For the past four years the New York City Behavioral Design Team (BDT)—a partnership between the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity and ideas42—has been redesigning elements of programs and services to make them more accessible to more New Yorkers, and make the City more equitable for more of its residents.

From this extensive work, we’ve distilled four ways behavioral design has improved equity by making New York City more accessible.

Preventing loss of food benefits

Each year, the SNAP program requires clients to recertify in order to continue receiving their benefits.

To help improve recertification rates and avoid unnecessary loss of food benefits, the BDT redesigned a reminder notification that both informed clients about required next steps, and simplified them.

Helping Gifted & Talented programs reach more low-income students

Fewer low-income students test into and attend Gifted & Talented programs, missing out on potential benefits.

The BDT redesigned emails and postcards to encourage parents of all preschoolers entering kindergarten to sign their students up for the test, in a randomized controlled trial.

Securing financial aid dollars for CUNY students

The BDT sent a series of email and text message reminders to enrolled students to increase financial aid renewal rates at three CUNY campuses, and saw steep increases at all of them.

Building a more diverse fire department

The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) invested in a multi-year, multi-pronged effort to increase the diversity of its ranks so that its firefighters would better reflect the population they serve. As part of this initiative, the BDT worked with FDNY to conduct a randomized controlled trial to assess whether waiving filing fees for applicants would increase the diversity of applicants taking the qualifying examination.

Waiving the fee increased filing rates by 84% among black candidates and 83% among female candidates.

Read the full article about behavioral design strategies at ideas42.