At SPRING, I worked to apply behavioral insights into everything that I did. This is a reflection on how an aspect of our work applied insights of human behavior.
Have you ever awarded certificates after a training? As a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo, I quickly learned that awarding certificates is an important component of any workshop. The certificate must cite the title of the workshop, the participant’s name, include the trainer’s signature, and be stamped with the facilitator’s approval. Finding a stamp designer in an American city can be quite challenging, but stamp designers in a West African city are about as ubiquitous as bodegas in Manhattan. A word of caution to Anglophone newcomers – “tampon” signs in Francophone regional capitals are not indicators of Tampax penetrating the developing market.
Returning from Togo, I assumed that the weight of certificates would be lifted. Certificates were no longer dealt as social currency, right? Not quite. One of my first responsibilities in 2015 with JSI was to design certificates for a workshop on maternal and child health in Niger. Years later, after a behavior change training in Rwanda, participants were very serious about the accuracy of their names on cardstock certificates.
Behavioral insights show us that the end of an experience greatly shapes a human’s memory of that experience. We call this the peak-end rule. From studies conducted by Kahneman, Fredreickson, and others we know that our memories resemble a series of snapshots rather than a continuous recording. As humans, when we look back at an experience we remember the end and the extremes. This insight has been applied across industries – shifting practices ranging from hotel check-outs to exercise routines.
Whether we’re completing a hotel stay, exercise routine, or workshop, the ending of the experience matters. At SPRING, if we wanted our workshop to be remembered well, it was important that we end it well. Our goal was for participants leave the workshop and then continually integrate their learnings into their work – of course we want the workshop to be remembered well! Certificates created our peak ending. The awarding of certificates initiated a ceremony, celebrated each individual, and encouraged everyone to act as the agents of change that they committed to being in the beginning. These experiences matter, and at SPRING we worked to incorporate this understanding into our project design.
“We can use this knowledge and we can go back and share this knowledge and it can affect our communities.”