Stay Informed!

By Sean Luechtefeld on 02/23/2010 @ 03:21 PM

Tags: Innovation, Innovators, Behavioral Economics

As many of you know, Innovator-in-Residence Mindy Hernandez maintains a blog as part of her Behavioral Economics project, Applying Behavioral Sciences in the Real World. In the past few months Mindy has connected with many practitioners and researchers and worked on variety of projects to connect behavioral economics research with practice and rigorous evaluation.

One intriguing new post on Mindy’s blog comes from Valerie Klein of CCCSDV, Consumer Credit Counseling Services of the Delaware Valley, who guest blogged about her experiences in helping individuals keep their debt counseling appointments. Through instituting behavioral concepts in the registration process, CCSDV was able to increase the retention rate of individuals that signed up for debt counseling appointments.

To read the full text of Valerie’s blog post, visit Applying Behavioral Sciences in the Real World.

Changes in Show Rates for Debt Counseling CCCDSV

Valerie noticed that her organization had a slew of folks calling their offices to set up appointments for credit counseling, but then a whopping 60% of these clients would either cancel their appointments or simply not show up. Valerie and her organization identified that one of the reasons was because of the appointment packet they were sending out. They found that once they changed the form, both its scope and its tone, no-show and cancellation rates significantly decreased.

This article spoke to me for a couple reasons and I think makes for an interesting thinking piece for our readers. First, it really highlights the nature of innovation. Valerie and her team didn’t need to reinvent the entire way that debt and credit counseling happens – even a “small” change like revising a form made a difference. People who otherwise wouldn’t have received counseling services now could because they didn’t feel alienated by a document designed to do the opposite. Second, it demonstrates the importance of communications and marketing in the innovation process. Certainly, a major part of innovating is having the vision to build an idea from the ground-up and being able to see that vision into fruition. But innovation also requires developing the right communications tools to get your idea to the right audience. For CCCSDV, their central communications tool for debt counseling was their appointment packet, but without figuring out how to re-language it to the audience who needed it the most, they wouldn’t have been able to innovate their debt counseling process.

So, when you get a moment, check out the Applying Behavioral Sciences in the Real World blog. Valerie’s post is just one of the many cool features they have there that contribute well to innovation!

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