Behavioural and Communications

We help policy and communications teams to clarify their behavioural and campaign objectives by facilitating workshops to create Theories of Change, exploring existing insights and hypotheses, defining opportunities for intervention, and recommending Key Performance Indicators and other evaluation metrics. These activities provide a strong basis for the design of subsequent project stages.

Read more about the power of using theories of change with Love Better.

We draw on a wide range of qualitative methods, literature review and experimental approaches to understand the influences on citizens’ behaviours, to identify interventions which have been effective elsewhere, and to examine responses to initial ideas for communications and other solutions. From these insights we make recommendations for behaviour change interventions and strategies, and for developing campaign assets.

This is a central part of our work with ACC.  Read more here.

Our proprietary behaviour change framework identifies both conscious and non-conscious influences to inform intervention design​. This tool has been used to create insights across many areas of public policy.

Our commitment model uses population-level analysis to inform strategies for sustained behaviour change and close the intention-action gap. Importantly, it supports the targeting of specific groups in the population with the highest propensity to change behaviour, supporting more effective ROI.

Read how we used these frameworks to reduce construction waste here.

We use proprietary tools which combine our expertise in behavioural science with clients’ knowledge of the environments in which they operate to develop innovative ideas for interventions, draw on established techniques to prioritise and shortlist these ideas, and build and test prototypes of the most promising options. These design inputs maximise the likelihood of success when interventions are scaled up and rolled out.

Our specialist approach to public sector campaign testing and evaluation moves beyond simply assessing reactions to, and reach of,  campaigns. Our work focuses on a deep understanding of a campaign’s attention, motivation, and action, to achieve intended behavioural outcomes - and draws on our global experience and learning from similar challenges. 

We have a range of innovative techniques to help ascertain the likelihood of real world impact before interventions are launched.  These include immersive online experiments in our Behaviour Change Lab to identify the most effective behavioural interventions, a range of RCT approaches to trial interventions in the field, and advanced statistical methods to model the drivers of impact and return on investment. From these we provide robust evidence to underpin policy and spending decisions. 

We provide diagnostic analysis of the reasons for a campaign or intervention’s effectiveness and make evidence-based recommendations for optimisation on further roll-out; we publish results wherever possible; and we offer a range of client training opportunities to build capabilities in behavioural science and communications research. In this way we ensure that our projects have long-term impact, and clients benefit from the breadth of our work.

Read how our recommendations led to a 2000% ROI for IRD here.