The Western Australian government has been successfully delivering the LivingSmart household behaviour change initiative in Western Australia for many years. The initiative includes phone-based recruitment, eco-coaching phone calls with households, tailored informational materials, normative feedback letters comparing a householdā€™s energy use with similar neighbours, home visits to explore quick fixes around the house, and other behavioural interventions. Collectively, past program evaluations have shown these measures to successfully lead to reductions in energy, water, and transport use.
In 2012, the WA State Government contracted with Behaviour Design Works to help design and deliver this randomised control trial using five different intervention conditions, plus placebo and control groups. Each condition was designed to test different intervention approaches, in order to determine which techniques have the greatest relative impact on behaviour change outcomes.
In order to collect robust and fine-grained data to use for both normative feedback letters and for evaluation purposes, our team performed five complete rounds of energy and water meter readings per household.
