The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Behaviour Change ~ Our top three blogs on Richard Thaler: here, here and here
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their thaler from their Thaler.
This week we bring you a special edition about how Nudge changed the way we think about human behaviour, and the top three blogs to guide you through Richard Thaler’s brain. Plus, there’s a must-read article from the LGA about why story-telling matters and what that means for local authorities. And from the serious to the (semi-) silly, we look at how to save crumbling buildings with pieces of Lego.
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, wherein lies the philosophising pollstering psychologist’s stone.
David Evans
Director
Everything you need to know about Richard Thaler’s Nudge
As we covered in last week’s Weekly, the Nobel Prize in Economics was this year awarded to Richard Thaler for his pioneering work about how to ‘nudge’ people to make better decisions. Since then, we’ve continued sifting through behaviour change blogs to find the best pieces about Thaler’s work. We’ve come across three that we thought TCC Weekly readers would like to see. Together they give a balanced view on the importance, application and limitations of his work. Click:
Here to read a neat summary about the importance of Nudge
Here to read about the challenges ahead in applying Thaler’s work
And here for an interview Thaler did with strategy consultancy McKinsey back in 2011, in the early days of the ‘No 10 Nudge Unit’
Good story-telling and what it means for public engagement
Good local authorities, we would argue, don’t view public engagement as an ‘add-on’ – a thing they’re obliged to do but don’t really want to. Instead, they see engagement as something that is integral to who they are and the way they do things – a crucial component of their DNA without which they wouldn’t be able to serve local communities.
In our New Conversations guide, we set out the three components that we think form the key ingredients to good public engagement: consult (listen), communicate (speak), and develop a strategy (or lead). Crucially, all three elements need to be integrated and overlap if engagement is to be effective (hence the graph above which moves from the old way of doing things – where different council department functions aren’t integrated – to the new – where they are).
This week, LGA Comms director David Holdstock writes a fascinating piece about how councils communicate (what we visualise as the speaking function above). The blog outlines the importance of ‘corporative narrative’ and being intelligent about how you communicate with local communities. There are parallels with our approach as it also points to the importance of leadership and knowing how to listen to effect real change.
The Values Lab is based on the Values Modes segmentation tool – created by Cultural Dynamics and used by TCC– which divides the population into ethics-driven Pioneers, aspirational Prospectors, and threat-wary Settlers. Take the test here to see which you are.
Environmental values
With Coca-Cola getting behind the plastic bottle deposit scheme campaign this week, we thought we’d look at the environment and what it means to different Values groups. We donned our lab coats, brought out our Petri dishes, and analysed extent of agreement with the following statement:
“I strongly believe that people should care for nature. Looking after the environment is important.”
Pioneers
Prospectors
Settlers
Not at all/not like me
6%
7%
12%
A little/Quite like me
45%
44%
46%
Like/very much like me
49%
49%
43%
The results are encouraging for environmental campaigners. It shows that the environment – though often perceived to be more of a Pioneer issue – is something that everyone cares about.
The trick probably lies in framing things intelligently. The statement references neutral terms like ‘nature’ – and so it is constructed in a way that the vast majority would find difficult to disagree with. This contrasts with environmental debates, for example about climate change, which are often perceived as politicised and are therefore more polarising. Perhaps the lesson for green campaigners is to use terms which come across as uncontroversial in order to reach out to a wider pool of people.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the loft that is built not of bricks but opts for the ostensibly more robust material that are Lego pieces:
