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:
This week we’ve got a handy tool that lets you in on a few secrets of the non-stop party that is behaviour change theory, and we put coalitions of political parties under the Values microscope following the Dutch election. There’s more on cohesion and trust in PPP, and a look at engagement gone digital. And of course, it wouldn’t be TCC Weekly if we didn’t round off with Charlie’s Attic, which recently welcomed the digital age with its first fax.
David Evans
Director
PS For the next few weeks our Health Hub will be re-branded as a pop-up Engagement Hub. We’ll bring you titbits on consultation and engagement from New Conversations – a guide we wrote for the Local Government Association on forging a better dialogue with residents.
If you see a link that belongs in The Weekly then email it to us and we’ll give you a free TCC exclamation mark to say thanks. Meanwhile, if you’re interested to see the mad, marvellous and missable articles featured in previous editions just click here for the full back catalogue.
If you’ve dipped your toe into behaviour change or like the idea of it, but you’re unsure how to utilise it to help inform policy or the way your organisation works, the Nudge Unit’s shiny but simple new tool could be for you.
EAST is the BIT’s handy acronym for simple application of behavioural insights, signposting four key principles to making behaviour change successful:
Make it easy – reducing hassle, or even making it the default option, goes a long way
Make it attractive – from catchy messaging to incentivising change with rewards
Make it social – never underestimate the power of social norms, so use early adopters to inspire others
Make it timely – pushing change when people are most likely to respond positively
We’d find it hard to disagree with any of these tenets from our experience and knowledge of nudge, so why not have a read of the framework and get your hands on a deck of brainstorming cards here.
The Economist this week put the increasing pre-eminence of fervent vilification of opponents over rationalism in public debate in the context of Owen Jones’ retreat from social media, with the Guardian journalist lamenting the increasing inability of those on either side of discussions to accept political disagreement in good faith.
Polarisation and acrimony in political debate both stems from and exacerbates declining levels of trust, and low trust, as mentioned in the article, tends to be bad for society more widely.
For organisations striving to improve things for their own societies, rebuilding that trust is vital – hence why community cohesion is once again a buzzword around the country, particularly where populations are changing, as highlighted by friend of TCC Prof Richard Webber, and creator of Mosaic and Acorn, in this article on his ground-breaking Origins software. As we’ve found from our own cohesion work, difficult conversations are a necessary step with both sides of any divide in order to bridge gaps and build trust.
Also this week:
If there is to be an IndyRef2, make some informed predictions by checking out the detailed results from the first round here
Which big issues did Spreadsheet Phil miss out of the Budget?
In local government, control of media tends to extend as far as a newsletter or social media account, whose readerships dwindle some distance below the hundreds of millions, engaging residents and communities requires a different approach.
In the LGA’s TCC-authored New Conversations guide, Pillar I (p.136-143) discusses the new world of tools that can be used to engage, listen and respond as well as awareness-raise, from canny social media to purpose built apps, as well as some guidelines on online consultation from our friends at the Consultation Institute.
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.
After incumbent PM Mark Rutte came out on top over Geert Wilders and even further over the Labour Party in the Dutch general election this week, he’ll now be looking to build a multi-party coalition to carry on as the guy in charge.
So with plenty of compromise and bridge-building to come, we wheeled the criminally underused TCC cheese platter into the Values Lab, and sat down to examine openness and values, over a decadent helping of Edam, Gouda and Maasdam.
The heatmap shows that Pioneers are the most likely to feel strongly that they should listen to people different from themselves. 20 per cent of this group, in the bottom right, feel this way, compared to 16 per cent Prospectors, on the left of the map. The big difference though, is between these groups and Settlers in the top right – just 9 per cent of this group feel this way. So socially conservative Settlers may be most resistant to differing points of view, and therefore the most averse to compromise – an important aspect to bear in mind in everyday community relations as well as government-building.
