Expert insights: Behaviour Change campaign tips from Dr Rory Gallagher

We asked Rory to share his top line recommendations for developing effective behaviour change campaigns.

If you're designing a behaviour change campaign, make sure you really understand your audience and the behaviour you're trying to change. To do that, you need to undertake a variety of qualitative and quantitative consumer research, to fully understand the data that tells you why particular audience segments are behaving in particular ways and the barriers that might be preventing that behaviour from happening.  

If you're able to do that, as well as target your interventions effectively, you’re much more likely to see the behaviour change you desire.

Three key tips when designing a behaviour change program would be to understand, design and test.  

1 - First, understand your audience and the behaviour you’re trying to change.  

2 - Next, design the system around that to try and make it as easy as possible for humans to undertake that behaviour: make it easy, attractive, social and timely.  

3 - Finally, test to see if it does actually work in practice.

Often we roll out a behaviour change program but we're not able to actually track whether it works or not, particularly who it works for and why. A lack of data and measurement is probably the biggest and most frequent barrier to effective behaviour change.

One of the most powerful methods of behaviour change is just to simplify a process. That can be simplifying the language. It can be simplifying the way that you change that behaviour.  

We live in a battle for people's attention. People are spread very thin, and even one extra click on a website can mean people fall out of your process.  

The clearer you can make your call to action and the least number of steps that people have to take to change that behaviour or sign up for something, the better.

We live in an attention economy where firms are competing for our attention. The smartphones we carry around everywhere with us have made that race even faster and tighter.  

So actually, the method that you have here, where you have people alone in the bathroom for two minutes, and an opportunity to engage them, is an extremely precious one and a really valuable one to use for behaviour change.

About Rory

Dr Rory Gallagher is former Managing Director of the Behavioural Insights Team Asia Pacific.  He led the establishment of the New South Wales Department of Premier and Cabinet’s Behavioural Insights Unit and has also worked with numerous state and commonwealth departments, as well as NGOs and philanthropic bodies across Australia. Prior to joining the Behavioural Insights Team, Rory worked in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit.