Nudging residents online€¦ · • General marketing channels and the media not particularly effective. • Social media was good for message testing and fairly successful (but

Nudging residents online

Dominic Ridley-MoyRidley Moy Communications

M: 07900 886 046 E: [email protected]

RMRidley MoyCommunications

mailto:[email protected]


Ridley Moy Communications

Experiences at London Borough of Havering

Phase One: traditional marketing and communications

Phase Two: low cost nudge techniques, used in Central

Government

Theory behind nudge, useful resources

Trailed nudges techniques

Phase Three: online only, for some services.

Havering: East London


Romford

Upminster

Cranham

Hornchurch

Rainham

Harold Hill

Elm Park

226,000 residents, 98,500 households

Low government grant, compared with other London Boroughs

Large funding gap, which only got bigger

A number of significant pressures: elderly population.


Phase One:Traditional communications

techniques

Your Council, Anytime – Year 1


• Getting the basics in place: very close working with

customer services.

• Revamping the website, systems and processes.

• Testing, re-testing and evaluating e-forms – to pay &

apply for services and report issues.

• Finished with 3 month communications campaign.


Your Council, Anytime – Year 1


Focus of Communications Campaign,

• Fly-tipping

• Missed rubbish collection

• Problem with street light

• Problem with road/pavement

• Obstruction on a road.

Focused on

high

volume

StreetCare

issues

Dec: mainly

internal

Jan-March:

campaign


Initial concern about

unintentional

consequences.

Focused on fly

tipping initially, with

some apply, pay,

report messages

Set objectives

+ 4 percentage point increase in issues reported online.

+ 8% percentage point increase in fly tipping reported online.


Tightly

defined

objectives

Focused on

“Reporting”

online

Publicity


• Borough wide posters

• Council magazine, press releases – editorial & adverts

• Flyers

• Email

• Facebook advertising

• Twitter

• Talks to community groups

• Internal Comms (across all channels).

Budget: £10,000

Started to convert to nudge principles


Report fly-tipping online, in

Havering

Report fly-tipping online, in

Havering

Randomised

control trials

Tested

messages on

Facebook

Evaluation of Facebook campaigns


Website Clicks 95 28

Post Likes 78 41

Post engagements 134 751

Cost per engagement $0.75 $0.13

Reach 27651 22239

Overall spend $100 (£60.94) $100 (£60.94)

Cost per click £0.64 £2.18

Complaints/Enquiries via web (Jan-March)

Type of query

Number of

queries Notes on Type of Query

Customer Services 1 Phone line always engaged.

External Site Issue 18

Problems accessing Council's external sites

e.g. planning.

General Enquiries 24

Customers asking specific questions, who,

what, when, where, why.

My Account 21 All activation/login issues.

Online form 11

Only one query about "logged issue not

being processed". Issues mainly about

map page problems.

Search Box 36

Customer has entered something in the

site search box and can’t find what they

were looking for from the results.

Website feedback 24

Customers providing us with feedback on

usability, out of date information, ease of

use, broken links.

Total Queries 135

Email newsletter

• July 2014 2,595 signed up, Jan 2015 10,045 signed up.

• 15 email newsletters – Borough News, Travel, Romford Market, Cycle

News and Cleaner Havering.

• Weekly, Monthly, Every 6 weeks, Ad hoc.

Most popular topics are:

• Cleaner Havering (4,720 subscribers)

• Businesses (3,667 subscribers)

• Events (2,159 subscribers)

• Council Tax (2,052 subscribers)

• Media Update (2,047 subscribers)

• Travel Update (2,008 subscribers)

• Health (2,006 subscribers).

Overlay on front

page

Email newsletter

Spike in

registrations

when email

newsletter went

out

Evaluation

Report It:

Target: +4 percentage points

Result: +9 percentage points

(21% to 30% of all transactions online)

Fly tipping:

Target: +8 percentage points

Result: +12.2 percentage points

(14% to 26.2% of all transactions online)

Evaluation

• General marketing channels and the media not particularly

effective.

• Social media was good for message testing and fairly

successful (but created more work than it solved).

• Email and direct letters by far the most successful channels

offering by far the best value for money.

The next steps


• Where can we add value?

• Won’t have large budgets to run borough wide

advertising campaigns.

• Work with departments to think online first.

• Learn lessons from Central Government “test, learn,

adapt”.



Learning from Central Government


“relatively minor changes to processes, forms and

language can have a significant, positive impact on

behaviour”

e.g. HMRC, DVLA

Changes to how letters are written and laid out, as well

as what colours are used.

Mindspace techniques


Organ donation: randomised control trials

135,000 people usedeach variation of the website.

Very difficult to predictwhich wold prove mosteffective.


Organ donation: randomised control trialsResults


100,000 extra

people joining

the organ

donation

register per

year, compared

with control.


HMRC: Lessons from behavioural science – seven steps

to reduce fraud, error and debt

Insight 1. Make it easy

Insight 2. Highlight key messages

Insight 3. Use personal language

Insight 4. Prompt honesty at key moments

Insight 5. Tell people what others are doing

Insight 6. Reward desired behaviour

Insight 7. Highlight the risk and impact of dishonesty.



Easy Attractive Social Timely

• Harness the power of defaults.

• Reduce the ‘hassle factor’ of taking up a service.

• Simplify messages.

Example: Auto-enrolment into pension schemes In the

first six months after employees in large firms were

automatically enrolled into pension schemes, participation

rates rose from 61 to 83%.



• Attract attention.

• Design rewards and sanctions for maximum effect.

Example: Drawing the attention of those who fail to pay road tax

When letters to non-payers of car tax included a picture of the

offending vehicle, payment rates rose from 40 to 49%.



• Show that most people perform the desired

behaviour.

• Design rewards and sanctions for maximum effect.

Example: Using social norms to increase tax payments

When people were told in letters from HMRC that most people

pay their tax on time, it increased significantly payment rates.

The most successful message led to a 5 percentage point

increase in payments.



• Prompt people when they are likely to be most

receptive.

• Consider the immediate costs and benefits.

• Help people plan their response to events.

Example: Increasing payment rates through text messages

Prompting those owing Courts Service fines with a text message

10 days before the bailiffs are to be sent to a person’s home

doubles the value of payments made, without the need for

further intervention.



1) Define the outcome.

- Identify exactly what behaviour is to be influenced.

2) Understand the context.

3) Build your intervention.

4) Test, learn, adapt.

- Use randomised controlled trials to evaluate its

interventions.

- Introduce a control group so you can understand what

would have happened if you had done nothing.

Beware of unintended consequences


Parents were arriving late to collect their children at a nursery in Israel.

In response, the nursery fined those who didn't pick their kids up on time.

Except this did not result in increased punctuality; quite the opposite.

Parents were more likely to be late after the fines were introduced. They

simply paid the fee and thought no more about it. The intrinsic motivation

– to conform to the social norm of being on time – was crowded out by the

extrinsic motivation of cash fines.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/23/finingparents-unpunctual-school-pupils

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/23/fining-parents-unpunctual-school-pupils

Case Study One: Garden Waste renewals


• Letter mail out to 20,000 residents with Garden Waste

bins, giving them a choice of renewing online, by

phone, by post or in person.

• Target: 20% renewals online.

Two, maybe three pronged approach

• Main focus: redesigning

the letter.

• Regular email reminders.

• Social media, but tailed

off during campaign.

Changes to letter


Reduce the hassle factor:

make online easy.

Attract attention through design,

• Eyetracker research.

• Focused on front page, 2 ½ times

more attention than back.

• Actions on right in line, with headline.

• Use some colour, but not too

much.

Evaluation

46%

ONLINE

41% AUTOMATED

PHONE LINE

11,500 new online

accounts created.

20 times the usual

volume of

registrations.

Previously online transactions, as an overall % of transactionspeaked at around 22%.

Effective use of email

• 46,694 individual subscribers to the

email bulletins

Opting in to a total of 155,770 topics

• Overlay, a huge increase in subscriptions.

Knock on effect on services

Street lighting

problems

increasingly

reported, with

no

communications

Case Study Two: Parking Permit Renewals


• Demonstrating value of nudge techniques.

• Service asked for: advertising, press releases, leaflets,

etc…

• A different solution, much more low cost and common

sense.

Case Study Two: Parking Permit renewals


Didn’t mention you can still renew over the

phone or person; made online the default.

Parking permit expires soon

Write letter to resident, about

new online renewal service

Resident renews online

Results


• 80-100 letters sent out at a time – 80/90% renewed online,

versus 20% (control).

• Overall parking permit transactions going up significantly.

Case Study Three: Building Control Inspections


Aim: to shift builders to booking Building Control Inspections

online rather than by phone.

Execution:

Building control inspectors to communicate new online service

to builders, • leaflet promoting the service

• branded giveaway

(QR code directed builders to the online booking form).

Case Study Three: Building Control Inspections


Results: 1 out of 25 builders used booking system, so rethought the

intervention.

Was it the default? NO

Did it make the action easier? NO

Was there an incentive? NO

Redesigning services


• 9 out of 10 residents, pay their Council Tax on time, do you?

• Encourage take up of services, when registering a birth.

• Reviewed online forms, prompt honesty – e.g. if you give a dishonest

answer to the following question, you could be liable for a fine of...

• More personalised letters.

• Colour/signage to grab people’s attention, and divert people to them to

the online computer terminals in the Public Advice and Service Centre.

Next phase

Increasingly moved to online servicesto save money


Out of hours online contact

Increasing

trend,

contacting

Council

while closed

Documents

Nudging residents online€¦ · • General marketing channels and the media not particularly effective. • Social media was good for message testing and fairly successful (but