Behavioral Insights Lab
For More Impactful Campaigns, Stronger Programs and Better ROI
Vital Strategies’ Behavioral Insights Lab is your partner in designing effective campaigns that move people, and health policies and programs that are responsive to how people behave and think in the real world.
game-changing research studies and peer-reviewed publications to guide more effective and efficient public health work.
The Challenge
Life-saving health solutions often fail to achieve their full potential, not because they are wrong, but because behavioral realities were never fully factored in. The result?
Misinformation and eroded public trust
People made wary of messaging, hurting future attempts.
People left unreached
Solutions built for them, but never delivered, undermining health objectives and budget.
Wasted resources
Funding spent on interventions that were never going to land.
Behavioral insights help public health solutions deliver their full potential.
Vital Strategies’ Behavioral Insights Lab exists to address this challenge.
Our distinctive strength is partnership: embedded within a global public health organization, we work in sustained collaboration with governments and public institutions.
From that vantage point, we apply behavioral science—and increasingly AI and digital technology—to identify barriers, test solutions and build demand before interventions scale. And we stay. We don’t hand over a report and walk away; we carry the evidence from early research through to delivery.
Core Capabilities
We work across the full program and policy cycle, structured around five interconnected capabilities.
Understand the Audience and Their Environment
Know what your audience believes and responds to before you design. This includes understanding how forces such as stigma and misinformation can undermine your efforts—and how to get ahead of them.
- Formative and audience research, including population surveys
- Stakeholder and policy-landscape mapping
Monitor Digital Environments
Uncover threats and risks in the digital environment and how they shape health perceptions and behavior, with clear, actionable insight to counter them.
- AI-powered digital media monitoring and reporting (including dashboard, digital archive and chatbot)
- Identification of industry tactics and narratives—hidden and evident.
Test Before Deployment
Go into implementation confident your intervention works, tested with real people against real barriers, using validated theories of change and behavioral frameworks.
- Message and concept testing
- Digital experimentation (e.g., A/B testing)
- Pre-implementation testing of policy tools such as front-of-package warning labels and marketing restrictions
Demonstrate Impact and Drive Action
Show what your investment achieved, with rigorous evidence of impact and cost-effectiveness, and receive a documented behavioral playbook for future interventions.
- Campaign evaluations (pre/post surveys, exposure analysis, mixed-methods)
- Cost-effectiveness assessment
Build to Last
Embed behavioral insight capacity within government teams and institutions so impact outlasts any single engagement.
- Tailored training programs and workshops
- Behavioral insight guides and explainers
- Multisectoral roundtables and knowledge-sharing session
campaigns to generate public health momentum informed
countries reached
reports and peer-reviewed publications
How we work with you
Because the Lab sits within Vital Strategies’ Policy, Advocacy and Communication division, which includes 70+ communication and technical specialists in dozens of countries, every engagement can be tailored to where a partner is in the program or policy cycle scale and scale as far as needed.
Partners can select individual deliverables, a full capability stage or move through our complete offering model below—from initial insight to full-scale delivery and sustainability.
Insight.
We diagnose the behavioral, institutional and political barriers standing between an intervention and its intended impact, so partners receive actionable evidence.
Insight to design.
We work alongside program and policy teams to turn evidence into interventions tested with real audiences, so investments go to what works.
Insight to delivery.
Drawing on the full capabilities of our division, we carry the work from research through campaign development, implementation and evaluation, with behavioral evidence informing every stage and rigorous documentation of impact.
Sustainability—available at any stage.
We embed behavioral insight capacity within institutional teams that can be carried forward to future projects. .
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