Designing for Behavior Change, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Crafting the Intervention: Advanced Topics

New Moms is a small nonprofit in Chicago serving young mothers at risk of homelessness with a range of programs—from low-income housing to doulas and parent education. Their job training program, however, faced many challenges: mothers were interested, but few people actually made it into the program. In marketing terms, their conversion funnel faced steep drop-offs at each stage of the process.

Unlike most small nonprofits, however, New Moms has long studied behavioral and brain science. “We’re big fans of ideas42 here,”¹ says CEO Laura Zumdahl. Under the direction of Dana Emanuel, their Director of Learning and Innovation, they partnered with the behavioral science team at MDRC to identify obstacles facing young mothers in the program. And, as is often the case with any program or product, there were many. Here’s what they found:

• Their marketing materials talked about the long-term benefits of the job training program, in technical terms (who doesn’t get excited about “job skills”?). In their behavioral analysis, they realized that the young mothers were strongly present biased and rightfully focused on near-term goals like feeding their kids. So the team changed the materials to “message to the mothers’ motivations,” as Dana described it. In other words, money for their family and a flexible schedule. It’s a lesson that ...