Behavioural and Communications

Providing policy makers with insight into factors that influence citizens’ decisions and behaviours, solutions that will drive change in support of better social outcomes, evidence of impact, and consultancy to support a cycle of continuous improvement.

To speak to one of our Behavioural and Communications experts, please contact us.

Systemic and sustainable behaviour change is central to addressing many of the most pressing public policy challenges, from the climate emergency to public health, and misinformation to domestic abuse. It is often critical to achieving better outcomes for individual citizens.

Policy makers have a number of levers available to them, including campaigns which aim to educate or motivate their target audiences, opportunities to alter the context in which citizens make decisions and act, and legislative and regulatory options such as taxation, penalties and incentives. Behavioural science and communications expertise needs to underpin the design and optimisation of these activities if they are to be as effective as possible.

Our behavioural and communications research and advisory teams help their clients in government and elsewhere to define behavioural challenges; provide insight into what influences individual and organisational behaviours; support the design of communications, interventions and strategies for driving change; trial and evaluate campaigns and interventions; and consider opportunities for improvement.

We use a wide range of behavioural models to understand conscious and non-conscious influences on behaviours, innovative methods to develop interventions ideas and prototypes, and a variety of statistical approaches to analyse experimental data and model campaign impacts.

Our approach

Our experts draw on our own global best practice tools and frameworks to design bespoke solutions to policy challenges.  From problem definition, to behavioural insight development and intervention design, to pre-testing to reduce risk and evaluating outcomes post implementation to inform future work – our proprietary DEEPER process designs for, and delivers, impact.

Our specialist approach to public sector communications development and evaluation moves beyond simply assessing reactions to 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.

Initial consultancy to support the design of activities

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.

Behavioural insights and creative development research

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.

Interventions design and testing

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.

Experiments, trials and campaign evaluation

We use primary and secondary data and proprietary frameworks to measure the impact of communications campaigns, 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.

Learning and improvement

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.

Behaviour change

Our framework to explore and understand both conscious and non-conscious influences to inform intervention design. This tool has been used to create insights across many areas of public policy - including the ‘wicked’ and enduring social problems of gender based violence and sexual consent - where our work has formed the basis of ground breaking, confronting and highly effective landmark campaigns.

Commitment model

This tool allows for population-level analysis to inform strategies for sustained  behaviour change and close the intention-action gap. Most importantly, it supports the targeting of specific groups in the population with the highest propensity to change behaviour, supporting more effective ROI.