Interventions to bolster benefits take-up: Assessing intensity, framing, and targeting of government outreach

• In Event: Nudges, Location and Communication: Reducing Administrative Burdens Inside and Outside Government

Abstract

Behaviorally-informed “nudges” are widely used in government outreach, but face criticism for being too modest to address poverty at scale. Indeed, when used to increase the take-up of social safety net programs, results are often mixed. In this paper, we test adjustments to behavioral interventions that are commonly hypothesized to increase their effectiveness. In four field experiments over two years (n = 542,804), we examine (1) whether “higher-touch” proactive communication, (2) variations in message framing, and (3) more precise targeting increase take-up of critical anti-poverty benefits in California, above and beyond traditional “light-touch” approaches. 

All four experiments were conducted in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and involved statewide outreach campaigns aimed at encouraging low-income households to claim the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) and other available economic stimulus payments during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our sample in each study was extremely vulnerable low-income households, many of whom had no prior-year income and so were at risk of missing out on the large cash transfers during the pandemic.

We find that light-touch interventions significantly and consistently increase take-up by 0.14 to 2 percentage points – a 150% to over 500% relative increase – regardless of message, sample, timing, or modality, resulting in over $4 million disbursed to low-income families. Partly because of the nature of the benefit, these light-touch approaches were remarkably cost effective and had a large and tangible real-world impact: every $1 spent on outreach yielded from $50 to over $8,000 in benefits disbursed. At the same time, we find that higher-touch outreach that involved staffing a hotline that could proactively reach out to residents, akin to voter registration or vaccination campaigns, was, at best, slightly more effective at closing take-up gaps than light-touch outreach – not nearly enough to offset its high cost. Similarly, we find that the effect of outreach is directionally larger among a more precisely-targeted sample, but this difference is neither sizable nor statistically significant, and we find no added effect from refining outreach message framing or content. 

Taken together, these findings challenge widely-held assumptions about how to increase effectiveness of behavioral interventions in the context of the social safety net, with immediate implications for scholars and policymakers. Nationally, millions of dollars are being invested in interventions like those tested in our field experiments, which often form the core of playbooks released by civic tech organizations or government digital service and customer experience teams. On the one hand, our studies reinforce the promise of light-touch outreach as one potential lever through which policymakers can start to close take-up gaps. On the other hand, our findings demonstrate that more resource-intensive interventions do not necessarily lead to higher impact. This points toward an urgent need to rethink what outreach strategies – if any – can do better than a “nudge” if we are to close the take-up gap in anti-poverty programs.

Authors

• Elizabeth Linos, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Jessica Lasky-Fink, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Jesse Rothstein, University of California, Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Co-Author