The following is a conversation between Joshua Wright, Executive Director of Ideas42, and Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving on AM 970 The Answer in New York City.
Denver: Many social programs are designed based on assumptions of how people behave. But what if it turns out those assumptions are wrong? In that case, the program might not do any good at all and could even make the situation worst. At Ideas42, they look at why people do what they do, and the context where these decisions are being made– to help improve lives and drive social change. And I’m delighted to have with us the executive director of Ideas42, Joshua Wright. Good evening, Josh, and welcome to The Business of Giving.
Joshua Wright
Josh: Denver, it’s great to be here with you.
Denver: Give us the founding story of Ideas42, Josh, including where that name came from.
Josh: Sure! Absolutely! Ideas42 was founded by some academics from Harvard, Princeton, and MIT, and it started as part of a research lab at Harvard about 10 years ago, and then we spun out about seven-and-a-half years ago as a separate 501(c)(3). The 42 comes from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The humans have asked Deep Thought, this massive computer, what the meaning of the universe is and the meaning of life. After much work, Deep Thought comes back and says: “The answer is 42.” The humans get very pissed off and say, “You’ve had all this time to work on it; I can’t believe you came up with this answer!” Deep Thought responds back to the humans, “Well, the problem with you is: you don’t ask the right questions.” And that’s one of our taglines: It’s asking the right questions.
The reason we have really been focused on that is we feel like that is often missing– not only in social programs, but the design of most products, policies, and social programs– really thinking about: How is it that humans truly behave? Not how we would hope that they would behave, not how traditional economists might think they behave, or how we would all hope that we would behave in our best selves.
Denver: That’s a good founding story. Why don’t you give us an overview of the field of behavioral science, and why you have made that the centerpiece of what you do?
Josh: Sure. Behavioral science is basically the combination of behavioral economics, social psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology. And at the heart of it is really about how humans make decisions and take actions– whether they follow through on those decisions. The reason we have really been focused on that is we feel that is often missing– not only in social programs, but the design of most products, policies, and social programs– really thinking about: How is it that humans truly behave? Not how we would hope that they would behave, not how traditional economists might think they behave, or how we would all hope that we would behave in our best selves.
Denver: So, when you’re designing a system or a program based on behavioral science, are there rules or guidelines that you tend to follow?
Josh: Not so much rules or guidelines. It’s not a box-checking type of exercise. But there are some principles. Some of those principles are things like the context in which people operate matter much more than personal attributes of the person, which is surprising to most people. If you ask the typical person, “What do you think drives the variability and decision-making by humans?” They’ll say, “It’s about 70% individual characteristics – things like their age, race, level of education.” And it’s actually the opposite. About 70% of it can be explained by the context, and only 30% by individual characteristics.
What we typically find traditionally in how things have been designed, they either think about humans as – I don’t know if you’re a Star Trek fan – but as Spock… this very unemotional individual who can calculate probabilities, can easily weigh all the costs and benefits, and then doesn’t have any problem following through on this issue. Or, they think about the archetype as Homer Simpson.… we have to be overly paternalistic about how we design the program.
And the reality is, we should think about humans as being quite smart. The three-pound brain between your ears is a very powerful tool, but it has biases. It can only focus on one thing at a time. A whole host of psychological phenomena that exists for humans in their brains, many of which are there for good evolutionary reasons, but it does make it tricky that we’re not either Spock or Homer. We’re all actually quite bright and intelligent and attractive, but sometimes we make funny decisions.
Denver: When these programs are being designed, does that person who’s designing them sort of have an archetype of the person that they’re being directed to, or for?
Josh: What we typically find traditionally in how things have been designed, they either think about humans as – I don’t know if you’re a Star Trek fan – but as Spock… this very unemotional individual who can calculate probabilities, can easily weigh all the costs and benefits, and then doesn’t have any problem following through on this issue. Or, they think about the archetype as Homer Simpson– the human with no self-control, and we have to be overly paternalistic about how we design the program.
And the reality is, we should think about humans as being quite smart. The three-pound brain between your ears is a very powerful tool, but it has biases. It can only focus on one thing at a time. A whole host of psychological phenomena that exists for humans in their brains, many of which are there for good evolutionary reasons, but it does make it tricky that we’re not either Spock or Homer. We’re all actually quite bright and intelligent and attractive, but sometimes we make funny decisions.
… if just the decision between the options is hard, we have a lot of trouble making decisions. And often what that causes us to do is not to make a decision incorrectly; we just delay or procrastinate… which I think everybody knows a lot about procrastination and can feel it and experience it on a regular basis, but it causes us to delay the decision, not to make the decision. And we often delay it for a long time to the point where it looks like we’re deciding No! when actually we might be happy to make a decision, but there’s just too many choices.
Denver: Speaking about decisions, let me ask you about choice. Is it better – the more choices, the better? Or is there an optimal number of choices that lead people to take action?
Josh: The funny thing about choices is that, we as humans like choice. So we’re drawn to more choice. But actually when you have lots of choice, either in the number of choices you have, in the complexity of the choice, or if just the decision between the options is hard, we have a lot of trouble making decisions. And often what that causes us to do is not to make a decision incorrectly; we just delay or procrastinate… which I think everybody knows a lot about procrastination and can feel it and experience it on a regular basis, but it causes us to delay the decision, not to make the decision. And we often delay it for a long time to the point where it looks like we’re deciding No! when actually we might be happy to make a decision, but there’s just too many choices.
Denver: There is that old joke, Josh, that if you have 14 frogs sitting on a log over a pond, and 9 of them decide to jump in, how many frogs are left on the log? And the answer, of course, is 14 because deciding to do something and actually doing it are two entirely different things. What happens, not with frogs, but with humans between deciding to do something, but then failing to act on that decision?
Josh: It’s very specific to the situation, and that has to do with the context. But humans can decide something, and then they have to take the action or many actions, and there might not be… for example, one of the things we often talk about – is there a moment of action? Is there something that cues you to actually remember to take the action? One of the concepts of psychology is the idea of prospective memory, which is just a psychologist’s fancy way of saying – things you need to remember to do in the future; it has this funny attribute: you have to remember to do it, but you also have to remember to do it at the right time and place.
So, if you think about something like refinancing your mortgage – something I needed to do when the mortgage rates are really low – when would I think about needing to refinance my mortgage? When I was falling asleep at night, every night, right? It’s not a good time to call a mortgage broker. So, that’s why we have things like reminders and calendars to help us really remember the right time. So prospective memory is just one of the things, but there’s procrastination. Also, people put things off. They may think they want to do something, and then they see what their friends are doing, social norms; and they decide, “Maybe I don’t want to do it anymore.” Small hassles surprisingly get in the way of us doing things that are very, very important.
Denver: That kind of friction can really stop you in your tracks, and you say, “I’ll come back to it later.”
Josh: Right. A little friction, even if the thing is really, really important and big– like filing your financial aid form if you want to go to college, where there’s tens of thousands of dollars in grants and loans on the table. Yes, it takes you four hours to do that. Any economist would say, “Of course people want to do that.” But it’s a very friction-fraught process, and you can get derailed very easily.
Denver: Yeah, I’ve been there. You’re missing that one piece of information, and you’ll say,” I don’t know where to get it right now, and I’ll come back to it.” And then six weeks later, you’re back to it.
Josh: And the deadline has gotten passed…
Denver: So much of what we have assumed to be true for so long, and we find that to no longer be the case… and the one that’s really got me lately is aspirin. I hear the other day that aspirin is no longer effective for heart disease, and I said, “Geez!” I couldn’t believe it when I heard it.
When it comes to social programs where we have been practicing something for the longest period of time, is there anything along those lines that we now know is just completely ineffective?
Josh: I think the biggest thing is that we put a lot of requirements for people to prove that they need the program, and the reason we do that is because we want to make sure that deserving people are getting it, that the people who need it the most are taking advantage of it, and people aren’t cheating the system. The research now shows that when you put those hoops to jump through or a lot of requirements, it’s the people who need it the most – the poorest among us who have the least amount of time… have the most cognitive drain on their mind because they’re thinking about managing their life with just too little money– that are not able to take advantage of those programs. So, I think that’s the biggest one broadly for social programs. We’re doing it with a good intention. We want to make sure the right people, the deserving people, get it. But by doing that, we’re eliminating the people who are most deserving or preventing them from getting the service they need.
Denver: And I think sometimes too, the people who designed these programs are doing it a little bit for themselves because they’re trying to think what information would we like to have? And they’re trying to collect everything for their databank, and not really thinking of the person on the other end who’s trying to navigate these waters.
Josh: That’s very true, and they’re also thinking, I’m thinking, about the housing. I’m in the housing department, and I’m thinking about the housing. So, I’m just going to ask them for this extra piece of information, forgetting that the person is thinking about the food program. And the person who is thinking about the healthcare program also has all these questions, right? You think about your little world; you’re touching one piece of the elephant. You forget that the human, the consumer at the end of the day, has all these issues they’re dealing with, and they’re trying to satisfy all the requirements.
…we realized that whether students think they’re college-going material… whether they think they really belong– Am I qualified to be here at school? – And there’s no good feedback loop for them about that.
…students don’t realize that everybody is actually struggling at the beginning of college, and that is normal. So, we designed this very low-cost intervention, but it’s also very interesting. It uses a little bit of jujitsu.
Denver: That’s a great foundation you just gave us. Let’s take a look at a handful of examples to really better understand this. About 18% of students drop out of college in their freshman year. And about a third of them do so because they just can’t do the academic work, but there are two-thirds that drop out for something else. You went out to San Francisco State University to see what could be done about this. Tell us about what happened and how you handled that situation.
Josh: Absolutely. That first framing, I think, is so helpful because so many people look at the problem of college dropout and think people are dropping out because they’re not academically prepared, or they don’t have the money. Now, that’s true for some people. But actually, it’s the majority of people that shows that they’re doing okay academically, and that there’s actually a pretty generous financial aid system as we talked about earlier. It could be fraught with challenges and hard to get the money sometimes. But it’s not those two reasons.
There’s other things going on. So what we do is really dig into what could be happening. What’s causing this? And, we looked at a lot of different factors. Interviewed students, looked at data. For example, we thought: Well maybe students – commuter students– drop out at a higher rate. Not true! So, we eliminate that. But then we get into it; we realized that whether students think they’re college-going material… whether they think they really belong– Am I qualified to be here at school? And there’s no good feedback loop for them about that, and college is hard; for everybody, it’s hard. Even if your parents went to college, it’s hard often. And maybe when your parents went to college… you’re having a tough time, you go home, and they’ll say – “Go get a tutor; work harder.” If you’re a first-time student going to college, you call the parents; they say, “I don’t know… maybe you should come home. I can be more supportive.”
So, students don’t realize that everybody is actually struggling at the beginning of college, and that is normal. So, we designed this very low-cost intervention, but it’s also very interesting. It uses a little bit of jujitsu. Let me describe it to you.
We show them a video that’s only about five minutes long that has vignettes of students who are in their junior/senior year or have graduated, and they talk about how college is hard and what they did to persevere. Now that’s interesting. But then the thing that we do is ask students what they’re going to do when they hit a bump in the road. We ask them what they’re interested in outside of school, and we ask them what their goal is in going to college. And then through the course of the semester, we text their own words back to them.
So, after midterms when they maybe have gotten not a great grade on their midterm, and they’re struggling, they get the text from themselves saying, “Here’s what you said you were going to do when you hit a bump on the road. That’s normal; now do this.” Or we send them a text that says, “You said you were interested in graffiti art or rock climbing. The student activity fair is this week on this date. You should go there and meet other people and sign up.” So they meet friends and have this ongoing social sense of belonging. When you do that, you basically halve the drop-out rate. So, the drop-out rate as you said is about – at San Francisco State University – it’s 20% of kids drop out after the first year; that rate goes down to 10%, and we’re talking about delivering an intervention that’s under $10 per student to get that drop. There’s nothing close out there that gets that level of impact for that amount of money.
Denver: That is really phenomenal. I know these kids really embrace it too. They open up the emails; they look at the vignettes. I think 83% of them give you their text number. So, you get them when they’re excited, but then you hook them. And you keep them there, and it makes a big, big difference.
Josh: We thought we might get a 70% or 60% response rate, but it’s, again, the context. When you’re a freshman, your first week of school, you basically do whatever you’re told to do.
Joshua Wright and Denver Frederick inside the studio
Denver: Local water resources are strained in many parts of the world, and that would include Costa Rica. So, what I might do is try to raise the price of water. That might limit consumption, but it might not. What didn’t work?
Josh: Raising prices is a common thing that an economist would think of. The problem with that is, it will actually reduce demand, but it also usually gets you voted out of office – your elected officials. So instead, what we did was – we did two different interventions; and let me explain to you first what’s going on when you get your water bill. You get your water bill, and what does it say to you? It says you’re using this number of metric tons of water, cubic tons of water. What the hell is a cubic ton, right? So, you have no sense of how much you’re using. And interestingly, if you show people how they are consuming water compared to other people like them, then they have a sense of – “Oh, am I over- consuming or under-consuming?” And when you show that information to them, particularly if you say at your neighborhood level, “You’re consuming more or less than at your neighborhood level – that causes water usage to drop by five percentage points.”
The other thing we can do is help people with what’s called Simple Plan Making. People get the notice saying they’re using too much water. They want to do something, but they’re not sure what to do. Maybe they have trouble following through. It’s a very simple thing. It gives them five options of things that they’re going to do. They check a couple of them, sign that they’re going to do them; it’s their own commitment. They don’t have to mail it back to anybody. That causes them to follow through. Again, also a 5% reduction.
Just to give you a sense, in Belén, Costa Rica, that’s almost 190,000 showers reduced per month for the average shower. It’s a significant amount of water, and you would have to raise water prices significantly to get that same impact.
Denver: I won’t ask you how many cubic tons that was, okay?
Josh: I don’t know.
Denver: People often fail to appear for court dates, and sometimes for the most minor of infractions like riding your bicycle on the sidewalk. In New York City, that automatically triggers an arrest warrant, and that can really create a bottleneck in the system, not to mention disrupt a person’s life. This is not good. Share with us your work there.
Josh: Let’s first talk about the scope of the problem in New York. We issue in New York 330,000 of these minor infractions – could be riding your bicycle on the sidewalk, could be littering, could be having an open container in a public place – 330,000 of those a year; 41% of these issued result in an arrest warrant, meaning the person doesn’t pay the fine, or they don’t show up for court. That’s 130,000 people who get an arrest warrant.
Now what happens when you get stopped for a minor traffic violation, or you get stopped again for something else? The police officer at that point has no choice but to bring you in. They can’t say, “Oh, you have an arrest warrant. Let me ask you about it.” They have to arrest you and actually bring you down and detain you until you actually have your court hearing. That causes massive havoc on people’s lives. And who do you think is most affected by that, right? If you or I got a ticket for something like that, the ticket will be relatively small compared to our income; we would pay it. Unfortunately, this is disproportionately impacting people who are lower income. So, what can we do about that? Now, when you get the ticket, the ticket looks like a parking ticket. So, when we went and talked to people or showed these tickets to people, people, thought it was a minor thing. They had no idea that they could end up with an arrest warrant.
Denver: Yeah, big-time trouble.
Josh: So first, we redesigned the ticket so that it’s very clear the implications of what can happen and what you need to do. The second thing was, we asked people whether they would give us their cell phone numbers so that we could text them a reminder. Now, when you just redesign the ticket, you get a 13% drop in not appearing. When you add the text messaging and the ticket together, it’s a 36% drop. So, that is huge… basically for almost no cost, you’re reducing in the neighborhood of about 20,000 people a year not getting an arrest warrant, which has massive impact.
Denver: Yeah. It can be the simplest things.
Let me ask you one more. Conserving energy in office towers seems like a challenge. I’ve worked in a lot of office towers, and I can assure you I have never heard this subject brought up even once. But you went to South Africa to design a pilot around this. Tell us about it.
Josh: We use some of the same things that we used in the water situation in Costa Rica, which is: people don’t know how much energy they’re using. They don’t have any feedback loop for it, right? So, we did two things. One, we set up floor-level monitors of how much electricity was being used. So, you could see how much you were using on your floor, and we created a competition between floors, so they could see what they were using compared to each other, again. But the other key thing was we made each floor have a champion– someone who felt responsible ultimately for whether their floor was winning or not. And that caused people who were those floor champions to do things like– when they’re walking out the door, they turn the copier off at the end of the night and tell other colleagues how they’re doing compared to their colleagues. That has a big 14 percentage point decrease in energy use.
In our process, we actually diagnose the behavioral barriers and what we think is going on with the individuals in context. And if you don’t diagnose, you’re a little bit like a doctor. If you walked into a doctor’s office, and the doctor just looked at you and said, “Let’s give him chemotherapy.” Or, “Hey, let’s give him antibiotics.” You can’t do that. You actually have to diagnose first because: when do defaults work really well? Defaults work well when the desires are relatively homogeneous – meaning that most people have the same desire, and we know what those desires are. If the desires are quite heterogeneous, then you’re going to be defaulting people into things that they don’t want, and that’s very bad.
Denver: Yeah. It becomes contagious.
Let me ask you about this. Let’s say you take something that’s been very successful in one setting and try to apply it to another. I was wondering whether that worked. Great example of that would be opt-ins and opt-outs. I think we know that when you opt-in to donate organs, participation is very low. When you opt-out, participation is very high. We also know that for savings plans. Is it wise or risky to take these kinds of default options which have worked in one setting or situation and then apply them to another?
Josh: It’s very risky if you don’t do what we call diagnosis. In our process, we actually diagnose the behavioral barriers and what we think is going on with the individuals and context. And if you don’t diagnose, you’re a little bit like a doctor. If you walked into a doctor’s office, and the doctor just looked at you and said, “Let’s give him chemotherapy.” Or, “Hey, let’s give him antibiotics.” You can’t do that. You actually have to diagnose first because when do defaults work really well? Defaults work well when the desires are relatively homogeneous – meaning that most people have the same desire, and we know what those desires are. If the desires are quite heterogeneous, then you’re going to be defaulting people into things that they don’t want, and that’s very bad. Or you’re going to default them into something, and then they’re going to have to take the time and effort to opt out of it.
A good example of this is that most low-income people get a very significant tax refund because of something called the earned income tax credit. It’s basically: making work pay. They’re working, but we want to supplement their income. Most low-income people also say they’d like to save more. So, people designed this experiment when at tax time, when they went to the free tax sites, they were automatically defaulted to having 10% of their savings go into a simple savings bond for them.
And they did a randomized control test. So, half the people were opted-in and half the people had to opt-out. The funny thing was that there was no difference in the actual adoption rate because people actually opted out of it. They didn’t want to do that. And when you go back and ask them in trying to figure out what’s going on, one of the questions you ask them is, “What was your intention for your tax return when you arrived at the tax site?” Over 75% of people had already committed what they were going to spend that on, either some paying down bills that they had in the past, trying to get some advantage for their kid, or some big purchase they needed to make for their family.
Denver: The money was spoken for.
Josh: The money was spoken for already. So, if you wanted to actually get people to save at tax time, you’d have to actually back up in the process of when they were thinking about the refund and get them to develop the intention that they actually wanted – that they were going to save part of this refund. So, that’s a good example of just like defaults. You have to be very careful. You can’t just say, “This idea of social norms or default works in one context. Let me use it in another context.”
Denver: One last question on this. Is there a phenomenon when you change the design of something– let’s say, a form or an application, and then get a statistically significant change; will that change lose will some of its effectiveness over time?
Josh: It depends. It can. So if it were something like simply reducing a hassle, the effect would probably continue on for a very long time. If it were an intervention that was more focused on raising the salience or the likelihood that somebody sees something, that’s probably going to fade over time because something like salience… humans are very astute at noticing something that’s different or draws their attention quickly, right? But if that thing is always there, then the effect falls away.
Again, it goes to this diagnosis question. You have to diagnose the situation and then think through: Is it likely or not to fade over time? A good example is the Costa Rica one. We actually said, “How often would we have to send people these messages?” So, we did a follow-up study where we looked and said, “Let’s send them to them every month; let’s send them every quarter; let’s send them every six months. Basically, what we found is that if you send people every four to five months, then you have the same effect as if you send it to them every month, which is actually super powerful because it costs a little bit to put the stickers on and do the adjustment. It’s very context-specific.
Denver: Ideas42, by no means, does this work alone. You have a wonderful array of partners, some who you do this work with, some who help finance this work, and in most cases, the combination of both. Who are some of them?
Josh: First, I would say, a big important partner for us is our academic affiliates. Ideas42 continues to be very connected to its founders, but also about 80 of the leading behavioral scientists around the country. So, we can have connections with them. We can call up and ask their advice anytime, and they are very helpful in providing advice. But the other important thing about that connection is that they are doing ongoing research. They’re doing the foundational, most cutting-edge research going on.
The funny thing about research is… you know that aspirin study you talked about? It was probably completed about two years ago. The process by which it then actually got into an academic journal, and all the evidence was there, is very lengthy. We know ahead of time what the latest research is because we’re talking to all of them. So, that’s the first one.
The second one is, all of our partners actually implement and do work with people around the world. Ideas42 doesn’t run programs ourselves. We have to work with partners who are running health clinics, governments and cities that are overseeing programs, businesses like banks that actually offer people savings products. Those partners are critically important to us because at the end of the day, we’re working with them.
And then lastly, none of this is possible without the generous donations and support from our funders. And that’s predominantly foundations. Many of the biggest foundations in the world like the Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation. But it’s also governments that fund us to work directly on their programs. Sometimes, there’s businesses that we work with that also fund us.
…an issue that I think many organizations struggle with is feedback, making sure that people give and get feedback. Most people give feedback training, and what they focus on is telling managers to give a lot of feedback. The funny thing is: Who is it most salient to? Who’s most aware that they want and need feedback? It’s the person receiving the feedback. Yes, we train the manager to give feedback. But equally, we train and encourage people to ask for the feedback, because that’s critical. It’s on their mind. They have the moment of action, as we talked about before. So, it’s very much within our culture to say, “Hey, can you give me feedback on this thing?” And then the manager wants to give feedback. They don’t have the moment of action in their mind. It creates a moment of action, and feedback is given at a much higher rate.
Denver: I would guess that the kind of work you do would lend itself to you having a very intentional and thoughtful workplace culture. Tell us what it’s like to work at Ideas42 and how you believe the work that you do is reflected in the corporate culture.
Josh: One of our key core values is what we call the behavioral lens, which means we have to look at everything through a behavioral lens in the world. That’s in our personal life, in obsessing and learning about behavioral science, but also means that we have to think about how we manage and run the organization within Ideas42. And it’s very prevalent.
I would say just two examples to give you a sense of that. One has to do with vacation. All the research actually shows that people need vacation, particularly if they’re doing creative innovation work like we’re doing – to recharge. Now, some places have tried to do unlimited vacation days. And that actually backfires. People don’t take them. They look at the norm. They think that no one is taking a vacation.
Instead we give a very generous vacation policy. We set it at 24 days a year. So, there’s an anchor saying: “This is what you should be shooting for.” But the other thing that we do; what we notice is that people weren’t taking as much vacation as we would have liked them to. And what it turned out was that people wouldn’t think far enough in advance about the vacation. So, they would say like – “Oh I have these vacation days; I need to use them because I lose them.” We take advantage of loss aversion, which is a very powerful behavioral concept for people.
But I look, and I can’t take vacation in the next two months because my schedule is filled up. But if I plan my vacation – not even what I’m going to do – but that I know I’m going to take a vacation six months from now, and I put it in the calendar; everything gets scheduled. So, that’s been very successful. That’s one.
The second one is an issue that I think many organizations struggle with is feedback, making sure that people give and get feedback. Most people give feedback training, and what they focus on is telling managers to give a lot of feedback. The funny thing is: Who is it most salient to? Who’s most aware that they want and need feedback? It’s the person receiving the feedback. Yes, we train the manager to give feedback. But equally, we train and encourage people to ask for the feedback, because that’s critical. It’s on their mind. They have the moment of action, as we talked about before. So, it’s very much within our culture to say, “Hey, can you give me feedback on this thing?” And then the manager wants to give feedback. They don’t have the moment of action in their mind. It creates the moment of action, and feedback is given at a much higher rate.
Denver: That’s a great point. I don’t think people appreciate sometimes that as important as it is to give feedback, the really important person is the person receiving the feedback because they’re going to be the ones to either act on it or not act on it, but we never pay as much attention to that side of the equation.
Let me close with this, Josh. You’ve been at this for a decade now and are starting that next chapter with several new initiatives including Ideas42 Ventures. How do you envision the next 10 years being, and in what way will Idea42 Ventures be different from the work that you’ve been doing?
Josh: For us, we’re going to continue do a lot of the great work we’ve been around discovering what we call discovering these innovations. But the thing we need to get much better at is: How do we get these innovations to scale? It’s not enough just to do it in Belén, Costa Rica. We have to figure out: How do we get cities in the developing world around the country to adapt something that we did in Belén?
So, we have a couple of different initiatives about how we’re going to get things to scale. One of them is the Venture Lab. We see an opportunity where things can be done for social good, but also make financial sense to run a business around. So, you take the example that we talked about with the San Francisco State University, where we think there’s an opportunity to actually charge colleges a small amount of money for an intervention like that. It funds the intervention, it allows you to create a business and get that business to scale, have marketing people to go and sell it to other colleges. Ventures is really about getting to scale for us.
The other things we’re doing around getting to scale are we are thinking about creating a policy lab, so that we do a better job at translating exactly what we’re learning into the policy language for policy makers. Lastly, we’re also thinking about making sure that we do more partnering with people who have the scale already built in. That’s one of the reasons government has always been attractive to us. That’s one of the reasons why New York City and that client in the office of operations is a key partner for us because New York City is a massive city. It touches millions of people, and that’s true of cities around the country. It’s true also when we work within the federal government.
Denver: Joshua Wright, the executive director of Ideas42, I want to thank you so much for being here this evening. Tell us about your website and some of the information that visitors will find on it.
Josh: We welcome people to come to the website. You heard about a few of the projects we’ve undertaken, but on the website are all of the projects we worked on and details about the projects, how we implemented the projects. Also on the website are major publications we’ve put together as well as: I want to mention two important links; one is something that we co-founded with some other people including the Behavioral Science and Policy Association called The Behavioral Scientist. This is an online magazine. I encourage people to go on to the Ideas42 website, find it and sign up for this separate website which really makes behavioral science accessible. It’s written in a New Yorker-kind of style way, very appealing to people. It’s very compelling.
The second thing is something called the B-Hub which is called Behavior Evidence Hub which really unpackages some of these experiments we’ve done and academics have done, which makes it accessible to practitioners. So, instead of looking at all the statistical charts that academics might be interested in, the practitioner just wants to know: Did it work? And then what was the actual letter that you designed? What was the different script you used? Or the video that we created? They can actually go and look at it and see the real intervention, so that they can then replicate it themselves. So, I would very much encourage people to come to the website.
Denver: And I’m sure you made it easy for them to sign up. Thanks, Josh. It was a real pleasure to have you on the show.
Josh: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure be here with you, Denver.
Denver: I’ll be back with more of The Business of Giving right after this.
Joshua Wright and Denver Frederick
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