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:
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Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their common rulebook from their Common Rule.
So it’s not coming home just yet, but whether you spent Thursday crying in a quiet corner of your office or sighing with relief that World Cup fever has evaporated, it’s time you threw yourself back into the regular, comforting routine of having a cursory scroll through this topically 3rd/4th place play-off-quality newsletter. But we must be gracious and say ‘Sretno Hrvatska’ as TCC has worked extensively in Croatia and we have many Croatian friends.
We’ve got a cracking guide on the potential for nudge to help students get into and through higher education up first, before marking the appointment of a digital-eager Health Secretary in our Politics section. The Values Lab this week compares values across the generations, before we end up in the Generation Game conveyer belt that is Charlie’s Attic, which this week features Britain’s favourite ice lolly, Vladimir Putin channelling Baddiel and Skinner, and Tennent’s Lager’s special tribute to Trump.
There’s a big push to widen participation in higher education, and to successfully achieve this there are a range of barriers that educational institutions need to help potential students overcome.
It’s a major challenge and one that undoubtedly requires a range of approaches, but one piece of work that caught our eye from across the pond is this guide to using behavioural science to help get students into and through post-secondary education, a collaboration between the University of Virginia’s Nudge4 Solutions Lab and non-profit ideas42.
Launched in May in partnership with Michelle Obama’s Reach Higher Initiative, the guide covers three main areas where behavioural science can make a positive difference – removing barriers to college in the first place; helping students to navigate college life and succeed academically; and improving access to financial assistance and guiding students to make smart financial decisions – and is supported by a hotline offering free support to practitioners.
The guide is jam packed with interesting ideas, and well worth a read if you’ve got an interest in improving higher education opportunities.
It’s been a bracing week in British politics, with a handful of high profile resignations causing a stir in the Cabinet. But while many are talking about those who’ve departed, the upshot of this is that their vacant posts have new occupants. One of those newbies is new Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
He shot to the attention of the engagement world in February with the launch of his own app – pitched as an opportunity to keep up with Matt in both his roles as MP for West Suffolk and as (then) Culture Secretary. Whatever you think of this, it does show he’s prepared to give new engagement methods a chance, so it will be interesting to see if he continues to plug this angle in his new role.
When we wrote the LGA’s New Conversations guide to engagement last year, ‘Pillar I: From analogue to digital’ covered the increasing role digital has to play in engagement, reflecting the increasingly digital world in which we live, with examples of how to get it wrong as well as right – and while this was written from a local government perspective, the principle applies to the health service too.
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.
Values and age
YouGov pumped out some of its Profiles data last week, suggesting that our motivations shift as we get older, with young adults driven by goals, money and other people, but as we age we care less about what others think of us. The more senior among us are also, apparently, more likely to be motivated by your nearest and dearest, whether that’s your partner or your family.
This all sounded very Values-y to us, so once we’d mopped up the beer that we’d hurled into the air when Kieran Trippier scored and we still dreamed it was coming home, we put our freshly cleaned Values Lab back to work by looking at how different age groups break down between the Values groups.
What that chart tells us is that, as you tick up the age groups, stability and security-driven Settlers make up an increasingly large portion, while status and achievement-driven Prospectors, on the whole, decrease. This certainly supports YouGov’s suggestion that older members of society value the very Settler priority of family, but less so the more Prospector motivations of achievement, goals and what other people think of us.
There is an argument in Values Modes theory that the shift in Values breakdowns through age groups is less down to values changing as we age, and more down to the aging of values with those who hold them, so it would be interesting in ten or twenty years’ time, whether we see the same patterns, or if everything has just shifted along a bit.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, TCC’s elixir of life that maintains our Peter Pan-esque agelessness:
