Report Stop Darmkanker

Brainvolve – Stop Darmkanker

(http://www.brainvolve.com) © Steven De Blieck 2015, no unauthorized copying, reproduction or redistribution

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About Brainvolve ..................................................................................................................... 3

About me .................................................................................................................................... 3 Goal and process ...................................................................................................................... 4

Target group and decisions ................................................................................................. 5 Bottlenecks and changes ...................................................................................................... 8 Long-‐term advice .............................................................................................................................. 8 Internal need to save lives ........................................................................................................................... 9 Link saving lives with donating ............................................................................................................. 10 Donation amount .......................................................................................................................................... 11 Less painful payment .................................................................................................................................. 11 Wanting bigger impact and esteem by friends ................................................................................ 12

Short-‐term advice ........................................................................................................................... 14 References ............................................................................................................................... 16



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About Brainvolve Brainvolve helps you guide your target group’s hidden decision process, via -‐costless-‐ technological changes, based on the latest behavior science. These small changes immediately produce big long-‐term savings in your costs of sales, employee health, etc. Brainvolve also builds technological solutions based on

the latest psychology research to help you reach company goals more effectively and save money. As an example, I'm developing a solution that helps organisations avoid bad employee health by using behavioral economics research in a digital environment. Contact me if you want your organisation to be a test-‐case!.

About me Hi, my name is Steven De Blieck. It is fair to say that nobody likes long texts, so I’ll keep this as short as I can. In fact this sentence itself might be unnecessary. I am specialised in linking behavior science and tech. It is fascinating to see how far apart these 2 domains are sometimes, and how this costs organisations a lot of money.

In order for me to provide this service, I have to be knowledgeable in two domains, computer science and behavioral science. I am only formally educated in the first one, through my university education. However, I have read extensively into the latest behavioral science research -‐ through mentoring of a domain expert -‐ and have been applying it in my previous startup. I have in fact become obsessed with understanding the ins and outs of this field. As a consequence, I’m able to exhibit the dual competencies necessary to offer highly specialized assistance. (Oh, by the way, I live in Belgium, you might have heard of it.)



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Goal and process The end goal is getting Stop Darmkanker (SD) more donations via it’s website. In order to do this, it is necessary to understand the target group’s hidden decision process, so consequently, we can guide it towards our goal. These are the different steps we will go through:



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Target group and decisions The first and most important step is to draw the target group’s hidden decision sequence:

Above, we can see the decision sequence of a person making the decision wether or not do donate money to SD. The blue and gray squares are states. The blue ones are the internal states of the person, the gray ones are external states (in this case, the website which the person is interacting with). The arrows that connect these states are the different decision and actions we want the individual to make. This process is divided into different steps, based on the latest research in neuro-‐economics.

Decision sequence



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Now, where the real potential lies, is how these different steps in each decision process are made. Our brain is not able to make all our decisions consciously, we would quickly become overloaded. In fact, we are only aware of a small percentage of our decisions. Even stronger, when we make a decision, the neurons in our brain fire seconds before we become aware of it.1 It’s like our brain decides for us and lets us know later on. Our decisions can be made using 2 processes, System 1 and System 2. This is called “dual-‐process” theory and was first layed out by Nobel-‐prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman2The fact that he won his Nobel prize in economics – not psychology -‐ just shows how much impact this theory can have, if put to good use. System 1 makes most of our decisions and is impulsive, automatic, unconsious and intuitive. As an example, when you tied your shoes this morning, you probably did not think about the different steps this requires, what costs this would involve for you etc.? Let me give you another example. Read this text: 3 + 4. I’m pretty confident the number “7” popped into your head. Now, did you make an active decision to do a calculation? Did you think about algebraic rules from primary school? Probably not. It just happened to you, this is System 1. On the other hand, there is System 2. As an example, please tell me the amount of occurunces of the letter “a” on this page. Unless you have some kind of compulsion to count letters, you probably had to shift your focus at the beginning of this page, scan word by word, and incremenent an internal counter when you saw an “a”. You had to do this consciously, an answer did not suddenly pop into your mind, this is System 2. This is a schematic represenation of the two systems: 3

Dual processes of decision-‐making



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The logo of this company (seen below) is not a rabbit and a turtle by mere coincidence, nor is it a product of psychedelic drug use. They represent the 2 systems. The rabbit is the fast System 1. It’s active most of the time. The turtle is the much slower System 2. It sits on top of the rabbit and can order it to slow down. This is what happens in the brain as well: when the turtle kicks in, we see in activation in the neurons of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, responsible for cognitive control. This results in an inhibition of the neurons in the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex, regions used in the rabbit way of thinking.

Next, we’ll determine bottlenecks in the decision sequence.

Brainvolve logo



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Bottlenecks and changes

Long-term advice So the decisions we want people to make are the following:

We will look how we can influence the rabbit (System 1) way of making decisions to solve bottlenecks in the decision sequence. These are decisions the targets should be making but aren’t. The automatic mode of our brain tends to make shortcuts, also called “heuristics”, in our decision making. This because letting the turtle (System 2) do the work would require too much effort. These shortcuts have been hard-‐coded by evolutionary processes, because they have often helped us in making quick correct decisions. As an example, if a friend does you a favor, you automatically feel the urge to repay that favor. This is called “reciprocity”.4 From an evolutionary perspective, this rule of thumb has been key to survival. There is no conscious thought involved in the process, our brain just tells us that this is the best thing to do in most cases. However, most cases is not the same as always, and these heuristics can cause us to make mistakes in our thinking, also called “cognitive biases”. As an example, many times when making a decision, we follow the behavior what many other similar to us do. A lot of times this turns out to be good for us too, but sometimes it’s just not. There is an incredible amount of research into these rules of thumb we take. If you understand them, you can use them ethically to guide people’s autopilot in the required direction. And I emphasise “ethically”. If we would use these to persuade people into doing something they really not want to do, it would backfire, because people will be unhappy and will never do business with you again (probably, they will let their friends know as too). What follows now are bottlenecks and the related small changes to the website I propose, that can have a big influence on our targets’ decision making. Often these

Decision sequence



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changes trigger these rules of thumb in our decision making (System 1). But bare in mind that it is of equal importance to also target the turtle (System 2). The website needs to be able to convince both our automatic and effortful decison processes.

Internal need to save l ives On the current website, we see that the visitors get asked immediately to make a gift. Very few things trigger the pain centre in our brain more than spending money. Donating is not the end goal but the means to an internal need of the donator. We have to dig deeper why people are willing to donate money. Research shows that mostly, this is because it makes people feel good or because they have a personal connection to the disease. Also, very few people don’t want their altruism to be known, so it’s important to tap into people’s need for self-‐actualisation and respect by others. I propose a popup when entering the website that urges people to help save a life:

Notice how the call-‐to-‐action button is red. This immediately draws our attention because from an evolutionary perspective, red was often a warning sign of dangerous predators. (don’t overuse is, as the power is in the contrast with the rest of the site). The photo of the patients increases the likeability, as these people could be similar to someone you know. We like to say “yes” to someone we like. 5 Also, I have mentioned that “it only takes a minute”. This is a very effective technique to ask a small commitment, everyone has a minute to spare. Once you give an initial commitment, your System 1 wants to be consistent with it. Note that it’s best to change the red button in the right corner of the website to “Help save a life! It only takes a minute.”



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Link saving l ives with donating The most difficult step is possibly to convince people that donating is something that they need to do. Often people don’t donate because they think only a very small percentage of the money will actually go to the helping of the people in need. They often think the organisation gets most of the money. It is very important to mention where the money will go to and especially how it will impact individuals. A good phrase would be: “Your money will help us make campaings that raise awareness for colon cancer. Just imagine that your donation could save your father or uncle.” (also add an image of a patient looking them into the eyes – if you have their permission). This has the added benefit of tapping into people’s loss aversion. We

strongly overvalue avoiding losses compared to acquiring gains. This was first proposed by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his prospect theory6: When you ask people to “imagine” themself doing something, you ask them to look in the mirror . When we see ourselves doing something, we want to act in a socially acceptable way.7 In this case, this would be donating. According to self-‐determination theory, people have a strong need for autonomy in their decision-‐making. That’s why adding this sentence has been shown to double donations in real-‐life settings: “but you are free to accept or refuse.” This makes people feel way more intrinsically motivated to donate. To increase trust, I advice to use light blue with low contrast on the donation page8. Simply adding “donating = loving” has also been shown to increase donations.”

Prospect theory



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Donation amount The first donation amount people currently see is the lowest one, and people will use this as a reference point to compare with the other amount. This is called anchoring. It’s best to set the first donation amount to something very high. For instance, if the first amount is €100, then 20€ does not seem that much anymore. Often, people are under the false assumption that a little donation won’t help, so they don’t donate. Research shows that simply adding “even an euro can help” can have huge results.9 You might think that this would result in more people donating, but that they would donate a lot less. This is not the case. By asking people a small commitment, they are actually willing to make a big one. It is good not to show eurosigns on the page, as triggers individualism in people, and they will donate less. This has been studied with restaurant menus.10 Right now, you have to put in your details twice when donating, once on your page and once on PayPal’s page. I would advise removing this from your page, as you can easily get this information from your Paypal account. People don’t like to give their data away, and certainly not twice. It is good to split the donating into two steps, like it is now. Because people will want to be consistent with what they previously have done. So if they complete the first step, there is a big chance they’ll complete the second one as well. So the first one has to be really small (without much data to be put in).

Less painful payment According to the Hofstede cultural index, Belgium is the second most uncertainty avoidant country in the world (for more info, take a look at http://geert-‐hofstede.com/belgium.html). Uncertainty avoidancy means the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these. Online payments are an extremely uncertain situation. People of a country that’s so uncertainty avoidant as Belgium have to be really reassured that the payment is safe and nothing will happen with their data (remember we are way more focused on avoiding losses than acquiring gains). The solution to this is actually very simple. Adding a logo of the payment security provider together with a text “payment secured by ...” can persuade a lot of people. The fact that we are used to all big sites mentioning this makes us ever more averse of sites not doing this. Taking in consideration all of the above, I propose the following donation page:



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Wanting bigger impact and esteem by friends It is important to ask people to spread the word about their just-‐made donation on social media. If we tailor the sharing message so it is very persuasive, this can get us a lot of donations. It is also an extra reward for the donator to have his/her heroic efforts being viewed by friends. For instance, just adding the picture of a superhero can have a big effect. The message that gets shared on social media can be set in the html code of your website by using opengraph and twitter card header tags: more info about that here: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/open-‐graph-‐meta-‐tags/ I would propose the following text that gets shared: “I helped save people from colon cancer. Want to help me? It only takes a minute. [link to donation page]” It is better to thank someone for their commitment than to thank them for their donation, certainly if you want people to keep being persistent with their commitment.



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This is how the sharing page would look like ideally:



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Short-term advice Now we will look at a campaign that can really boost donations in a short term. Sometimes it is just not enough that a donation saves lives, people want an extra incentive. Competition is a great way to do this. It is fun plus we also like to compare ourselves with others. It would be good if we could divide donators into groups that would battle each other to have the most donations together (although we will frame this as “who cares most about others”). This has been tested in real-‐life with 2 groups based on gender with incredible results. Time to test this online! We have the “advantage” that the Belgian provinces are somewhats divided and are rivals. We can use this to our advantage. Each of the Flemish provinces can have an own donation page, these can stay exactly the same as they are now. We only need to add one “main page” that lets you choose your province. A donation meter can be added here (normalised by the number of inhabitants) with simple Wordpress plugins (such as this one: https://wordpress.org/plugins/fundraising-‐thermometer-‐plugin-‐for-‐wordpress/screenshots/ ). It is of equal importance to let all the people of the Flemish provinces now about the “most caring province” competition. Stop Darmkanker has a lot of celebrities supporting them. What we could do is getting at least one celebrity role model for every province. They can promise to do a challenge if their province wins (e.g. if Tom Waes wants to do a challenge, this will get a lot of attention). We can make a teaser video for each of these celebrities and the challenges they promise to do if they win. Since we like celebrities, and we certainly like them in unusual situations, video’s like this can really work. Most celebs have a lot of social media followers (I wich I had those!), so these videos can be spread very fast (of course with a link to the competition page). I have experience in making films myself so it would be fun and learnful for me to help put these together! Last but not least, it is important to set quite a short timelimit on the competition. If we let the competition run for a month, people will simply procrastinate their decision and eventually just won’t donate. I propose to let it run for 2 weeks max. The main page would look something like this:



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References 1 Chun Siong Soon et al., “Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain,” Nature Neuroscience 11, no. 5 (2008): 543–45. 2 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185, no. 4157 (September 27, 1974): 1124–31, doi:10.1126/science.185.4157.1124. 3 Daniel Kahneman, “A Perspective on Judgment and Choice: Mapping Bounded Rationality,” The American Psychologist 58, no. 9 (September 2003): 697–720, doi:10.1037/0003-‐066X.58.9.697. 4 Robert B. Cialdini, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” 1993 5 Robert B. Cialdini, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” 1993 6 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (March 1, 1979): 263–91, doi:10.2307/1914185. 7 Arthur L. Beaman et al., “Self-‐Awareness and Transgression in Children: Two Field Studies,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, no. 10 (1979): 1835–46, doi:10.1037/0022-‐3514.37.10.1835. 8 Nathalie Nahai, Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion (FT Press, 2013), http://www.websofinfluence.com 9 Robert B. Cialdini and David A. Schroeder, “Increasing Compliance by Legitimizing Paltry Contributions: When Even a Penny Helps.,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34, no. 4 (1976): 599. 10 Sybil S. Yang, Mauro M. Sessarego, and others, “$ or Dollars: Effects of Menu-‐Price Formats on Restaurant Checks,” 2009, http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/chrpubs/169/?utm_source=scholarship.sha.cornell.edu%2Fchrpubs%2F169&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages.

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