Contagious Truth - behaviour change & social marketing

By Emma Young. While some research suggests activism can be alienating, other studies highlight power of outrage to change behaviour.

A well-told story can inspire people to engage with social and environmental issues, but how do nonprofits channel that energy into behaviors that make a difference? Behavioral science can help point the way.

Charitable organizations can use insights from behavioral economics to help people follow through on their impulsive and deliberative intentions to give.

A list of SSIR articles to help your team define and achieve its goals for doing better in 2020.

In her column this week, Axios’ Amy Harder offers “confessions of an energy reporter,” and admits that even she — someone fluent in facts…

As other collective action problems, mitigating climate change requires a minimum number of cooperating countries before losses are averted. Benefit is shared and cooperation is costly: how to prevent free-riding, then?

The emergence of the International Social Marketing Association (iSMA) and its affiliated regional associations is a key indicator that social marketing is matu...

People with cancer are fed up of the language of war, says Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins

Elske van de Fliert of the Centre of Communicatio…

How can a social marketing campaign actually promote the very behavior they are trying to prevent? See how and learn how you can avoid this in your own work.

“Journey” metaphor may encourage feelings of personal growth.

The evidence about the effectiveness of behaviour change approaches—what works and what does not work—is unclear. What we do know is that single interventions that target a specific behavioural risk have little impact on the determinants that actually cause poor health, especially for vulnerable people. This has not prevented health promoters from continuing to invest in behaviour change interventions which are widely used in a range of programs. The future of behaviour change and health promotion is through the application of a comprehensive strategy with three core components: (1) a behav...

Nonprofits struggling to keep supporters excited about their causes should follow these five recommendations to make the most of Stanford behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg's model for getting people to act.

In order to describe the social marketing plan, we need to have a Background, Purpose and Focus Socio- Cultural Forces - psychographics of the intended adopters - Internal attributes such as attitudes, values, preferences, mind set, motivation, predisposition and personality

Approach behavioral science with necessary controls, rigorous testing and respect.

Decoy marketing, sometimes called decoy pricing, uses an inferior product at a similar price to increase sales of a better product.

Highways England is increasingly using behavioural insights to gain a clearer understanding of why people drive the way that they do, as it looks to make roads safer.

There is no greater teacher than experience — or the experience of others, it turns out. Educating the anti-vaxx population has proven to be challenging, yet a new intervention conducted by researchers at Brigham Young University appears to work: introduce anti-vaxxers to people who have suffered from vaccine-preventable diseases.The study, published in the journal Vaccines, was conducted with college students in Provo, Utah, a city with the sixth-highest number of under-vaccinated kindergartners. Of the 574 student volunteers, 491 were pro-vaccine and 83 were vaccine-hesitant. Half of thes...

Communication strategy can’t be an afterthought for organizations that want to fully embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion. It requires a careful examination of words, images, ideas, and narrative framing. Where should you start? Using insight from systems thinking and social, behavioral, and cognitive science, Ann Christiano and Annie Neimand describe how to craft stories and multimedia experiences that disrupt bias and drive social change. They present four questions to help develop an effective communication strategy—a “back-of-the-envelope” framework they also outlined in an article ...

New research from FlexMR highlights the challenges of understanding modern consumer behavior.

Executives setting up a behavioral-science unit should start by challenging themselves with six questions.

One of the appealing aspects of behavioral science is that rather than being a single, over-arching theory, it’s a broad collection of biases. That means

From Marie Kondo’s tips for decluttering to entire communities moving towards minimalist living, people around the world are trying to change their own behaviours for the better – sometimes r…

Here's 5 ways to make facts matter through good storytelling.

Cat management is often discussed in terms of population reduction, with trap-neuter-return (TNR) campaigns commonly organized to manage unowned urban cat populations. However, long-term effectiveness is only possible if positive neutering practises are continued by local residents. Here we discuss how implementing TNR within a wider framework of social engagement has the potential to tackle cat overpopulation and instil long-term positive behaviour change towards them. We demonstrate how community engagement pre-TNR can help establish a baseline of the attitudes, knowledge and behaviour co...

Find out how we ranked the 2019 Super Bowl ads based on our approach to behavior change.