“This year has brought behaviour change into the public consciousness.” Ellie Madgwick, Strategist at Mind+Matter, is speaking at the AMEC Virtual Global Summit on Measurement about the challenges and considerations faced when measuring the impact of a digital behaviour change campaign.

“At the start of the pandemic there was a lack of information on COVID-19, and the Government had to rely on changing the behaviour of the public in order to control the spread of the disease. This was done by the communications teams of the Government and Public Health England, who helped to influence people’s behaviour.”

Ellie is joined by Jon Buckley, Director of Experience at Mind+Matter, who explains how behaviour change is measured through data and analytics – especially digital data. Through their presentation they show how behaviour change is constantly taking place all around us, and how there are tools that can effectively measure it.

“There are a number of different theories on how to impact a person’s behaviour. But in order for a person to change, they need the capability, opportunity and motivation.”

There are a range of interventions that can impact behaviour change, including education. Within education, one approach may be to provide information to a person, and to show the consequences of a certain behaviour.

“We were approached by Network Rail and British Transport Police as they struggled with teenagers trespassing on the tracks,” Ellie explains. As they worked on this project, they discovered that teenagers have a developing brain and that they respond better to their emotive side than their rational side.

In order to change teenagers’ behaviour, Mind+Matter decided on a campaign that would show how their actions have consequences for their families. They launched a successful campaign across various social media platforms, and the number of incidents were halved, reversing a five-year trend.

An important element of measuring the effectiveness of a behaviour change campaign for Mind+Matter is an AI programme called Gravity, which has four elements: audience insight, audience creator, audience predictor and activator. “This helps us to get the right content and deliver behaviour change,” Jon explains.

He lists the benefits of using Gravity: “A custom algorithm has been created, which helps to remove empty data, while ranking the usefulness of the data.” This helps Mind+Matter to identify the effective parts of their activities.

NEW AMEC Tech Hub for members

AMEC is proud to have the newly established AMEC technology SIG called Tech Hub up and running and invite all AMEC members to have a nominated tech contact on this group to be involved. There is no doubt that technology will become a core business function within organizations and according to the ICCO World PR Report for 2020-2021, investment in IT and technology is expected to grow over the next five years, for more details please e-mail  group Chair Sophia Karakeva, Datascouting.