What is behavioural insights?
Behavioural insights draws on research into human behaviour and decision making based on psychology, economics, and social sciences. It recognises that people’s behaviour can change moment to moment, that we don't always do what we plan to do, and that surprising things can affect our decisions.
The aim of behavioural insights is to develop a better understanding of what drives people’s actions and choices, so that we can reduce barriers to change and design better services, communications, and policies for Victorians.
Case studies on how can behavioural insights help
Improving the home learning environment
Behavioural insights helped the PlayLearnGrow program support parents to improve their children’s home learning through text messages. 12,000 parents took part and 42% tried most of the ideas provided.
COVID-19 decision tool
Read about how we created an online decision tool to help people navigate COVID-19 exposure. The tool was used 23,000 times in the first 10 weeks.
Increasing HPV vaccinations
Learn how we increased return consent form rates by 3.5 percentage points, increasing the likelihood of students receiving the HPV vaccine by 1.7 percentage points.
Increasing hospital appointment attendance
Understand how behavioural insights increased the likelihood of patients attending their hospital appointments by introducing text message reminders.
Increasing organ donor registration
Behavioural insights helped VicRoads and the Department of Health understand what kind of behaviourally-informed messages would increase organ donation registration.
Encouraging use of digital services
Consumer Affairs Victoria used behavioural insights to increase the number of callers who go online for their query by 54%, moving about 13,600 people from telephone help to the website per-year.
Increasing land tax payments
By redesigning the Land Tax Assessment Notice, we increased the proportion of Victorians paying land tax via BPAY by 34%.
Increasing liquor licencing renewals
Using behaviourally-informed messaging, we increased the number of liquor licence holders who paid for their licence in full by the due date by 7.4 percentage points.
Supporting the adoption of the Family Violence MARAM Framework
Read about how we supported the implementation of the Multi-Agency Risk Assessment and Management (MARAM) Framework by designing new decision tools and training sessions for staff.
Better family violence information sharing
Learn how we improved information sharing across the family violence system by simplifying the number of issues workers must consider to improve efficiency and reduce errors in workers’ decisions.
Increasing apprentice licences and supervision rates
We helped Energy Safe Victoria engage with electrical apprentices and employers about getting licensed.
Understanding how to increase reporting of workplace law breaches
We helped Wage Inspectorate Victoria develop a decision tool and user journey to understand the barriers to reporting breaches of workplace law and design solutions to encourage reporting.
Increasing court summons attendance
Behavioural insights helped simplify the court summons form to make it easier for people to show up to court, and reduce the number of missed court proceedings.
Measuring impact of Healthy Homes energy upgrades
By designing a randomised controlled trial, we helped Sustainability Victoria measure the health and wellbeing impacts of the Healthy Homes energy efficiency upgrades.
Download our report: Applying Behavioural Insights in Victoria
Contact email: behavioural.insights@dpc.vic.gov.au
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