Evelyn Gosnell

If you’ve ever planned a wedding, hosted an event, or thrown a party, you know that getting people to RSVP on time (or at all!) can be a lot like pulling teeth.

🤔 But what if we could somehow make RSVPing more desirable?

In behavioral science, we refer to this type of intervention as a benefit—or, more specifically, as “adding benefit to a key behavior.”

And events platform Partiful has found a clever way to do it 👏

Only RSVP’d guests can:

🎉 View the guest list
🎉 See the event location
🎉 Keep up with event activity

By withholding the ability to see who’s coming—along with other key event details—Partiful has created a strong nudge for guests to RSVP.

Why does this work?

💡 Because they’ve added a benefit (access to important info) to the key behavior (RSVPing).

This is a really nice intervention because it taps into a simple insight: when we think about attending a party, we want to know who else might be there.

As in: “Will I know the other guests? Will there be people I can talk to? Will I feel comfortable going?”

Unless you have the effortless confidence of a George Clooney or a Serena Williams, you probably want answers to these questions—making the benefit of RSVPing concrete, specific, and salient.

Best of all? By nudging folks to RSVP, Partiful is also nudging them to communicate and connect.

And a little more human connection can benefit us all 😊

#BehavioralEconomics #BehavioralScience #HumanConnection #ProductManagement

How we frame choices matters.

Because simple choice-based interventions can drive behavior change around even the smallest of decisions.

For example, consider the decision of whether to sign into Google when prompted during an internet browsing session.

Ordinarily, our motivation to do this is almost zero. Our limited attention span leads us to focus on the task at hand—in this case, finding the information we need on the web. Besides, there’s no perceived benefit to signing in—especially when compared to NOT signing in, which takes no effort at all.

So the sign-in prompt is an annoying but brief distraction. One that’s easy to ignore.

Google knows this. So they made a simple (but smart!) move that reframes our thinking—and makes us likelier to sign in.

How did they do it? Two ways 👇

1️⃣ First, they leaned into logic with “active choice.” I’ll explain.

Where we used to be prompted to simply “sign in,” we’re now forced to decide between 2 choices: “sign in” or “stay signed out.”

This no longer feels like a decision between doing SOMETHING (signing in) and NOTHING. Instead, Google has equalized the choices—and we feel more invested in the decision.

2️⃣ Next, they leaned into our “feels”—by wording the 2 choices in a way that changes the entire emotional landscape around sign-in.

Because now, we’re presented with this counterfactual of “STAY signed out.”

And it FEELS bad, like we’re choosing to miss out on something.

Regardless of what that “something” is, we still perceive this as the more costly choice (albeit for a different reason than above). And that makes us likelier to sign in.

Makes sense, right?

It gets better: interventions like these are widely applicable across the product world 👏 

Here’s another example:

💡 At Irrational Labs, we used active choice to increase bank linkage by 63% on Steady, a mobile app that helps gig workers track their income.

Our intervention? Asking people to “accept” or “decline” the new feature.

In asking them if they wanted to “decline,” we added a perceived cost of finality to NOT accepting (i.e., “we might not have another opportunity”). As a result, accepting looked relatively more beneficial—and less costly—in comparison.

Skeptical? Don’t be.

Choice-based interventions have endless potential to drive behavior change—especially when you’re willing to sweat the small stuff 😉

#BehavioralEconomics #Design #ProductManagement