A psychiatrist couldn’t keep up with the demand for mental health care. So he hired grandmothers.
He asked himself a simple question: who do people already trust with their problems?
The majority said it was grandmothers. They are wise, respected and embedded in the community.
He trained them in basic therapy for common mental health disorders and gave them benches in public spaces.
The results speak for themselves :
→ Thousands sought support
→ Depression symptoms dropped
→ A randomised trial showed it worked better than standard primary care
This session explores how Harmony Labs and Earth Alliance collaborated to identify and engage audiences missing from the climate conversation, blending together in one pilot project groundbreaking behavioral media research with influencer partnerships and media testing and iteration. Harmony Labs Executive Director Brian Waniewski shares key research findings and showcase how these findings informed an influencer media strategy to connect with untapped audiences, offering climate communicators new pathways for engaging diverse communities.
(04:29–06:55) They created content with 60 creators through co-productions and a creators fund—rather than scripted ads—with two goals: engagement and transporting audiences toward awareness, pro-climate futures, and participation.
(07:26–09:14) Using their Narrative Observatory, they tracked media behavior from half-million US panelists, mapping how people move through media and which values shape their consumption.
(09:14–13:07) Identified a key overlooked group: the “If You Say So” audience—online, culture makers who avoid news—so they tailored content to their values (autonomy, fun), not traditional activist messaging.
Furthermore, Gen Z is rejecting traditional advertising which paints a picture of a happier, more beautiful, successful life. For them, it’s about identity. If your content doesn’t make Gen Z say “That’s so me,” then it’s not worth their time.
When the word ‘vulnerable’ is used as an adjective to describe people, such as ‘vulnerable consumers’ this risks causing harm (or more harm) to those experiencing vulnerability. We recommend that ‘vulnerability’ is used as a noun to describe the situation people experience, suchas ‘consumer vulnerability’ rather than as an adjective to modify a noun (see Macdonald et al.,2021). The use of person-first terminology is consistent with adopting a strengths-based approachto customer vulnerability (Raciti et al. 2022, Russell-Bennett et. al. 2023). This addresses one ofthe harm factors listed above by taking away the stigma incumbent with assigned labels. Forpolicymakers or practitioners who aim to focus on addressing those who are at a higher risk ofharm, we suggest the following term is optimal: “consumers experiencing heightened vulnerability” (CEHV). The shorter term to use outside this framework is “consumers experiencing vulnerability”.
What works better is grouping the reasons someone struggles with a service, rather than segmenting the people who experience those struggles. This is the basis of the Universal Barriers to Access approach. Over time, the Government Digital Service received thousands of calls from people unable to use parts of its services. By analysing this data, we identified 11 common barriers—recurring patterns that explain why services fail for users, regardless of their background or situation.
When people feel positive, they are positive about advertising, so brands should be targeting – or, better yet, creating – moments of happiness and relaxation.
Starting from Cooper's approach for constructing personas, this paper details how behavioral theory can contribute substantially to the development of personas. We describe a case study in which Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is used to develop five distinctive personas for the design of a digital coach for sustainable weight loss. We show how behavioral theories such as SDT can help to understand what genuinely drives and motivates users to sustainably change their behavior.
You may remember from the MDA Framework that the authors listed 8 kinds of fun. These are:
Sensation. Games can engage the senses directly. Consider the audio and video “eye candy” of video games; the tactile feel of the wooden roads and houses in Settlers of Catan; or the physical movement involved in playing sports, Dance Dance Revolution, or any game on the Nintendo Wii.
Fantasy. Games can provide a make-believe world (some might cynically call it “escapism”) that is more interesting than the real world.
Narrative. As we mentioned earlier in passing, games can involve stories, either of the embedded kind that designers put there, or the emergent kind that are created through player action.
Challenge. Some games, particularly retro-arcade games, professional sports, and some highly competitive board games like Chess and Go, derive their fun largely from the thrill of competition. Even single-player games like Minesweeper or activities like mountain climbing are fun mainly from overcoming a difficult challenge.
Fellowship. Many games have a highly social component to them. I think it is this alone that allows many American board games like Monopoly to continue to sell many copies per year, in spite of the uninteresting decisions and dull mechanics. It is not the game, but the social interaction with family, that people remember fondly from their childhood.
Discovery. This is rare in board games, but can be found in exploration-type games like Tikal and Entdecker. It is more commonly found in adventure and role-playing video games, particularly games in the Zelda and Metroid series.
Expression. By this, I think the MDA authors mean the ability to express yourself through gameplay. Examples include games like Charades or Poker where the way that you act is at least as important as what other actions you take within a game; Dungeons & Dragons where the character you create is largely an expression of your own personal idea; or open-world and sim video games like The Sims or Grand Theft Auto or Oblivion or Fable, which are largely concerned with giving the player the tools needed to create their own custom experience.
Submission. A name that often has my students chuckling with their dirty minds, but the intent is games as an ongoing hobby rather than an isolated event. Consider the metagame and the tournament scene in Magic: the Gathering, the demands of a guild to show up at regular meetings in World of Warcraft, or even the ritualized play of games at a weekly boardgame or tabletop-roleplaying group.
The SHeLL Health Literacy Editor is an online browser-based software that gives you objective, real-time feedback on the complexity of health information.
n this essay, Sherine Guirguis and Michael Coleman tell the story of the lesson that shaped their careers. It was a lesson that occurred while navigating a particularly challenging set of circumstances—how to deliver polio vaccines to children in remote areas of Pakistan under Taliban control.
Audiopedia Academy GPT is an advanced AI-powered assistant built using OpenAI's GPT technology. Designed specifically to help Community-Based Organizations (CBOs), NGOs, government organizations, and individual stakeholders, this tool guides users through the EDUC method for creating meaningful and effective audio-based outreach campaigns. This interactive, empathetic, and resource-aware tool is now available at adp.ax/gpt.
Latinx is broadly unpopular among Latino adults who have heard of it, according to the survey.
75% of Latinos who have heard of the term Latinx say it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, up from 65% saying the same in 2019.
Should a person describe what they look like during a virtual meeting or webinar?
Response # of respondents % of respondents
Yes 363 31.8%
No 779 68.2%
The majority (68.2%) of respondents do not prefer descriptions of appearances in online meetings.
Could this guide us towards a structured approach for assessing the level of community involvement in SBC programmes? At the highest level, “Citizen Control“, communities independently lead programmes with full decision-making authority. “Delegated Power“ and “Partnership“ designate significant community influence on programme decisions, either through majority control or collaborative governance. In contrast, “Placation“, “Consultation“, and “Informing“ indicate lower degrees of participation, where community input may be sought but is not necessarily instrumental in shaping outcomes.
In my research, I focus on three things that ran through people’s minds when they were working toward something. These three things are:
inner thinking, thoughts, pondering, reasoning
emotional reactions, feelings, moods
guiding principles, personal rules
Thinking Styles are the archetypes that you would base characters on, like characters in TV episodes. (Try writing your scenarios like TV episodes, with constant characters.) Characters think, react, and made decisions based on their thinking style archetype. BUT they also switch thinking styles depending on context. For example, if you take a flight as a single traveler versus bringing a young child along–you’ll probably change your thinking style for that flight, including getting to the gate, boarding, and deplaning.
“We tested the effectiveness of different messages aimed at addressing climate change and created a tool that can be deployed by both lawmakers and practitioners to generate support for climate policy or to encourage action,” says Madalina Vlasceanu, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the paper’s lead author.
The tool, which the researchers describe as a “Climate Intervention Webapp,” takes into account an array of targeted audiences in the studied countries, ranging from nationality and political ideology to age, gender, education, and income level.
“To maximize their impact, policymakers and advocates can assess which messaging is most promising for their publics,” adds paper author Kimberly Doell, a senior scientist at the University of Vienna who led the project with Vlasceanu.
Article: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cr5at
Tool: https://climate-interventions.shinyapps.io/climate-interventions/
I sometimes make a further suggestion to client teams who have years of experience working directly (via research) with the diversity of the people their organization supports. I suggest they abandon “persona” (a representation of a person) and replace it with “behavioral audience segment” (a representation of a group). (Note: I have begun calling these “thinking styles” to emphasize that a person can change to a different group based on context or experience.)This change allows those qualified teams to get away from names and photos. I don’t suggest this for everyone.
Note: “Behavioral audience segment” is the name I use, although there may be a better one. In its defense, Susan Weinschenk uses “behavioral science” to mean what I am trying to represent. And “audience segment” is a common way to express a group an organization is focused on.
Why are your organization’s personas so hard to use? It might be because they are marketing personas, based on the way customers buy what you produce—segments of the market divided up by the way each group tends to make a purchase decision. Maybe what you’re designing for isn’t the purchase process.
A problem many organizations run into is relying on only one set of personas. Personas can be derived from any sort of audience segment. There are many ways your organization might have divided the people it supports into segments.
There are marketing or buying segments, demographic segments, preference segments, and behavioral segments, to name but a few. Within each of these types of segments, your organization might take different perspectives, such as first-time buyer and return buyer.
But she did explain how researching and designing for the majority or “average user” actually end up ignoring, othering, and harming the people our designs are meant to serve. Indi shared how she finds patterns in people’s behaviors, thoughts, and needs—and how she uses that data to create thinking styles that inform more inclusive design decisions.
Indi talked about…
Why researchers should look for patterns, not anecdotes, to understand real user needs.
What are thinking styles and how to uncover and use them.
Why your “average” user often doesn’t exist in the real world, and how we can do better.
The fact of the matter is that each market/user group has its own particular set of situational and psychological differences that determine which behaviors will be adopted and which will never even be attempted.
The job of every product team, whether they know it or not, is to make it as easy and delightful as possible for their target market/user group to perform a behavior that they find doable, useful, compelling, and enjoyable that also leads to an important business outcome for the company.
If any of these things are missing, there is no Behavior Market Fit and the project and any associated products will be a failure.
The JTBD Canvas 2.0 is a tool to help you scope out your JTBD landscape prior to conducting field research. It frames your field of inquiry and scopes of your innovation effort. Jobs to be done
Linguistic accessibility is important because people in a group often speak more than one language with various degrees of confidence. People also use different varieties of the same language or create their own variety.
The way a language develops in a multilingual group reflects what people need and want to communicate.
Personas are a widely used tool to keep real users in mind, while avoiding stereotypical thinking in the design process. Yet, creating personas can be challenging. Starting from Cooper's approach for constructing personas, this paper details how behavioral theory can contribute substantially to the development of personas. We describe a case study in which Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is used to develop five distinctive personas for the design of a digital coach for sustainable weight loss. We show how behavioral theories such as SDT can help to understand what genuinely drives and motivates users to sustainably change their behavior. In our study, we used SDT to prepare and analyze interviews with envisioned users of the coach and to create complex, yet engaging and highly realistic personas that make users' basic psychological needs explicit. The paper ends with a critical reflection on the use of behavioral theories to create personas, discussing both challenges and strengths.
According to Social Media Perth, the acronym stands for “get ready with me,“ which is a common form of video content found on platforms like YouTube and increasingly on TikTok as well. These videos are typically created by people in the beauty and fashion spaces, and they involve a thorough documentation of everything an influencer does during their morning or evening routines.
Extending from the existing seven-step co-design process, this paper outlines a first attempt explaining the formative research study that employed six SMBC to co-create a sustainable marketing program. Three studies were conducted, namely 1) Expert panel review (N = 24), 2) Segmentation study (N = 707), and 3) Co-design workshops (N = 77). As a result, a framework for Marketing Co-creation is proposed to assist practitioners to build programs for behaviour (ex)change. This research proposed a step-by-step process that can be applied by researchers/practitioners ensuring that marketing programs are built with consumers.
This is SenseMaker in its most simple form, usually structured to have an open (non-hypothesis) question (commonly referred to as a ‘prompting question’) to collect a micro-narrative at the start. This is then followed by a range of triads (triangles), dyads (sliders), stones canvases, free text questions and multiple choice questions.
The reason or value for using Sensemaker: Open free text questions are used at the beginning as a way of scanning for diversity of narratives and experiences. This is a way to remain open to ‘unknown unknowns’. The narrative is then followed by signifier questions that allow the respondent to add layers of meaning and codification to the narrative (or experience) in order to allow for mixed methods analysis, to map and explore patterns.
This article reviews 10 techniques used to identify opinion leaders to promote behavior change. Opinion leaders can act as gatekeepers for interventions, help change social norms, and accelerate behavior change. Few studies document the manner in which opinion leaders are identified, recruited, and trained to promote health. The authors categorize close to 200 studies that have studied or used opinion leaders to promote behavior change into 10 different methods. They present the advantages and disadvantages of the 10 opinion leader identification methods and provide sample instruments for each. Factors that might influence programs to select one or another method are then discussed, and the article closes with a discussion of combining and comparing methods.
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