Behavioural Insights (BI) Practitioners-in-training in UBC’s Advanced Professional Certificate in Behavioural Insights complete a capstone project to apply their developing BI knowledge and skills to real-world problems. As teams turn these projects into working papers, conference presentations, and journal articles, we’ll be posting them to the BI wiki at https://blogs.ubc.ca/biwiki/bi-at-ubc/. This week’s featured project is:
Check Your Inbox: Evaluating the Impact of Email Reminders on Hearing Attendance
Alexis Gordon, Emily Medd, & Lindsay Miles-Pickup
(Advisor: Kirstin Appelt)
This project aimed to increase attendance at tenancy dispute hearings managed by the BC Residential Tenancy Branch. New “Behavioural Insights informed” pre-hearing notification emails incorporated salient information, consequences of inaction, and actionable next steps. Due to feasibility constraints, control and BI-informed emails were compared in a quasi-experimental trial. Although the BI-informed emails did not significantly increase hearing attendance, the project team identified several useful insights, including the impact of cultural holidays, missing email addresses, and other barriers.
Keywords: behavioural insights, nudge, email reminder, salience, consequences, call to action, attendance, dispute resolution
[ Working Paper PDF | Conference Video & Slides ]