This guide, written by the behavioural science team at the Cabinet Office, lays out how government communicators can use a behavioural approach to design and implement effective communications campaigns.
Resource
This guide is intended for all government communicators and lays out how you can use a behavioural approach to design and implement effective communications campaigns.
All government campaigns should aim to make a difference. In this guide, you will find out how to apply a behavioural approach to campaign design and implementation to maximise the effectiveness of your campaign.
Behavioural science gives us the tools to analyse the context, empathise with target audiences, and ensure that the campaign helps enable behaviours. This guide will showcase the principles of behavioural change communications, providing theories and techniques to embed throughout a campaign in order to optimise its outcomes.
Following the success of the previous GCS guidance titled “Strategic Communications: A Behavioural Approach” and the demand for a more in-depth look into behavioural science for communicators, this guide expands on the previous content and provides practical tools and case studies to further support the application of behavioural science to communication activities.
How to use this guide
Throughout this guide, we will illustrate theory with case studies from the UK and international governments. We will also work through a fictional example campaign aimed at closing the gender gap in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) field.
For particularly complex campaigns, we recommend seeking advice from behavioural scientists during the campaign development process. Contact details are provided at the end of this guide.
Foreword
If there’s anything that 2020 has taught us, it’s that behaviour change is often the ultimate measure of campaign success. At the start of 2018, one of the eight challenges I set for communicators was for the profession to adopt behavioural science techniques to enhance the effectiveness of our campaigns. Coronavirus has made this challenge all the more urgent, and has demonstrated how communications is a powerful and flexible lever to create and sustain behaviour change.
The formation of the Government Communication Service (GCS) behavioural science team has accelerated progress towards this goal of embedding behavioural science expertise across the Government Communication profession. Behavioural tools and techniques are now being used by communicators across government. This guide is the next step in that journey.
The guide brings together rigorous academic research and existing best practice to give communicators practical ways to apply behavioural science to their own campaigns. The accessible approach will help communicators learn how to systematically identify barriers to behaviour change, and use behaviourally-informed communications to overcome these barriers.
There is a lot more we can do, and this guide is just the start. The GCS Professional Development Team provides further training and resources to support you in applying the content of this guide to your work – look out for details on the GCS website or through your own professional development team.
I am very grateful to everyone involved in producing this guide and improving our practice in this area of our work.
I look forward to seeing the techniques set out here applied across government – and to building on our efforts so far in bringing behavioural science to the heart of campaign planning and implementation, to demonstrably improve our public service.
Alex Aiken
Executive Director, Government Communication Service
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