Campaigns

Cover of Campaigns, Field Guide No. 20

Field Guide No. 20 · 23 pages · 35 sources

How do you design a public campaign that works?

Ask one audience for one specific action, and find out whether they lack the ability, the opportunity or the motivation to take it. Show the action as something most people already do and approve, and end every message with a clear step. Launch at fresh starts, beside services and rules that point the same way, make the action easy, and test versions at random against the behaviour itself.

What the report found

  1. Choose one behaviour. A campaign works best when it asks one group for one specific action. Find out whether that group lacks the ability, the opportunity or the motivation to act.
  2. Shape the message. Show what most others do and approve of. Letters comparing 600,000 households with their neighbours cut energy use by about 2 per cent, and by about 6 per cent among the heaviest users. Pair any warning with a clear step.
  3. Reach the right moment. Campaigns do best alongside services and rules that point the same way. Habits loosen when people move home or change jobs, and goals rise at fresh starts such as a new month.
  4. Make it easy. Remove steps, set helpful defaults and help people plan. In one workplace, asking staff to write down the date and time they would be vaccinated raised take up by about 4 points.
  5. Test and measure. Compare versions at random, measure behaviour rather than recall, and set modest goals. Across 126 trials with 23 million people, effects were smaller than in published studies, and still real.

Who it is for

For public bodies, health and safety teams, utilities, city and community programmes, charities, communications agencies and anyone who designs messages that ask people to act.

How we work

Field Guides turn the evidence into principles, each with the research, a worked example and what to try and watch out for. Every claim is graded, and where researchers disagree, as they do on how far fear helps a campaign, both sides are set out before we say where we stand.

Cite this report

The Why We Project (2026) Campaigns: Designing behaviour change for the public. Field Guide No. 20. Dubai: Why We Tech Ltd. Available at: thewhyweproject.com