bouraima Gnanou
Country: Burkina Faso
Title: Technical Advisor, Science and Technique of Information and Communication
Organization: Department of Communication, Ministry of Health Burkina Faso

How  did  you  learn  about  the  Burkina  Faso NIT?

I heard about the NIT when Breakthrough ACTION started to create this program here in Burkina Faso. I was working in the communication department at the MOH. I wanted to discover something new, to do something else to allow me to act differently, and I wanted to learn about best practices from other countries. I participated in the NIT for two cycles [in 2020–21 and 2021–22].

What did you learn by participating in the NIT?

Before joining the NIT, when there was a problem, we thought about scenarios to tackle the problem, created messages, adapted the solution, then broadcast [those messages to the public]. We were satisfied with the messages that we broadcast. At that time, we were not engaging beneficiaries to provide feedback on the messages beforehand.

With the NIT, we learned new skills—really brand new! We would start with an idea and end up with a prototype of that idea. We analyzed the problems we were seeking to address, prioritized among these problems, considered the determinants of the problem, and then proposed ways to address these problems to implement. [This was all] very different from what I was used to doing. We went beyond messages and went as far as making prototypes that would be used by the beneficiaries and tested these prototypes to take into account the opinions of health workers, husbands, mothers-in-law, women of childbearing age, and the beneficiaries. This was really new for me.

What surprised you the most?

In the beginning, I did not know that I could have an idea and that my idea would be used throughout the process to create solutions and prototypes to test. My idea went to a certain level, to make sketches to implement [the solution] and [be] used by the beneficiaries. I also enjoyed the interactivity within the group, which allowed us to exchange opinions and develop the best ideas. It was a great formula for collaboration. The trip to the communities was also a great exercise, to be in contact with the beneficiaries and to have their opinion.

“In the NIT course, I can say there was a lot of discovery. Now, I have learned all the processes and am able to make proposals for an innovative intervention to bring change.”

Recently, we developed health communication strategies. We came up with many proposals of ideas that could feed into innovative behavior change strategies. We have already made a proposal for a National Health Communication Strategy that includes innovative interventions and workshops to allow the development of prototypes to address certain issues.

During COVID[-19], we tried to use innovative methods to solve problems. The course we completed served us well to improve our work and now innovative interventions have been introduced in the strategy.

When I joined the NIT I had expectations, but I feel that I got more than I expected. I feel capable of making innovative proposals [for interventions]. I really received a lot of support, I learned a lot, [and] I feel fulfilled. Today, if I am asked to make an innovative proposal, I will be able to make it because of the course.

How did you apply what you learned at work?

There has been a change today—we are working with many technical departments.

“Now, when there are problems to solve and we have to develop public health messages, I always think of using innovative approaches.”

I ask myself, “What can we do?” Whenever there is an opportunity, I give updates and inform the team about the innovation, and I [take] into account the different steps for an innovative intervention. Planning innovative activities in the communication strategy comes automatically to mind. This is a big change.

Recently, when we worked on [our] five-year strategy, we included innovative activities and interventions in the health strategy from 2022 onwards to solve problems.

Can you share with us how you practiced applying innovative methods during the course?

The ANC rate in Burkina Faso is low. For our group, our work was to determine how to bring the women from rural areas to complete all their ANC visits, which is usually four visits.

For this exercise, we challenged ourselves with the new World Health Organization guideline, which is eight ANC visits. In Burkina Faso, pregnant women usually come for their first ANC visit at the end of the first trimester or in the second trimester. Therefore, having a full four ANC visits becomes challenging due to that delay. The rate of one ANC visit is between 70% and 80%, but fewer than 30% of women have four ANC visits and we wanted to work upstream. From our analysis, women do not know the benefits of ANC, forget about appointments, and listen to taboos about pregnancy that are related to culture and beliefs. Hence, we identified four solutions to overcome these barriers.

First, [we] involved the key actors, such as husbands [and] mothers-in-law, who are very influential to the women. We thought that the contribution of the husband and mother-in-law in a voluntary and official way can help to tackle the problem related to benefits and the delay for the ANC. They were involved in encouraging women from the first month of pregnancy to start the ANC.

[For our] second solution, we put women in groups of two or three so they go to ANC together. [This] will encourage discussion and also break the taboo of attending ANC. Since they are in a group, at least one or two can remember the next appointment so they can remind each other of the date of the appointment.

[Our] third solution was the commitment card. The pregnant woman or husband or mother-in-law will encourage women to go and register with a community health worker (CHW). Then, the group will be formed, and the woman will take the commitment with the CHW to follow the ANC.

Finally, as a fourth solution, we have provided stickers that show the development of the fetus, which will encourage the woman to go for the next appointment. The health worker who does the checkup will put the sticker on the card. If she comes to the next appointment, she will get another sticker. We thought she didn’t want to miss out on knowing her child’s developmental level.

“During user testing, [women] said, “Ah, we’ve never seen this before, and we’re going to go to the care visit.” With that pretest, we think it will really enhance the outcome.”

Implementing [these solutions] will increase the rate of ANC and compliance with ANC appointments. We were comforted when we did the pretest. A midwife said, “No woman wants to miss her appointment for ANC. They will all make it all the way and come here to make sure they get the sticker.” With the women in the community, we feel that there is already an attachment to the sticker.

Do you have any projects or suggestions related to what you have learned?

I suggest the [Burkina Faso] MOH formalize the NIT. Annually, the MOH determines the priority issues and could request the support of the NIT to help solve the problems. The NIT should be given the technical support to work on the analysis [of problem determinants] and propose innovative solutions. The ownership of NIT by the MOH is important. Having a formalized NIT would help improve the whole process and achieve great results.

The post Building Behavioral Design Skills: A Conversation with Breakthrough ACTION Innovator Bouraima Gnanou appeared first on ideas42.

In the summer of 2020, we listed seven concrete ways we would support racial justice in our work, as calls for racial justice rang not only in the United States but around the world. As we did in 2021, we’re taking a moment to hold ourselves accountable to those commitments and report on the ongoing progress we have made, while acknowledging there is still more work to be done.

In all that we do as we strive to achieve our mission of improving lives around the world using behavioral science, we aim for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice for all. It is our hope that by sharing our efforts in the service of this goal, we can encourage others to also be explicit with their own commitments to advancing racial justice.

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

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

• Action:  Proactively sought diverse and underrepresented voices from the communities we serve to help guide our organization as board members. We joined the Board Challenge as a Charter Partner in 2021. Additionally, inside the organization, our leadership team is currently 69% female-identifying, up 9% from last year. And for the first time, a majority of our team outside of leadership roles (52%) identify as non-white. We have more work to do to reach gender parity across the organization as a whole, as well as make our board more representative of the people and communities we work with, and that continues to be our goal.

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

•  Action: We have refined and finalized an internal equity training and accompanying toolset, which includes a set of Equity Cards, a facilitated equity kickoff activity and conversation, and an equity pre-mortem exercise. We’ve rolled these resources out across ideas42 so all team members have a shared vocabulary to talk about identity, privilege, and power, and project teams intentionally and proactively integrate equity considerations into their work. We will continue to refine the tools by improving their usability, and we’ve begun creating additional complementary materials designed to build cultural competence, especially for team members working in new or unfamiliar contexts.
  

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

• Action: We continue to seek opportunities to expand our network of academic affiliates who inform our work with an eye toward ensuring that our network of scholars reflects the diversity of the populations we serve. We have not grown our affiliate network since the progress we made up to June 2021, however, we maintain near-gender parity (44% female-identifying) and have increased the number of Black scholars by 7.5x since 2020. We look forward to continue learning from our newest affiliates and expanding the diversity of scholars who contribute to our work along multiple dimensions. We also plan to ramp up engagement opportunities with our affiliates, through an expanded slate of lectures, and project collaborations. 
• We are also seeking to increase representation from experts in the issue areas we work in outside of academia who can inform our work in important ways. We started this work in 2022 with the launch of our Global Health Advisory Council. 

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

• Action: The ideas42 Policy Lab continues to leverage behavioral science research to advocate for policy changes that would improve access to social safety net services for immigrant families. Our Policy Lab, along with others in the behavioral science community, also advocated for the extension of the expanded and fully refundable Child Tax Credit, which would reduce child poverty and existing racial disparities in eligibility. 
• Additionally, our Economic Justice team, as part of our ongoing narrative change work, launched a quiz to help people understand the false and harmful narratives about poverty that they might hold that perpetuate inequality in the United States, and influence the way policy is designed and delivered. Changing poverty narratives starts with understanding our own associations—so we created the short quiz to help people understand the most common types of false narratives, and which ones they may be subscribing to. We encourage you to reflect on your own views by taking the 5-minute Poverty Associations Quiz. 

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

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

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

• Action: Explicitly tackled racial inequities in the policing, judicial, and probation spaces in the United States as part of our Safety & Justice work. Select projects include:
  • In partnership with Harris County, Texas, we redesigned all communications associated with misdemeanor court notifications and launched new research to more deeply understand and address challenges to appearing in court. A full report on this work will be released in fall 2022. 
  • Continuing to grow and develop Vergil, a technology designed to help parolees and those on probation set and achieve positive goals. Vergil connects users with desired and available social services, all in the service of helping them avoid incarceration or re-incarceration.
  • Collaborating with the Fines and Fees Justice Center to design tools that reform the high and often disproportionate costs of court-imposed fines and fees. These tools, supported by behavioral science research, can assess people’s ability to pay to ensure any fines and fees assessed are fair and affordable.

Commitment #7 – We commit to partnering with more organizations on the front line of this battle, and will publish a list of organizations with whom we have or are currently partnering in this effort. 

• Action: We remain committed to partnering with more organizations on the front lines of the battle for racial justice in the United States and around the world. Below are examples of how new partnerships have supported our racial justice efforts across two portfolios of work.
  • Civic Engagement: We partnered with the NAACP to run one of the largest voter mobilization programs for Black voters in Virginia. Focused on building power through civic engagement, we sent more than two million GOTV messages, activated 16,000 volunteers, and reached 675,000 Black potential voters, including 430,000 moderate-to-low propensity voters. We’re honored to work with the NAACP again this year to actualize an even greater impact in elections across the U.S.
  • Financial Health: College savings programs are often offered universally, and yet some families face specific barriers to participation based on their racial identity, financial situation, and immigration status, despite having arguably more to gain. Our research collaboration with the City of San Francisco’s K2C program found that behaviorally-informed text messages (primarily tailored to overcome barriers faced by Black and Latino families who had never made a deposit) resulted in 2.5 times more “new savers” and a significant increase in registration rates.

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

The post Our Ongoing Commitment to Racial Justice: 2022 Updates appeared first on ideas42.

As behavioral designers, we know it’s important for end users and other stakeholders to participate in the design process for any new solution. But when a diverse array of perspectives are important, determining when and how to approach design collaboratively may feel daunting. A recent co-design process in South Sudan illustrates how stakeholders’ input, provided through different participatory design activities, can strengthen solutions and help adapt interventions to new contexts and ultimately improve outcomes for those impacted by our work.

Building on previous work in Uganda with IntraHealth International, ideas42 is supporting Breakthrough ACTION to develop an interactive game that aims to facilitate open conversation and joint decision-making among couples about family planning. Players work together as “household” teams to navigate choices for their families, see the consequences of their decisions, and learn about family planning. Several South Sudanese stakeholders have contributed to the game design, including representatives from the Ministry of Health, USAID’s MOMENTUM Integrated Health Resilience project, community-based organizations, local leaders, community- and facility-based health workers, and men and women living in the communities where the solutions are used.

These stakeholders participated in various ways, including through one-on-one conversations with our team members, participation in co-creation workshops, and playing draft versions of the game. This input was invaluable across the board, but there were three key ways these co-design activities strengthened the final design in South Sudan.

An example game card from user testing.

1. Program stakeholders offered insight into abstract questions of family values, status, and priorities and how to adapt the design to resonate with the South Sudanese context.

To be engaging and relatable, it was essential for the game to align with participants’ real-life priorities and with relevant norms about what makes a good parent and a strong family. Program stakeholders noted that the concept of “family harmony” resonates particularly strongly in South Sudanese communities and that men feel a strong sense of responsibility to foster harmony in their households.

Having many children is considered a source of pride, but not if parents fail to provide well for those children or if there is discord within the family. Stakeholders shared that focusing on the financial costs of children is most likely to resonate if presented as a means to build harmony, along with other factors such as keeping family members healthy and making important decisions jointly. In response, we structured the game so that players work to build household harmony and see the consequences of their choices, both negative and positive, in those terms. This was a shift from the approach we took in Uganda, in which a family planning decision-making game was framed around wealth and providing financially for one’s family.

2. In addition to sharing their perspectives and opinions, stakeholders taught us a lot by simply interacting with the game. What they didn’t say in these interactions (and who spoke when) was illuminating.

While we directly solicited stakeholder feedback, just as valuable was the more subtle insight we gained from seeing a person interact with a design. During user testing, we saw that when men and women played the game together, men would often defer to their wives to answer questions, particularly questions about contraceptive methods. Women have historically had more opportunities to learn about contraception, and both men and women tend to expect that women will know more. Men, by contrast, are viewed as decision-makers, but find it challenging to engage in conversations when they know less than their wives. Seeing women speak up is a positive sign that women’s voices and agency in decision-making are valued. But another important objective of the game is to boost all players’ comfort and confidence in discussing sensitive topics such as family size and contraception.

Seeing male players’ hesitancy to respond to knowledge questions in the game led us to add a new type of game card that provides an immediate and less intimidating opportunity for discussion between players. These new cards prompt players to discuss how they might approach an uneasy or uncomfortable situation, such as responding to a respected elder family member who wants the couple to have a child at a time that might be risky for the mother’s health. Many of the cards pointedly do not have a right or wrong answer.

An example game card from user testing.

3. Contrasting feedback suggested a need for local flexibility in some program details.

Our experience in Uganda suggested that men value the opportunity to learn and explore unfamiliar topics in a “safe space” with male peers. However, government and program stakeholders in South Sudan recommended the game be played by couples to build comfort discussing family planning together and to avoid potential adverse consequences of exposing only men (or only women) to the content. We tested the game with both single- and mixed-gender groups to determine the approach that worked best. User testing reinforced the benefits stakeholders expected, but also revealed significant challenges to playing the game with men and women together.

As noted above, men were less willing to participate actively and share openly when playing the game with women. We also encountered more challenges recruiting men to play in couples; while men consistently showed up to male-only games, some men interpreted couples-based invitations as allowing their wives to participate instead of them. These different insights suggested that there wasn’t a single correct approach, and that local stakeholders might be best positioned to weigh the pros and cons for their own communities. Ultimately, we decided to encourage couples-based participation but invite local leaders and game facilitators to make the decision.

By creating the space for these diverse (and at times contrasting) views, our team strengthened the game and identified avenues to create flexibility in the game when perspectives differed. The process also affirmed the game’s effectiveness as a fun and engaging way for participants to learn about contraception and become more comfortable having conversations about the topic. We continue to leverage the power of co-design as we work in several other regions of South Sudan to further refine the game and encourage male engagement in family planning discussion and use.

Write to gh@ideas42.org if you’re interested in exploring how these approaches could be applied to your setting.

The post The Power of Co-Design: Lessons Learned from Diverse Stakeholder Perspectives appeared first on ideas42.

A few weeks before 4-year-old Paul Peterson was scheduled to have surgery to close a hole in his stomach as part of his recovery from a stroke, he was dropped from Medicaid coverage. While his mother frantically worked to figure out what happened and get him re-enrolled, his surgery was delayed and he missed needed speech, occupational, and physical therapy appointments. Paul, like many others, lost coverage not because he wasn’t eligible but because of bureaucratic hurdles: burdensome paperwork, complex regulations, and changing deadlines.

Hurdles such as these are a type of administrative burden, that is – the time, money, effort, and other work needed for eligible people to access their benefits. Administrative burdens include compliance costs like completing paperwork, learning costs like navigating eligibility requirements, and psychological costs like overcoming stigma. Some administrative burdens are inevitable, but too often policymakers use them to purposely make it harder to access benefits. 

In previous years, Paul and other children with complex medical needs or long-term disabilities in Idaho, where Paul lived, were automatically re-enrolled in Medicaid. This “ex parte” renewal helps ensure eligible enrollees don’t lose coverage. It reduces the administrative burden on both beneficiaries and state administrators. Despite significant evidence on the benefits of ex parte renewal, in 2019 the Trump administration deemed the process “inadequate” and threatened to pull Idaho’s federal funding unless it required additional documentation from recipients. That left about 2,700 children in Idaho – including Paul – with little or no warning that they would have to complete a new process in order to keep their coverage. Such regulations, implemented nationwide by the Trump administration, are part of the reason why over 700,000 more children were uninsured in 2019 than 2016.

Administrative burdens are everywhere in American life: when we fill out our taxes, apply for a driver’s license, vote, or have almost any interaction with the government. For some, these requirements are just an annoying chore. But for people living with chronic scarcity – for example, people with limited time to gather necessary paperwork, limited money to pay required fees, or limited resources to travel to in-person appointments – administrative burdens can be the difference between getting a benefit or not. Administrative burdens also disproportionately harm those who most need benefits.

For example, many families find the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) – a 100+ question form – to be too complex to complete, despite the financial benefits. A Department of Education report found that 23% of students who did not complete the FAFSA (non-filers) stated that they did not have enough information to complete it. While this “learning cost” affected all non-filers, the burden was not evenly distributed: 34% of Hispanic students and 27% of Black students, compared to only 18% of white students, and 43% of students whose parents did not have a high school degree reported they did not have enough information to file. ideas42 has done work to help students navigate these administrative burdens, which in turn increased FAFSA filing rates.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which provides financial assistance to families with low incomes, is similarly burdensome to access. Families must navigate drug tests, educational requirements, benefit time-limits, restrictions on cash usage, and more. These harsh “compliance costs” are part of the reason why only 21 of every 100 families living in poverty received TANF in 2020. Additionally, many of these burdens are rooted in intentionally racist policies that have historically, and continue to systemically, deny access to Black families. Today, states with larger Black populations have less generous and more restrictive TANF policies. As a result, Black children are less likely than white children to receive TANF benefits when their families fall into crisis. ideas42 research suggests that removing these administrative burdens would increase access and support for eligible families.

On the other hand, the enhanced Child Tax Credit (CTC), enacted as part of the American Rescue Plan, successfully reduced child poverty, in part, because it did not impose unnecessary administrative burdens. Most families automatically received the credit through monthly deposits into their accounts or by check. As a result, families experienced an unprecedented 30% reduction in child poverty rates in 2021 and racial disparities in poverty narrowed. This had important implications for families’ well-being. ideas42 collaborated with several organizations on research that found that the CTC reduced financial stress for all eligible families, particularly among Black and Hispanic families. Unfortunately, the expanded Child Tax Credit was not extended and families received their final monthly payment last year. 

The Child Tax Credit is not a standalone example: the COVID-19 pandemic prompted policymakers across the country to reduce administrative burdens for critical social safety net programs. However, as the pandemic emergency has ended, these changes are expiring. This is unfortunate. While the changes may have been borne of necessity, reducing administrative burdens better served the American people and reduced disparities. Rather than rolling back the new streamlined systems, local, state, and federal governments should seek to make many of the changes permanent and look for additional ways to reduce administrative burdens. 

We at the ideas42 Policy Lab are working to reduce administrative burdens so that all eligible people can easily access their benefits. This includes supporting policies like the extended Child Tax Credit, which puts money directly into families’ hands without unnecessary hurdles, and leveraging our research to provide recommendations to policymakers on how to reduce administrative burdens in safety net programs.

The post Rebuilding the Safety Net by Reducing Administrative Burden appeared first on ideas42.

I used to not think much about narratives, let alone their role in shaping public opinion and policy. If you had asked me at the start of my poverty-fighting career what narratives were, I would have told you they were simply stories or referenced a quote about “controlling the narrative.” It’s true that I knew that narratives were important (I work in the behavioral sciences after all), but I never understood the centrality of narratives in all that anti-poverty organizations do or are able to accomplish. How if the narrative was right, the thing that we most want to accomplish, solving poverty, could have the political will to happen. They didn’t frame this as “narratives” in social work school when I attended, though they should have.

When I started working more closely with our Economic Justice team at ideas42 using a behavioral science lens to tackle thorny issues that create and maintain poverty and inequality in the United States, the importance of narrative work became more striking. When I would be in conversations with others that I didn’t agree with on social policy, I realized that our beliefs and attitudes were consistently driven by our underlying narratives. Narratives are a lens through which we make sense of the world, including the causes of poverty. Narratives help us conjure responses in debates about fundamental social policy questions, such as:

• What causes poverty? 
• Who deserves what type of support?
• What is the role of the government in providing that support?

I realized quickly that narratives provided a way for me to communicate ideas both around why I was doing the work I was doing, as well as how important it was for social change. Now that I have an understanding of common poverty narratives, I see them everywhere. In movies, what is conveyed about structural barriers as causes for poverty, versus individual fault? Overwhelming, as many say in religious circles, “God helps those who help themselves.”  

And not surprisingly, political rhetoric, which I will avoid repeating here, is omnipresent in how we think about and talk about poverty. Even in conversations with fellow organizations committed to fighting poverty, I sometimes have to ask – what do you mean by that comment? What are the implications of this position, and what narratives does it relate to? Truthfully, even those committed to fighting poverty can unintentionally reinforce some of the most harmful poverty narratives. It’s something we all need to look out for as an ongoing practice.

Even for me, when I took our new Poverty Associations Quiz, I was surprised that I was grappling with one or two of the statements related to the Fatalism narrative. While I didn’t score high, reading more about that narrative prompted me to reflect on where those beliefs and attitudes might be coming from, and what some of the implications might be in terms of my work.

We want other people to notice poverty narratives and their impact- so we decided to take survey work we’re doing nationwide as a part of Shared Prosperity Catalyst and let other people take it with real-time answers to see where they land. I challenge you to take it honestly – go with your gut – and see what poverty narratives you might hold, and reflect on whether those narratives align with your views on policy and what you’d want for your community.

If relevant, think about the implications of your views on the people you serve. Here’s what you’ll get as a part of taking the Poverty Associations Quiz.

1. See what common narratives exist about poverty, and what people across the U.S. believe.
2. Read more about what might be driving those narratives, such as demographics and ideological positions.
3. Start to understand how important narrative work is to addressing poverty in the U.S.

If this quiz gets a large response, we might consider developing a Poverty Associations Quiz 2.0 that contains many of the community-driven narratives from our work with Shared Prosperity Catalyst.  

To learn more about our narrative work, feel free to reach out to me directly at allison@ideas42.org and read up on our Shared Prosperity Catalyst website and data blog. 

The post Changing Poverty Narratives Starts with Understanding Our Own Associations appeared first on ideas42.

Photo by Nigeria Centre for Disease Control

It has been more than a year since the global roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines, yet the gap in vaccination rates between high- and low-income countries continues to grow. Supply shortages are no longer the primary issue, with logistics challenges and vaccine hesitancy emerging as the main barriers to uptake in many low-income countries.

Among an “infodemic” of abundant and potentially harmful misinformation about COVID-19, people already suspicious of the vaccine’s origins are drawn to information that seemingly confirms their beliefs and can be resistant to new and contradicting information. Even if few people believe conspiracy theories, they contribute to a cloud of uncertainty about the vaccine and possible adverse side effects. This undermines the public health response, fomenting mistrust of governments’ priorities and motivation, as well as suspicion about foreign actors’ involvement in pushing vaccines.

As part of the USAID-funded Breakthrough ACTION project, we are working with teams and governments in eight countries—Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Philippines, and Nigeria—to understand and target demand-side barriers to improve acceptance and uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine. Our formative work has explored the context surrounding vaccine-related decision-making and behavior in each country through interviews with healthcare workers and community leaders, as well as the general public.

Below are three cross-cutting behavioral insights from our initial work across Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Cameroon that suggest opportunities to encourage uptake in low-resource settings despite persistent challenges to vaccine acceptance.

Opportunity #1: Make peer vaccination more visible

Despite widespread exposure to misinformation, we found that seeing a peer or someone you identify with safely vaccinate can be a powerful driver towards personal acceptance. In some cases, this can serve to directly counter beliefs—for example, seeing that a friend who got vaccinated is now pregnant can help to overcome misinformation-related concerns about infertility. In other cases, someone may feel compelled to accept the vaccine after seeing others do so, even if they still harbor personal concerns or uncertainties. Whether peer vaccination effectively counters or simply trumps negative beliefs, this observation suggests that normative interventions to increase the visibility of vaccine uptake among peers can help drive demand, even without more intensive belief-shifting efforts. It also underscores the importance of making vaccines easily accessible to those already motivated to receive them, as their actions may have a downstream impact on their peer network.

“When the boss gets vaccinated, I stay without getting vaccinated—why? I said, ‘vaccinate me.’ If it did something to you it will do something to me.” – Community member, Cameroon

“I took the vaccine because I saw some of my friends who took the vaccine moving around smoothly.”– Provider, Liberia

Opportunity #2: Prime identities

We observed that one’s perceived status as a role model or desire to set a good example can help to override personal doubts about the vaccine among community leaders and health workers. We found examples of this responsibility either driving personal vaccine uptake or at least leading to a willingness to promote vaccination to others through their capacity as a community leader, even if they remained hesitant themselves. This suggests that prompting people to consider aspects of their identity that would also align with setting a good example with regards to vaccines, such as informal roles within family and friend networks, might help build more inroads into hesitant communities, in addition to leveraging local influencers.

“They themselves are taking the vaccine because we the health workers are the example, and the people look up to us. So, we are serious about the vaccine…” – Provider, Liberia

“…For someone to come and be vaccinated, I had to be vaccinated to motivate the population. When we went to the community, you had to be the model, the example.” – Provider, Cameroon

Opportunity #3: Communicate other downsides to staying unvaccinated

Finally, more recent emerging evidence suggests that anticipation of future hassles related to one’s unvaccinated status can increase the perceived urgency of getting vaccinated and willingness to do so among those otherwise on the fence or ambivalent. Several people we spoke to cited restrictions against traveling across borders, entry into government buildings, or future work requirements as reasons they expected to take the vaccine. This suggests that vaccine mandates for specific activities that people want to engage in could be a potentially effective tool in these settings, as they have been found elsewhere.

“Crossing borders, they say, ‘Ah, you didn’t get the vaccine, you can’t go into such and such a country…’ So, it’s better to get vaccinated.” – Provider, Côte d’Ivoire

“You have to get vaccinated if you want to go to France…But if I don’t see this obligation, I’m in no hurry.” – Community member, Cameroon

Vaccine uptake is as much a behavioral problem as it is logistical, and our early insights in Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Cameroon suggest opportunities to encourage vaccination that may resonate across other settings facing similar behavioral challenges. We believe such insights can be leveraged through behavioral design and will play an important role in boosting vaccine uptake efforts and reducing the vaccination disparity in low-income countries.

Write to gh@ideas42.org if you’re interested in exploring how these approaches could be applied to your setting.
We believe such insights can be leveraged through behavioral design and will play an important role in boosting vaccine uptake efforts and reducing the vaccination disparity in low-income countries.

The post Closing the Global COVID-19 Vaccine Gap: Three Encouraging Insights from the Countries of Implementation appeared first on ideas42.

Credit: Gabriela Carvalho PH, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Achieving gender equity doesn’t require better arguments or more evidence, it needs new narratives. Last year, Argentina’s marea verde, or green tide, delivered a sweeping abortion reform, moving the needle in favor of gender equity in a society that’s still influenced by prevailing Catholic values and norms that stigmatize a woman’s right to choose. Millions of Argentinians took to the streets to celebrate the landmark bill, and its rallying cry: “educación sexual para decidir, anticonceptivos para no abortar, aborto legal para no morir,” (or, ‘sexual education so we can decide, contraceptives so we don’t need abortions, and legal abortions so we don’t die’) inspired feminist movements and other civil society groups working for increased women’s rights throughout the region. But despite recent wins, Argentina, like many countries, is still far from achieving equal rights for women, and narratives are a part of why. In the first of a two-part series, I’ll start to unpack some of the behavioral barriers at play. 

Why is the political economy for issues impacting women’s rights and equal standing in society so difficult to shift in Argentina? Our Economic Justice team’s work changing narratives around poverty in the U.S. suggests that to unlock the kinds of policies and programs that promote equity and dignity, we need to uncover and dismantle the often false and harmful stories we hold about each other. Just as we unconsciously hold narratives around poverty and how it happens, we all have a powerful, unconscious script about what women should or should not do, what women deserve, and even what it means to be a ‘good’ mother. How we define womanhood may be based on what we’ve seen in our families or in popular culture and movies. I personally come from a Venezuelan family with very traditional gender roles – my father is the breadwinner and my mother stayed at home to raise me and my sisters. This seemed so normal that I didn’t question that division of labor until well into my 20s. 

We see the same gender roles play out in mainstream media: in 2017, among the 100 top-grossing films globally, male characters were more likely than females to have work-related goals (41% vs 34%). And between 2006-2009, not one female character in films marketed towards people of all ages was represented as a business leader or in professions with stringent education and certification requirements such as medicine, law, or politics. Given all the signals we get about gender and work, and the narratives underpinning them, it’s no wonder we internalize ideas about what’s ‘normal’—sometimes without even knowing it.

At ideas42, we believe that as long as we hold onto prescriptive, false narratives about what types of jobs women should or shouldn’t do and even what constitutes ‘work’, women’s labor will not be valued equally, and therefore their place in society will not be equal. To begin the hard work of changing false and deeply embedded narratives, we partnered with the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Argentina. We had two goals: first, to uncover the narratives that drive an unequal distribution of unpaid care work. Second, to design a social norms intervention to dismantle those narratives and replace them with new, more accurate ones that reflect the experience of women in the real world. 

We started by exploring how gender inequities around care work manifest in Argentina. The context is bleak: care work—activities that strengthen the health, safety, and emotional wellbeing of others—is invisible because it happens inside the home and is largely shouldered by women. Because it is invisible, it is also unpaid and undervalued, creating a vicious cycle that keeps women from making money for their labor while often excluding them from many paid economic opportunities. Indeed, we assign economic value to this work, it translates to more than 15.9%  of Argentina’s GDP with women contributing 76% of that effort. 

It also deepens income inequality. Women with higher socio-economic status can afford to pay for private care services and on average report spending three hours per day on care work while women living in poverty don’t have the option to externalize care—whether public or private—and are often forced to shoulder unpaid but important ‘community work’ like running neighborhood kitchens, taking care of neighbors, friends, or cleaning shared spaces. This is in addition to the family household work, where many women spend up to eight hours on childcare and housekeeping activities. This depresses economic mobility by increasing time scarcity on top of resource scarcity and toxic stress for women living in poverty, keeping them from joining the workforce and improving their livelihoods. 

We began to explore the narratives that create the conditions we uncovered in Argentina through an online survey with 1,010 respondents, and 15 in-depth interviews with adults that had at least one child in the province of Buenos Aires. We found there are clear ideas about how people conceptualize care and motherhood that get in the way of an equal distribution of care work in households: 

1. There are new reasons for old sexism. Social desirability has changed the ways sexism crops up—the traditional narrative that defines women’s role as stay-at-home mothers and men as providers had very low endorsement in our survey (only 11% of respondents). The modern version is more subtle—people believe that women should stay at home for a different reason: “if they don’t, it has negative consequences for the child’s development” (29% of respondents). Narratives around masculinity also contribute to unequal distribution of care work. Men are considered less competent and responsible and therefore less critical to a child’s development. In fact, an ILO-led survey revealed that when asked what’s an important characteristic for someone to take care of children, 68% answered that being a woman was somewhat and very important. This preference was also reflected in our qualitative interviews: ideal external caregivers were often women, such as aunts and grandmothers, and at times, we were explicitly told they should not be men.

2. (False) mental models of gendered parenting roles persist. ‘Good mothering’ is rooted in unachievable mental models that either keep women from considering re-entering the workplace or drown them in guilt if they do. Since a ‘good’ mother sacrifices herself for her children and is expected to be always present, a working mother is always lacking or struggling to live up to this expectation. Indeed, we saw high levels of guilt for working mothers overall. They feel guilty because their children take time away from their work and guilty because work gets in the way of spending time with their family. In interviews, women expressed the desire to go back to work to feel like themselves and have financial autonomy, with one woman saying, “If I need to buy a diaper, I’d like to pay for it myself instead of asking my husband.”

3. Labor is selectively devalued. Care work is seen as ‘altruistic,’ meaning people should do it out of love or selflessness without expecting anything in return. By turning care work into an intrinsic value, there are no incentives to recognize it as labor and place a market value on it. Interestingly, when asked about other people’s endorsement of gendered narratives interviews, women shared, “Many think: the man works and puts food on the table…she doesn’t work, she’s a housewife, I would live for them to put themselves in our shoes, what we go through, what we resist so they’re comfortable, have a clean house, food. Many of them don’t value that or don’t see it.”

If we can shift how people conceptualize care from altruism to true work, as well as shift our mental models from masculinity being antithetical to care and femininity making someone an ideal caregiver to shared and equal responsibility, we can unlock the ability for women to achieve the same agency over their lives as men. Specifically, women would be able to enter and participate in the workforce meaningfully as they choose, achieve financial autonomy, and prioritize caring for themselves and living meaningful lives of their own choosing. 

In the next post, we’ll share how we co-created behaviorally-informed designs to begin to counter these narratives and reshape social norms in Argentina with ILO, civil society organizations, UN agencies, and other stakeholders in the country. Our hope is that we can contribute to the ongoing efforts by ILO and others that foster an equitable distribution of care work, allowing women to have the time they need to take care of themselves, join the labor force, or just watch a movie in peace (hopefully with a female protagonist that is fulfilled by more than her romantic relationships).

The post Changing Narratives Around Care Work in Argentina and Beyond appeared first on ideas42.

In the decade since becoming eligible to vote, I’ve moved seven times across four different states. Along the way, I’ve prided myself on re-registering with each move and doing my best to get familiar with my new elected officials. But despite the fact that my job literally revolves around elections, I still struggle like most Americans when it comes to voting in local elections and down ballot races during higher-profile elections. 

When my city recently held a ballot referendum over building a new high school, I felt completely out of my depth. I only learned about the race a week before election day and I had trouble making sense of what we were being asked to vote on. The handful of articles I found felt incomplete and had agendas that were difficult to decipher. Talking it out with my fiancé, we debated whether it was even our place to weigh in since we didn’t have deep roots in town or plan to raise kids here. 

As I attempted to untangle what a “yes” or “no” vote meant, the fear of getting it wrong loomed large, especially since the consequences would be borne by people already marginalized within the community. While the city I live in is overwhelmingly white, the high school primarily served Black and Latino students. The demographic mismatch between the school system and the voting population forced me to consider the potential equity impacts of the referendum even more deeply. 

Although I ultimately made it to the polls for that referendum, millions across the country sit out similar elections every year, with turnout in local elections often struggling to crack 30%. Some simply never hear about these low salience elections, while others drop off somewhere along the way between setting an intention to vote and actually voting—especially if they lack the time and resources to navigate the process. While conventional wisdom is quick to ascribe low turnout to voter apathy, the reality reveals a much more complicated picture.

Voting Local: Promoting More Equitable Participation in Local Elections

Over the past year, ideas42 partnered with Democracy Works, the makers of TurboVote, to learn more about the barriers to voting in local elections. Given our organizations’ shared goal of increasing the representativeness of local electorates, we paid close attention to barriers that were particularly pronounced among voters who are traditionally underserved by elections infrastructure, especially communities of color. 

With the help of voters in New York City, Detroit, Boston, Atlanta, Richmond, and New Orleans, our team uncovered four key barriers to participation, which we detail in our new report Voting Local: Promoting More Equitable Participation in Local Elections. We then delivered over 85,000 custom text message notifications to TurboVote users in our target cities to tackle these barriers head on.

The barriers we uncovered provide important nuances for how people’s desire and ability to vote in local races are commonly undercut. For instance, we found that many people disengage from local elections because they lack a strong connection to the place where they currently live or are skeptical that candidates would reliably represent their needs. We found these sentiments repeated even by those who otherwise were eager to participate in national elections for high-profile offices like the President, even though local races often have a more direct impact on their day to day lives. Like me, they were transplants or had strong preconceived notions about who local elections were meant for. Their image of the “typical” local voter was often of an older person who owned their home and had kids in public schools. 

Of course, there are those who intend to vote in every election who still struggle to follow through. We heard reports in every city that people do not feel prepared enough to participate in local elections and as a result the consequences of making the wrong decision feel worse than not voting. Contrary to popular belief, almost everyone we spoke with had an intuitive understanding of how important local elections were to their daily lives. They felt that choosing “correctly” was in fact so important that it was less risky to sit out all together than risk voting in a way that caused harm to their community. One man in Atlanta captured this do no harm ethos poetically when he told us a local race, “has a more direct impact, and you don’t know if you’ve led the snake into the garden. You like the wrong politician, and suddenly your waters are polluted.” 

While a typical voter outreach campaign may go all in to convince voters about the stakes of the election, if they don’t properly support people by connecting them to simple, actionable, and resonant resources, then they risk demobilizing voters by amplifying the consequence of making the wrong choice.

With the 2022 midterm election cycle officially underway, these insights are critical to help understand how voters across the country are approaching the decision of whether or not to participate, especially in lower salience contests. As organizations and campaigns craft their voter outreach strategies, the insights outlined in Voting Local can help people communicate more effectively with voters and avoid some common pitfalls that may inadvertently hamper their efforts. 

Interested in learning more about our efforts to apply a behavioral lens to increase voter turnout and by extension the representativeness of our democracy for all? Reach out to us at omar@ideas42.org

The post Overcoming Barriers to Voting in Local Elections appeared first on ideas42.

Behavioral science provides a crucial framework for understanding human responses to uncertainty. As we unpacked in a recent post, we’ve all been living with high levels of uncertainty and instability throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. 

When it comes to uncertainty regarding COVID-19 vaccines, there are four “cognitive pitfalls” in particular that are likely to affect decision-making. In the previous post, we examined the first two: ambiguity aversion and the possibility and certainty effects. Here, we take a look at the next two pitfalls. 

With these cognitive tendencies in mind, healthcare practitioners and others who communicate about vaccines can help people overcome these pitfalls, to protect themselves, their families, and their communities from COVID-19.

Zero Risk Bias

We like to take actions that completely eliminate one kind of risk, even if it increases our overall exposure to a negative outcome. This is known as zero risk bias. Remember all that panicked toilet paper buying in early 2020? It’s a great example of the zero risk bias in action. Rushing to a crowded grocery store to stock up on toilet paper eliminates your risk of a tricky situation in the bathroom, but in aggregate it exposes you to a much worse risk of contracting a potentially deadly disease. In this case, people were opting to reduce their bathroom risk to zero, and in doing so neglect the broader category of COVID-19 related risks.

Getting vaccinated against COVID-19 lowers risk of becoming infected, particularly the chances of severe illness leading to hospitalization or death. But vaccines don’t entirely eliminate those risks, and they also introduce another possibility–experiencing side effects. Avoiding the vaccines eliminates that risk of side effects. Essentially, people may accept a much higher risk of getting COVID-19 if it allows them to eliminate another category of risk, even though the levels of those two risks are very different. 

One approach to address this bias is to find ways to eliminate categories of risk relating to vaccination, such as guaranteeing paid sick leave so people won’t need to risk income loss if they experience side effects. Another is to reframe how people are conceiving risks, shifting the focus away from contracting COVID-19 to more serious outcomes like hospitalization or death. While vaccines will not eliminate your possibility of contracting COVID-19 or even coming down with symptoms, early evidence around the Omicron variant suggests that a recent booster shot all but eliminates the risk of serious illness and death for otherwise healthy people.

Attribute Substitution and Negativity Dominance

Objectively evaluating the odds of catching COVID-19 is hard (especially with each new variant bringing different rates of transmissibility), to say nothing of assessing how severe the illness might be. A much easier question to answer might be, “how many people do I know who got COVID-19, and how serious was their illness?” When confronting hard-to-evaluate questions, our brains tend to substitute easier questions like these to help us navigate complexity and uncertainty. This cognitive process is known as attribute substitution. Like the other biases, while it often serves us well in making quick judgments, it can lead us astray when evaluating risks and benefits around COVID-19 vaccines. And when we are evaluating these risks, our thinking tends to be biased even further by negativity dominance, which is the tendency to give more weight to negative events and information relative to positive.

To counter these effects, vivid and intuitive graphics (such as the example for an imaginary “Behavioria County” below) showing the tiny scale of breakthrough infections that lead to hospitalizations and deaths compared to the magnitude of total vaccinations can be effective. This visual would make it easier for our brains to process just how rare serious infections among vaccinated individuals are, better highlighting the positive benefits.

Graphic for illustration only (not based on actual figures)

Throughout the pandemic, a core component of public health messaging has depended on the assumption that people calculate risk and probability effectively and then make informed choices about whether or not to get the COVID-19 vaccine or any boosters. But as the four cognitive pitfalls we’ve discussed in this series show, it’s very easy for anyone to be swayed by psychological biases. When systems are designed around assumptions about human behavior that don’t hold true, it’s a failure of the system, not of the person doing their best to navigate it. As behavioral scientists and practitioners, we need to make sure that we’re meeting people where they are, and working to ensure that our messaging and systems account for the ways people actually think and behave. 

The post How Does Uncertainty Influence Decisions About COVID Vaccination? Part 2 appeared first on ideas42.