The Nudge: making it persuasive, making it personal

Make it persuasive. Make it personal. We know these are important practises for crafting client-focused, business winning bids, proposals and presentations. Important for convincing the C-suite that we can address their business problems, and help them to achieve their key goals and objectives. Important for our procurement cousins, who expect us to demonstrate value for money.

It’s claimed that the UK Government is saving hundreds of millions of pounds by altering the way officials communicate with us. Rather colloquially, this approach is referred to as “the nudge”. Pioneered by The Behavioural Insights Team – a social purpose company with its roots in 10 Downing Street and part funded by the UK Government – nudging uses simple persuasion and personalisation techniques to help government departments and agencies improve the way they deliver public services.

How to get the richest 1% of the population to pay their outstanding taxes more quickly?

Use our old friend, persuasion. By tuning the language in their communications, HM Treasury collected over £210m in overdue taxes. Simply changing a few words and elaborating on the potential outcomes of late or non-payment realised a shift in compliant respondents from 39% to 56%.

How to get more unemployed people to attend job interviews?

Say hello to personalisation. Simply personalising the SMS job alerts sent to potential applicants – adding the candidate’s forename, wishing them good luck and signing off in person – saw the number of candidates attending interviews increase from 11% to 27%.

Persuasion and personalisation work!

As the UK’s “nudge unit” has illustrated in these two examples, the application of persuasion and personalisation techniques can have a striking, quantifiable impact on our behaviour and decision making processes. So, the next time you’re tendering for a £210m technology contract, or writing a proposal to get your billable consultants off the bench, take time to care about what is motivating all the people evaluating your offer. Make it persuasive. Make it personal.

Read more about nudging in the book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness” by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein. See the BBC News article that moved me to post this.