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Case Studies

The work we do puts focus on knowing your audience, showing what works, designing meaningful experiences and embedding behavioural science. This is showcased in our case studies below.

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Understanding What Influences Job Decisions: Is Money All that Matters?

Governments and firms regularly grapple with the question of how to attract particular employees to their shores, to different sectors of the economy, or to their workplace rather than that of a competitor. Research intensive firms might want to attract the best scientists. Often just as urgently, there might be a critical need for low-paid employees in sectors in which local citizens are reluctant to work, such as fruit picking in the US and the UK. Or there may be a need to encourage citizens to take up private-sector roles in countries where the public sector is particularly attractive, such as in parts of the Middle East. When considering how to encourage people to move into new roles or locations, governments and firms often focus on extrinsic rewards — the pay, benefits or even visa facilitation that can influence an individual’s decision. But a growing range of research shows that these extrinsic rewards are only part of the picture. Together with the global management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, we set out to explore the other factors that should be taken into account.

Getting Citizens More Involved in Policy Making

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) wanted to find new and better ways of understanding the viewpoints of large numbers of people. UNDP was especially interested in gauging the views of younger people in Pakistan, Bhutan and Timor Leste on critical policy questions, such as what they thought their governments should be doing to tackle climate change. So they asked CogCo to help them develop a new and more engaging way of getting people involved in these policy discussions.

Understanding how Citizens Respond to Risk

All of us are confronted by risks every day. We could be hit by a car when crossing a road. We might take a pill which has potential side-effects. Or we could be weighing up a business decision that looks sensible but might turn sour at some distant point. Decades of behavioural science research have taught us that there are many factors that influence our risk-based judgements. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, these became all the more important. So in partnership with FGS Global, the global strategic communications firm, we set out to create an evidence-based framework that could be used by individuals communicating risk to consumers or citizens.

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