The scale up toolkit for behaviour change

When we know that a behaviour change intervention has worked in a pilot or trial, how can we scale it up to achieve greater impact and reach?

BehaviourWorks Australia and the Victorian Government Behavioural Insights Unit have developed an evidence-informed toolkit to help behavioural insights researchers and practitioners to start with scale up in mind, including how to:

  • Learn about scale up, its challenges, and useful frameworks.
  • Identify which behaviour to target with an intervention.
  • Assess the feasibility of different intervention ideas.
  • Select a scalable behaviour change intervention.
  • Design or adapt an intervention for testing and scale up.
  • Test scale up assumptions about your intervention in a pilot or trial.

This website provides videos and tutorials on how to use the toolkit, and extra resources to help achieve behavioural impact at scale. All content will be iterated upon; we welcome feedback and the opportunity to develop better tools.

Read the research paper

We conducted a systematic overview of reviews of scholarly evidence on scale up, and 11 practice interviews with behaviour science researchers and practitioners to identify the factors and activities that influence the scale up of behaviour change interventions. This research underpinned the development of the scale up toolkit.

Read the preprint manuscript on the Open Science Framework:

Saeri, A. K., Slattery, P., Tear, M. J., Varazzani, C., Epstein, D., Knott, C., Kusmanoff, A. M., Bagshaw, H., Liao, J., Orjuela, S., Smith, L. D. (2021). Scale up of behaviour change interventions: A rapid review of evidence and practice. doi: 10.31219/osf.io/scd3k

Read the book chapter

In chapter 12 of the BehaviourWorks Method Book, we offer some approaches and tools to help teams share the learnings from their intervention trials and scale their successes up to achieve even greater impact.

Download the book chapter:

Chapter 12: Scaling and Knowledge Translation

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The scale up project is a collaboration was to understand: “How can we best support behavioural insights practitioners in scaling up?”

The development of the toolkit was informed by a review of published evidence and interviews with more than 20 practitioners to identify the factors and activities that influence whether behaviour change interventions scale. We are currently writing a research paper.

The scale up project team

Dr Alexander Saeri, BehaviourWorks Australia, Monash University
Dr Peter Slattery, BehaviourWorks Australia, Monash University
Dr Morgan Tear, BehaviourWorks Australia, Monash University

Kate Phillips, Behavioural Insights Unit, Department of Premier and Cabinet, Victoria
Dr Chiara Varazzani, Behavioural Insights Unit, Department of Premier and Cabinet, Victoria

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