Featured Resource: The Make It Toolkit
By Dr. Jonathan Caballero, Strategic Operations Advisor
4-min read
In this post, we are covering The Make It Toolkit. The Make It Toolkit is a gamified framework for behavioral design. It provides a repertoire of 15 strategies to elevate the effectiveness of products, services, and campaigns (in other words – change or implementation strategies). This toolkit simplifies the application of behavioral science, advocates for its ethical use, and equips professionals with potent strategies to drive desired outcomes while supporting implementation initiatives.
These activities can be used in a variety of different settings including meetings, workshops and team retreats. For example, we have been hearing interest in using empathy mapping in implementation science. This toolkit provides an overview of how to do that.
Behaviour change strategies
The toolkit does a great job of summarizing research on behavioral science. Drawing from fields including behavioral economics, the psychology of motivation, and even user experience design, it offers 15 actionable and easy-to-understand strategies (which seem like ways to operationalize strategies) that can be leveraged to change behavior, one of the key activities that implementation support professionals focus on.
We were inspired to feature this toolkit, because their infographic of the different strategies has been the most like social media post we have ever shared. It captures a huge amount of information in one visual.
Let’s look through a few examples:
“Make it easy” – Refers to decreasing the cost and/or effort of performing a behavior.
“Make it social” – Refers to leveraging the social context, and social motivations.
“Make it timely” – Refers to leveraging the moments when behavior is more likely to happen.
“Make it meaningful” – Refers to connecting behavior and goals with deep values and beliefs.
Implementation professionals might easily recognize the parallels between some of these ideas with concepts and categories from implementation science theories, models, and frameworks.
For example, the “Make it easy” strategy might bring to mind the idea of trialability from the CFIR, the “Make it timely” strategy is easy to connect with the concept of readiness for implementation, and the “Make it social” and “Make it meaningful” strategies can be recognized as being well-suited to create a plan to address barriers and leverage facilitators from specific categories of the TDF.
Examples and practical advice to inspire implementation
Implementation support professionals will find it particularly valuable that for each strategy the toolkit offers an in-depth description of the science behind the concept and pointers on how to apply it practically. The toolkit goes beyond definitions to provide examples of how the strategies have been successfully applied in areas as diverse as supporting language learning through apps to collaborative-economy transportation.
While the examples do not necessarily come from initiatives that use an implementation lens, the behavior change strategies are designed to be highly adaptable. This can be very valuable for implementation support professionals, as we often hear about the need for examples of change strategies that can be applied across different settings (as a large proportion of implementation examples tend to focus on healthcare).
More resources in the toolkit
The toolkit itself leverages the strategies that it describes by providing additional resources for people who want to change behavior. Examples include MakeitGPT (a custom-built ChatGPT focused on behavioral design and gamification), a blog with case studies of behavior change from many different settings, training, and a space for people to discuss behavioral change and gamification.
To “Make it easy” for you to explore these resources, here’s a link to explore the toolkit! - https://www.makeit.tools/
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