Stay Informed!

By Genevieve Melford on 03/14/2011 @ 11:00 AM

Tags: Behavioral Economics, Financial Empowerment, Innovation, Innovators

Over the next few weeks we are thrilled to post early excerpts from a paper to be published this spring by 2010 Innovator-in-Residence, Mindy Hernandez.

For her Innovation Year, Mindy partnered with select asset-building organizations to create innovative projects. With each organization, Mindy walked through the programs' goals and processes to target critical leverage points, propose behaviorally-informed design changes and evaluate each intervention as rigorously as possible.

The soon-to-be-released white paper describes the surprising, exciting and potentially powerful lessons from her Innovation Year. The paper also includes helpful hints on how practitioners can design, implement and evaluate similar behavioral interventions in their own programs.

Upcoming blog: We learn the outcome of the Campaign for Working Families (CWF) study in which Mindy and CWF designed an intervention to help self-employed clients at the CWF tax site prepare for tax day with the hope that better preparation would lead to higher tax refunds.

• Does preparation really lead to bigger refunds for self-employed VITA clients?
• What works in getting self-employed clients to prepare? And what's that worth in dollars?

The results are exciting and surprising. Check out the next post for more details!