We all use behavioural nudges – some more effectively than others. I leave my family’s belongings on the stairs to try and encourage them to scoop them up when they walk past, though it doesn’t often work…
Defaults – our hard-wired desire to take the path of least resistance – can be hard to change. Loss aversion is much more effective in our house, explaining what my kids will miss out on if they don’t follow instruction…
Behaviour change techniques are, clearly, not a fix for everything, but they can be a useful frame for your strategic thinking. They can be a way of ensuring your communications are rooted in genuine audience insight and that your tactics address the real, rather than perceived, challenges they face, helping you get to the heart of what matters and genuinely influence people.
The foundations for effectively using behaviour change
Objectives
It starts with objectives. Focus on articulating the change you need to achieve.
Think about measurement – what evidence do you have of the status quo? How will you prove you’ve achieved the change you’re looking for?
Behaviour change can be hard to prove if it’s not linked to a specific action like increasing voting propensity or vaccination uptake. You might need to think about how you track reported behaviour before and after your campaign so you can look for a shift.
Audience
Next comes a granular focus on audience – who are you targeting and what do you really know about them? How can you build a picture that takes you beyond demographics and media channels to provide more of an understanding into their mindset?
What are the barriers that might stop your audience from changing behaviour? What are the levers you could use? What’s the journey you need to take them on? What do you need them to think, to feel and, ultimately, to do?
Strategy
Only when you really know your objectives and audience are you ready to think about a strategy and which behaviour change principles might be appropriate.
Some useful behaviour change models
The Mindspace framework
The MINDSPACE framework is a tool originally used to integrate principles of behavioural science into policymaking but it’s equally applicable to communications. There’s a lot you can draw on in this framing model, so you need to think about what’s relevant:
1. Messenger
We are heavily influenced by who communicates information, so consider who your audience is most likely to listen to; this might mean that someone with lived experience of the cause might work better than your CEO.
2. Incentives
We’re motivated to avoid losses so it can be helpful to frame things around what the audience will get by doing something or a cost they’ll incur if they don’t. It’s why charities emphasize what people stand to lose if they don’t engage in routine health screening, for example.
3. Norms
We are strongly influenced by what others do which means that talking about the number of people calling a helpline, for example, can normalise seeking help and encourage others to do the same.
4. Defaults
We only tend to ‘go with the flow’ when we have a series of pre-set options, so we need to provide easy alternatives where behaviours are engrained – in policy terms, making organ donation opt-out changed the default and significantly increased numbers.
5. Salience or relevance
Our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us. For communications, if your topic is of low interest for your audience, this means thinking about how you can link it to something you know your audience deeply cares about.
6. Priming
Our behaviours are often influenced by sub-conscious cues which means people can be made more receptive with the right words or images.
7. Affect
Our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions, so generating emotion scan elicit a stronger response (which is something charities already rely on heavily through lived experience stories).
8. Commitments
We are often more motivated to keep our public promises – it’s why apps like Strava, which publicly share our exercise milestones, are so popular.
9. Ego
This is the idea that we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves. People will be motivated to act in ways that tap into this feeling or will lead to social approval.
It’s worth working through these to determine how they might impact the framing of your campaign, but a word of advice: clarity is key. Only pick those which feel most relevant to your audience or campaign purpose.
The COM-B model
Behaviour change thinking also provides useful models to plot out your approach as well as your framing.
The COM-B model, which is most often used by the government, looks at what needs to be in place in order to change behaviour. It’s the idea that an audience must have:
- The capability (C): Has your audience got the knowledge and the physical ability to do what’s required? Part of this review will be ensuring the information or the tools are readily available to your audience.
- The opportunity (O): This point is about whether external factors make it possible or not possible for behaviour to change. If not, how do you create the right environment? For example, if you want people to start eating more healthily, you might provide free nutrition classes in community hubs.
- The motivation (M): Both of these points feed into someone’s motivation to act. This is about influencing people so they want to do the required action.
- The behaviour (B): Your communications strategy should ensure these three prior elements are in place to help you ladder up to the required change in behaviour.
Why behaviour change matters more than ever
When I run workshops on behaviour change, there’s usually a very satisfying light bulb moment for participants and, more than that, excitement to test out techniques that don’t need to decimate budgets. And it tends to work out for them.
I could point to countless examples from the sector, from DKMS increasing sign-ups to the stem cell register by painting donors as ‘life-savers’ and ‘heroes’ to Breast Cancer Now partnering with M&S as a trusted messenger to talk to women about breast checks at its bra fittings.
With budgets increasingly stretched in the sector, seeing communications through a behaviour change lens can help increase the impact of your work and ensure limited resources are used as effectively as possible.
Behaviour change is available to everyone to influence people. And, as an added bonus, knowing these techniques might help you nudge everyone around you in your personal lives into helpful new habits too.
Image credit: Canva
