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I recently finished Nudge, a book by economists about how to get people to change their behaviour. Before you drop off to sleep let me say – this book is fantastic.
The main point of the book (paraphrased) is as follows:
Since people don’t think very hard about the choices they make, it is a lot easier to make it easy for them to do what you want than to try to educate them or incentivize them to change their behaviour. There are many ways to do this, but one of the easiest is simply by giving thought to the way choices are available to them, or what they call “choice architecture.”
Many people in health and sport have tried to educate and inform, with little impact. The choice architects take a different approach: almost everyone opts for the default if a default is given. Thus, the answer is simply to make the default choice intelligently given what the choice architect knows about the person. The impact of savings behaviour from altering defaults swamps everything else.
Picking and choosing a few examples can’t convey what is most surprising about the book: it is really fun to read. Academics aren’t supposed to be able to write this well.
To give you a sense of the topics the book covers, here are just a few of the entries in the index:
ABBA, Gold: Greatest Hits, 194
accountability in schools, 200
air conditioners, filters for, 234
angels, 235
arousal, power of, 42
asbestos, warnings about, 189
Attila the Hun, 23-24
autopsies, corneas removed in, 177
The Inclusive Fitness Initiative (IFI) is running a series of events during 2009-2010 with the aim of enhancing the benefits of providing an inclusive fitness facility. The series of seminar style events will cover a number of topics including inclusive marketing, creating an inclusive fitness environment, staff training and developing partnership networks. The events will include speakers from key areas of the industry as well as the IFI team. Each seminar will also include an IFI facility case study.
I’m speaking about top tips for inclusive marketing at the two inclusive marketing events.
What are the benefits of attending?
Who can benefit?
Individuals who can benefit from attending include: fitness instructors, fitness managers, individuals involved in marketing roles and individuals involved in physical activity and health development. IFI Accredited Facility staff can attend free of charge with places available to non-IFI Accredited organisations at only £50 (plus VAT) per person.
More details including how to register
There is a flyer with more details about the event including a form for registering. You can download it here.
If you attended one of my train-the-trainer workshops you might be running workshops yourself. When you do can you please point people to the survey link on the promotingactivity.com homepage at the end. I’ve also included the link below in case you want to email it to anyone.
This should save time in evaluating the workshops and make sure everyone’s opinion has an influence on the future direction of promotingactivity.com.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=aJtQswo_2fNB8sEMuExt74pQ_3d_3d
We’re very pleased to be able to bring you the new and improved Promoting Activity photo library. It has 450 new high-resolution photos of activity available to you for free. This takes the total number of photos to over 650.
We’ve also added a new user interface and keyworded every new photo to make it easier than ever for you to find the perfect photo.
This photo shoot was done by an incredibly talented photographer called Jon Parker Lee. His work has previously been featured in The Independent, The Sun, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mirror, the Manchester Evening News and others. He spent 2 months this year travelling round the North West photographing local, real people doing activity. This huge photo shoot is now available to you and anyone else promoting physical activity to use for free.
We’ve tried to capture a wide range of people taking part in activity, with a deliberate focus on normal, everyday people from all walks of life. Model release forms were signed by everyone captured in these photos, so you can use them in any format you want.
We know there are still gaps in our library – particularly around disabled people and some BME groups, so we will carry on with more photo shoots in the future to fill these gaps.
The password reminder was playing up, so some people haven’t been able to login to the poster design tool. This is now fixed, and everyone should be able to get a password reminder by clicking on the forgotten password button and entering their email address.
Apologies to anyone who this caused problems for, for how long this took to fix. Chris – our developer – had just gotten married when it broke and has just got back from his honeymoon. We’ll try and set it up so anything like this doesn’t hold up fixes when they’re needed.
