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Brought to you by the BIAS team April 2012
Welcome! This is the first email blast about behavioral economics and the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families’ Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project. The BIAS project learns and applies tools from behavioral science to improve the well-being of low-income children, adults, and families.
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Behavioral Insight
Want to get your staff to meet deadlines?
We've all experienced crunch periods as we approach a deadline. How can we get ourselves (and our staff) to start working on a project before the deadline looms? A study with bank loan officers who were having trouble meeting their monthly performance goals - even with a large bonus program already in place—suggests one minimal cost approach. Offering weekly reminders of progress and a newsletter congratulating staff who met their weekly goals increased staff productivity, reduced stress levels, and increased job satisfaction.
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Accomplishments
Engaging ACF Stakeholders
Over the past year, the BIAS team connected with nearly 100 ACF stakeholders in order to learn more about ACF programming and generate interest and excitement around potential behavioral innovations. The team spoke with state and local administrators, policymakers, practitioners, policy analysts, and researchers, learning about their programs and introducing them to the core principles of behavioral economics and its application to public programs. These exploratory sessions generated a network of interested practitioners eager to learn more about incorporating behavioral insights and piloting interventions to address program challenges. These discussions uncovered a spectrum of challenges facing program administrators across ACF programs.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) stakeholders are interested in strategies for improving program participation, reducing noncompliance, and re‐engaging partially sanctioned clients. Child care administrators are seeking new ways to engage families in making care decisions based on quality rating systems, and increasing understanding of the importance of early care experiences for child development. These issues resonate with the goals of child care policymakers and experts, who are trying to increase the proportion of children enrolled in licensed and high‐quality care settings. Child support directors aspire to attract noncustodial parents early on, to make sure orders match ability to pay, and to improve consistency of payments. These challenges and others have had some response to conventional solutions (such as pure increases in generosity of payments) but may well benefit from the behavioral insights.
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Upcoming Milestones
Many of the programmatic challenges described by ACF stakeholders seem likely candidates for behavioral intervention. In order to identify which program challenges do indeed exhibit behavioral underpinnings, the team applies a diagnostic framework called behavioral mapping. This exercise is comprised of a series of steps that allow the team to identify all possible behavioral problems in a given program; focus on the key behavioral bottlenecks in program processes; diagnose specific factors and decision makers in play; and propose a set of behavioral solutions that can potentially address these issues within the context of the existing program. The BIAS team has launched several behavioral mapping activities across ACF’s key program areas:
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Working with the National Domestic Violence Hotline, the team is seeking approaches to increase calls answered, decrease calls that hang‐up, especially after a reasonable wait time, or both;
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With Illinois’ Department of Human Services and one of their employment providers, Asian Human Services, the team is investigating strategies to improve program participation and reduce drop‐off in ways that go beyond basic factors like access to child care;
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With Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Child and Family Services, the team is exploring methods to improve outreach to parents to increase their use of Maine’s quality rating systems in making childcare decisions; and,
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With Texas’s Office of Child Support, the team is seeking potential behavioral approaches to increase effectiveness of outreach to adjust child support orders and re‐engage noncustodial parents’ visitation with their children.
The next BIAS buzz will feature updates on the behavioral insights from these mapping activities.
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From the BIAS team at OPRE, MDRC and ideas42.
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