We tend to pay more attention to novel stimuli, things that are personalised to us and things that offer rewards. Do you know someone who buys everything with a reduced price sticker on it in a supermarket, even if it’s only a tiny discount? The way that the discount sticker acts as a simple visual cue to grab our attention helps to explain why.
When designing policies and services you can make it attractive by:
- Personalising. Simply adding someone’s name to otherwise generic text messages or emails tends to increase response rates.
- Attracting attention. We are more likely to engage with information that contains visually appealing stimuli (colour, images and bolding).
- Using rewards and incentives. These can be effective tools at encouraging a given behaviour, whether or not the reward is financial. In one previous study, offering a bag of sweets more than tripled the proportion of employees who donated a day’s wages to charity.
Make it Attractive: Case study on reducing no-shows at GP appointments
More than 15 million GP appointments are wasted each year because patients do not turn up or fail to cancel. On top of the disruption, this incurs costs of more than £200 million for the NHS every year.
The Behavioural Insights Team worked with the NHS to test out a range of pre-appointment reminder text messages designed to reduce no-shows. The most effective message, which warned patients that each appointment costs the NHS £160, reduced non-attendance by a quarter.
