Case Studies

Description: This study seeks to explore ways to best develop a time-locked savings product.

Lessons Learned: Reframing a CD in another way that doesn't carry a negative connotation (e.g. "Super Locked Savings Goal product") with an explicit interest rate may impact how likely someone is to put money into a locked-savings product.

There are two lessons here: 1) it seems that reframing a CD as a "Super Locked Savings Goal product" may increase the likelihood to invest in a locked-savings product, and 2) it seems that a 3% interest rate (vs. a 2% interest rate) may increase the likelihood to invest in a locked savings product.

Description: This lab study seeks to assess wage-framing has a causal impact on retirement savings contributions.

Lessons Learned: These findings suggest that a yearly salary (regardless of the amount) helps put people into a long-term mindset and creates a greater willingness to save for a long-term future. By telling people what their expected annual salary is, rather than their hourly wage and how many hours they will work per week, we can encourage greater long-term savings.

Description: This field study seeks to understand how psychologically satisfying numbers can be leveraged to help people pay off loans faster.

Lessons Learned: The results suggest that an "earnings" framing (instead of a "savings" framing") may make saving on a mortgage payment more appealing.

These results suggest that while a simple prompt to increase loan payments may be effective, adopting a "round up" frame may be even more effective.

Description: This fields study seeks to present retirement savings accounts that will yield the largest uptake and retirement savings.

Lessons Learned: Choice defaults seem to be marginially more successful than simple defaults, both in terms of opening an account and keeping it active, and amount saved.

Description: This study seeks to assess if recurring payments form designed to encourage borrowers to repay their loans automatically when they are paid can increase car loan repayment.

Lessons Learned: Inviting loan repayment customers to ennroll in a recurrent loans repayment program can be an effective way to promote program enrollment, increase timely payment and increase loan repaymeent overall.

Description: This field study seeks to encourage more employees to communicate how many hours they would want to work each week.

Lessons Learned: These results suggest that incorporating the desired hours function into the employee onboarding flow (meaning that incompletion looks like missing information) encourages employees to input their desired hours.

Description: This cross-sectional study aims to explore whether sending out a Loan Information Letter that clearly highlights the loan repayment date with repayment instructions could decrease first-payment loan defaults.

Lessons Learned: The updated letter that clearly highlights a repayment date and repayment instructions did bring about an average decrease in time it took to pay a loan payment by about 1.5 days. Although, this was cross-sectional, and didn't compare to a control, meaning there were a lot of factors that weren't controlled for, so more testing is suggested.

Description: This field experiment seeks to help users reduce or avoid overdraft fees.

Lessons Learned: Opt-out messages harnessing social norms are an effective way to reduce overdraft fees. Leveraging injunctive social norms appears to be particularly effective when it comes to reminder messages.

Description: This field study seeks to increase the number of credit union members who saved their coin deposits windfalls.

Lessons Learned: The implied default in the treatment group successfully nudged members who otherwise would not have saved at all to save, even if it was just a small portion of their coin slip.

Description: This field experiment seeks to explore how different messaging on a new template feature affects the time in which managers post work schedules.

Lessons Learned: The scheduling template alone, which reduced friction in posting schedules, led to 33% of managers posting their schedules at least a week ahead of time. Additionally, adding social proof and overdue cues was shown to be the strongest method in getting more managers to post sooner.

Description: This quasi-experimental study seeks to observe whether a financial assessment recommendation (of the defendant) would impact how judges set bail.

Lessons Learned: Although there was no discussion of how the financial assesment affected the judge's willingness to change the bail amount, there was data about how the form of bail affected the likelihood of making bail. Defendants were significantly more likely to make bail when they were offered the partially secured bond option (82% made bail) vs. the cash or insurance co bail (62% made bail).

Description: This field study seeks to reduce the amount graduate students borrow, particularly for living expenses.

Lessons Learned: Defaulting students to only take out the COA and making them enroll again for living cost related expenses decreased student borrowing.

Description: This field study leverages how timed events and reminders can encourage employees to save more.

Lessons Learned: Reminders to save may be most effective a few days out from payday when people are less likely to already be planning what to spend on and in turn willing to put aside more.

Savings events may encourage employees to start saving.

Description: This study aims to assess how defaults and round numbers for a Pay Yourself First CD (PYFCD) account during the auto-loan process can impact customers' overall savings.

Lessons Learned: Defaults were shown to be effective in increasing enrollment to a savings account (which increased savings) for those obtaining automobile loans. While this was generally effective, there were no differences between the conditions, meaning the percentage going into savings (9.4% vs. 10%) and the presentation of the numbers (round vs. specific) did not impact savings enrollment/ contributions.

Description: This field study seeks to further increase the participation in a scholars program by bolstering the perceptions of credibility and trustworthiness of the respective program.

Lessons Learned: This study found that that an advertisement with an in-product endorsement alongside a logo for a scholarship program led to the highers interest from users, as measured by unique clicks on the advertisement.

Description: This field study seeks to help more 1099-workers enroll in retirement accounts.

Lessons Learned: Framing income in annual terms as opposed to "per job" appears to be an effective way to increase the amount of people who open retirement savings accounts, boosting long-term savings.

Description: This field study seeks to increase the number of people who sign up to receive benefits and discounts at grocery stores.

Lessons Learned: Endowing users with a sense of ownership over the benefits and access to discounts was sufficient in impacting platform sign-up rates. This intervention holds promises to drive future cost-effective interventions and is now a central component of CoinFlip's messaging.

Description: This field experiment seeks to encourage bank account linkages within a mobile app through different screen designs.

Lessons Learned: Using either a "Forced Choice" (forcing the user to either or accept a feature) or "Missing Information" (telling users that their account setup was incomplete) is an effective way to increase bank account linkages within a mobile app.

Description: This field study seeks to increase the likelihood that an applicant completes the application and gets access to a 0% interest loan.

Lessons Learned: The results suggest that these new Kiva U.S. customers didn’t require significant amounts of time to complete the application; they just hadn’t prioritized it.

Description: This field study seeks to find ways to help members manage their cash flow by increasing short- and long-term savings.

Lessons Learned: Adding slips that add friction alongside additional elements such as savings defaults and a risk waiver could potentially lead to higher savings deposits.

Description: This field study explores whether pre-commitment may affect willingness to save when receiving a tax refund.

Lessons Learned: These results suggest that implementing pre-commitment into the tax refund process may increase savings from those respective tax refunds.

Description: This field study aims to increase uptake of Valet VITA, a scan-and-go version of the IRS’s drop-off filing services.

Lessons Learned: Adding a decision aid that highlights the different circumstances under which people should use Valet Vita seemed to be effective in increasing uptake of the system.

Description: This field study seeks to encourage more families to open and set up automatic deposits into a CSA.

Lessons Learned: The number of families who made any deposit remains relatively small and did not significantly increase, but we believe that, over time, the families who contribute are more likely to create lasting savings behaviors that can lead to increased total savings in preparation for college.

Description: This study compares how cadence of payment affects people's debt repayment amounts.

Lessons Learned: Framing and cadence of payment affect how much money people are willing to set aside to repay credit card debt.

Description: This study seeks to assess how various mechanisms (i.e. round-up savings, paycheck splitting and a pre-commitment savings account) will affect enrollment in various savings funds.

Lessons Learned: This study has three key takeaways: 1) Respondents found round-ups to be the most interesting funding mechanism, yet were aware of its shortcomings in helping them save effectively; 2) Aligning automatic savings with income (e.g., paycheck splitting) is believed to be most effective for saving by respondents and; 3) People are hesitant to limit their access to saved money with a pre-commitment device. Counterintuitively, participants report that they would be most willing to lock away savings for an emergency fund, even though the unpredictable nature of an emergency could make this problematic.

Description: This lab learning seeks to increase the perceived importance of savings among people.

Lessons Learned: This study suggests that anchoring potential savers on a large number (amount saved over a longer period of time) is important in increasing the percieved importance of saving for the future.

Description: This study seeks to assess what design choices for a retirement calculator would be most likely to encourage users to engage in positive behaviors like increasing contributions to their account.

Lessons Learned: This laboratory finding can be applied to inform how companies display savings projections to maximize user contribution--and ultimately savings amount.

Description: This field study seeks to help families build their short-term savings whille paying of their loans.

Lessons Learned: Loss aversion language may be an effective framing to get members to stay opted-in to a loan-savings program.

Description: This field study seeks to encourage more employers to finish the registration and account set up for state-facilitated retirement plans (SFRPs).

Lessons Learned: Out of the conditions tested (Goal-gradient, Helpful, Compliance), the Compliance condition email, which denotes the SFRP mandate along with a display of incompleteness, led to the greatest increase in the probability of adding employee infromation to the SFRP portal.

Description: This study seeks to increase the number of mobile banking app users who set up an Emergency Savings goal with a prompt at onboarding.

Lessons Learned: Prompting mobile banking app users to create an emergency fund can be an effective way to increase both fund creation and subsequent savings. However, the lack of difference between the $100 and $500 targets suggests that the perceived difficulty of the target amounts in our treatment groups was likely not a factor.

Description: This prototype seeks to help consumers to lower their interest on their credit card.

Lessons Learned: The use of secrecy wording in messaging can be scaled across multiple domains that still require people to take an action like making a phone call, such as making changes to credit reports or cancelling subscriptions.

Description: This field study aims to increase the number of homeowners with company that matches older homeowners with potential renters.

Lessons Learned: Framing Facebooks advertisements around age milestones can help increase click through rates and ultimately also increase homeowner sign-up rates.

Description: This field study seeks to help optimize creation of and contributions to savings goals.

Lessons Learned: Leveraging goal gradient theory, via punchcards, seems to be an effective, low cost way to help members achieve their financial goals.

Description: This study aims to increase the number of users who link their bank account to an app and to increase the amount of income users earn through the addition of a goal feature into an app.

Lessons Learned: The addition of an in-app goal feature can lead to significant changes in the income generated by users. The ease of scalability of such a feature leads to the potential of large-scale impact.

Description: This field study seeks to promote college savings and financial literacy for the city’s schoolchildren and families through the children’s savings account (CSA) program.

Lessons Learned: TBD

These resuts sugguest that the type of messaging used should depend on the ultimate goal. If the goal is to have parents/guardians return the CSA form, not including a time progression front page may be more effective. However, if the goal is increase likelihood of CSA depsoits, a front page time progression may be more effective.

Description: This field study seeks to encourage more employees to start saving with the OregonSaves automatic enrollment program.

Lessons Learned: This study provides support for the use of narrative decision aids embedded (especially Social Proof decision aids) within emails to increase enrollment rates.

Description: This fields study seeks to assess how different text messages be used to increase usage of the VITA site, a free tax site.

Lessons Learned: Text message reminders appear to be a cost effective way to increase retention at tax free sites. This intervention costs less than $65 total to implement. Assuming these clients would have gone to a paid preparer, our interventions saved over $21,000 in tax preparation costs just from sending out messages to clients of this one VITA site.

Description: This field study seeks to leverage to effectively drive lower discretionary spending.

Lessons Learned: In addition to the results of the intervention, we also gained key insights into spending behaviors, which include: people are interested in others’ spending, people thought others were spending more than they were, and people didn't want bad news (i.e. they were more likely to drop out when they were told they were spending more than the average).

Description: This field study seeks to increse the nummber of VITA filers through a friend and family referral program.

Lessons Learned: Adding a tangible lottery ticket to a VITA referral program could lead to a substantial increase in referrals and filers.

Description: This field study seeks to improve the retention of financial coaching programs.

Lessons Learned: This experiment suggests that retention is built during a participant’s early engagement. If a participant engages with coaching and derives social, emotional, or financial value during the first sessions, they are more likely to sustain their engagement over time.

Description: This field experiment seeks to display the results of a financial health survey in a way that is meaningful and provide targeted recommendations for actions that members can immediately take based on their responses.

Lessons Learned: Subscores may provide respondents more concrete ways to imagine taking action compared to just than the overall score, which feels more abstract. Additionally, financially vulnerable individuals may be overwhelmed by a poor situation and may tend to avoid confronting the problem.

Description: This exploratory research seeks to assess what role the choice architecture related to the presentation of investment portfolios plays in creating the mismatch between risk and individual tolerance for risk.

Lessons Learned: The analysis provides evidence that people’s preferences for and tolerance of risk is not static but instead informed by cues and influences in the surrounding context.

Description: This analysis seeks to explore whether different types of alternative short-term, small dollar loans has an affect on people's savings behavior.

Lessons Learned: This analysis provides support for small-dollar loan products with a forced savings component for qualified members. According to the analyses, this type of account could lead to greater overall savings.

Description: This study aims to explore the demand for different types of automatic savings plans.

Lessons Learned: This study found that the majority of users that were tested wanted some type of "smarter" atuomatic savings option. While the most commonly choser answer was the traditional manual option, "Save on Payday" was the second most common. This means beyond the default manual savings proess, users had a preference for automatic transfers on payday. Beyond this, there was a small but signifcant negative correlation between people who preferred manual savings and total deposit amount.

Description: This field study seeks to increase the number of 1099-workers enrolling in tax savings “wallets".

Lessons Learned: Although earlier results suggested that users may express concern about issues of control and access, when it comes to actually signing up for a tax savings wallet, they prefer ease and automaticity.

Description: This field study seeks to get more LiveSaver users to link their bank account (which is required to track savings and earn the financial reward).

Lessons Learned: People are motivated to save, but motivation wanes. It’s important to have people complete difficult tasks when their motivation is the highest to minimize drop-off rates.

Description: This field study seeks to encourage re-engagement with a savings CD among credit union members through an email nudge.

Lessons Learned: While it is unclear what the main effect of the reminder email itself was, this study found that a simple reminder is just as effective as a goal-oriented behavioral nudge via email.

Description: This study assesses whether call center staffers asked if members wanted to save a portion of their payment reductions when consolidating debt or modifying a loan can increase member savings.

Lessons Learned: Our experiment yielded a much smaller sample size than anticipated. One reason may be many call center employees reported difficulty incorporated a new script. Any future experiments should also randomize borrowers to different conditions with each call center employee changing the script they use based on the randomization to avoid employee-induced effects.

Description: This fields study examines how present a lower fee, lower interest payday loan alternative to members in a way that motivates them to switch from payday loans to this alternative.

Lessons Learned: Presenting a lump-sum savings may be an effective way to boost enrollment for a payday loan alternative. Pilot tests allow us to assess the preliminary results of an intervention. When results are promising, we can scale the intervention from there.

Description: This analysis explores how different types of earmarking may impact people's savings behaviors.

Lessons Learned: This analysis potentially suggests that the way in which users label their goals may guide their initial savings behavior. Additionally, this analysis suggests that an Emergency Savings goal can focus savers more than a General Savings goal, making a more concerted effort to fund it.

Description: This field study seeks to increase savings rates through Form 8888 and increase attendance at a tax preparation site.

Lessons Learned: It is difficult to get tax filers to use the Form 8888. One large hurdle we found was that many of the preparers didn’t know about the Form 8888 and if they did, they were hesitant to add another step in the process.

Social norms may be an effective way to nudge intentions towards saving part of an annual tax refund. Interestingly, individuals were not deterred. when they were explicitly informed they were being nudged.

Description: This research seeks to increase the number of employees who donate to an employee relief fund.

Lessons Learned: Email open and click rates are generally low. Additionally, we did receive a handful of donations after the five-day window, suggesting that our window may have been too small. Finally, a subsequent Giving Tuesday campaign generated higher donation volume.

Description: This study seeks to assess how both the messenger as well as the message itself may impact a persons' short-term savings behavior.

Lessons Learned: This study suggests that people may have a strong mental bias towards 3% savings, even if anchored at 5%. Also, beyond this, these results reflected that specific messengers may have an effect on savings behavior, but it remains unclear.

Description: This study aims to explore how three different designs of an app budgeting screen may impact users' behavioral intentions as well as uncovering both interpretations and relative preferences between designs.

Lessons Learned: The key lessons learned are the following: 1) Users need clearer explanations of the graphs that were used within the survey; 2) the stacked bar visual gave users the strongest impression of overspending, and; 3) rate of spend required either clearer explanation or a higher data visualization literacy on behalf of the users.

Description: This study explores how reflection and a loan calculator can affect someone's perceptions of car ownership.

Lessons Learned: Both reflecting (on costs or generally a car) and a loan calculator could lead to higher percieved costs and lower percieved affordability of a car.

Description: This exploratory research investigates how individuals incorporate budget reference points into their spending decisions, both within a single time period and across multiple time periods.

Lessons Learned: People are more likely to spend when they have already broken their spending rules—overspending seems to beget more overspending. This is exacerbated by people’s optimism about their behavior in the future. The more people feel like they will adjust their spending in the future, the more likely they are to overspend in the present.

Description: This lab learning explores whether different framing of social security benefits can encourage a later desired age to claim benefits.

Lessons Learned: Whie significance wasn't explicity discussed, providing a low anchor (reaching 100% benefits by age 70) led to the most promising results with regard to claiming preferences.

While there were significant differences between the low anchor and two other conditions, none of the conditions were singificantly different than the control.

Description: This study investigates how different social norm aspects regarding spending and savings habits affect peoples' intent to decrease fast-food spending and increase savings.

Lessons Learned: Seems like social comparisons could be an effective strategy to reduce fast-food consumption when the prompt is framed as savings. Also, if framed as spending, seems that it may less effective to compare people to those who spend a little less than them, as this may backfire and lead to the person to select fewer savings tips.

Description: This lab study seeks to better understand what affects budjeting behavior by running a series of budgeting experiments across a number of categories.

Lessons Learned: This study provides some evidence for an average bias and a maximum bias in marginal reasoning. These findings can be used to tailor interventions aimed at reducing spending while increasing consumer happiness by focusing on consumer items that matter to them.

Description: This lab study seeks to understand how factors such as emotional, social, psychological drive low- to moderate-income households (LMI) to participate in or refrain from investing.

Lessons Learned: These findings suggest that risk matters most; the higher the risk, the lower the desire to put money in the account. Higher risk accounts also lead people to leave less money in the account, and for shorter periods of time, regardless if it’s an investing or savings account. Given that people are particularly sensitive to risk during trying times, financial service providers that aim to drive savings or investment should be mindful of how they describe their products and the associated risk.

This analysis found that LMI individuals to utilize fewer important financial products. Additionally, the findings suggest one’s choice to invest in either low or high-risk accounts doesn’t vary by income. However, investment accounts typically have more varied risk levels.

Description: This lab study seeks to assess what drives us to spend our money too soon, and what can we do about it.

Lessons Learned: The results of this study help us to understand why we have such a strong propensity to spend now, rather than in the future. Moreover, the game provides a platform in which to test hypotheses about how to overcome present bias.

Description: This research aims to better understand financial decision making among low-and- moderate income Americans through qualitative interviews.

Lessons Learned: These insights have helped informed our work. We are building a new auto loan calculator to help consumers understand the true cost of buying a car, including gas, insurance and maintenance costs.

Description: This lab study seeks to understand how we can increase willingness to save.

Lessons Learned: Asking people to think vividly about their child in the future may have an impact on college savings, although this result is still unclear. More testing is needed to investigate ways to impact how concrete and immediate the future feels.

Showing a time-lapse video of a person growing up may increase perception of time moving and could lead to a feeling that college is closer to the present.

These results suggest that mental visualization may not be an impactful intervention to affect perception of time movement.

Description: This survey analysis aims to understand what makes Millenials tick financially by measuring how satisfied they are with their purchases.

Lessons Learned: The lessons learned from this analysis are: 1) millenials spend on enrichment and others; 2) put the essentials on auto pay; 3) limit impulse buys; and 4) second guess the small stuff, but don't rationalize the big buys.

Description: This study discusses a new "Robo-advising" prototype product and how the company plans to measure the impact it has on savings behavior.

Lessons Learned: No lessons to be learned at the moment. After the roll-out process has ended, only then will it be possible to measure the impact of the Retiremap system.

Description: This field study seeks to reduce overdraft fees and non-sufficient funds amongst credit union members.

Lessons Learned: The implementation challenges we came across yielded many lessons learned. Going forward, we recommend including testing staff on the recipient list so that they can see the actual version that people in the test see, running a pre-test with a small pilot when possible, and vetting multiple venders when a study requires one.

Description: This study explores whether an email could encourage more savings from employer bonuses.

Lessons Learned: There was not much initial interest in Bonus Savings program (only 4%) and the messenger effect did not apply in this context (no significant differences between conditions). Although, of the employees that chose to enroll, they mentioned that they would like more support from their employer for savings.

Description: This field study seeks to language cues to build trust in credit counselors.

Lessons Learned: Our experiments suggest that, within the context of financial counseling, trust does not limit a caller’s willingness to finish a counseling session as we hypothesized. Instead, other factors –such as logistical factors at the time they are calling and how tenuous their financial situation is – seem to play more important roles.

The lack of change in the conversation rate suggests that either there is a ceiling effect around 70% or that there are more important barriers preventing callers from finishing a session. Further, this experiment suggest that trust is context specific – whom we trust and how much we trust them is partly shaped by small factors in our environment. Financial counselors and advisors should be aware of these factors – even small changes in how they interact with clients can significantly shape their relationship.

Description: This field study focuses on how to encourage greater engagement with the child savings accounts.

Lessons Learned: This study suggests that a school principal could be a more effective messenger than a local government official, but due to the lack of actual deposits, further investigation into the effect of a messenger on savings behavior is needed.

Description: This study aims to encourage people to accelerate debt repayment by nudging more people to "overpay" on their outstanding loans.

Lessons Learned: Making savings more concrete in this context led to a lower likelihood to choose a savings-oriented payment plan.

Description: This field experiment explores whether different messaging (Control, Deadline, Self-Other) within the body of an email can impact open rates, click-through rates, or survey completion rates.

Lessons Learned: There seems to be a need outside the current framing strategies to increase their desired survey metrics. This may mean a structural intervention or just more familiarity with the survey could be needed to move the needle.

Description: This field study seeks to increase the number of applicants who complete a loan application.

Lessons Learned: It is possible that having both elements in the e-mail led to information overload and avoidance, driving to lower completion rates. Future interventions may be better off streamlining the number of components. Additionally, effects of an intervention may be bolstered with follow-ups to reinforce the treatment.

Description: This field experiment seeks to frame the programs in a way that would maximize trustworthiness, ultimately driving user engagement and user acquisition.

Lessons Learned: Email interventions emphasizing forms of trustworthiness does not seem to be sufficient in increasing the number of applications or people applying to a job opportunity through a user platform.

Description: This field study aims to increase users' intrinisic motivation to apply for job opportunities.

Lessons Learned: Adding value questions to a job search survey may increase friction, which could lead to less completed job searches. It it weren't for this added friction, there may be an interesting case for evoking value-based thinking.

Description: This field experiment seeks to help housing voucher recipients, who expressed the intention to move, to do so on time and to a lower poverty area.

Lessons Learned: Although the text messages likely were insufficient in helping people to move, they may have had a complementary effect for those who were going to move anyways.

Description: This field study seeks to increase the number of work shifts employees attend (i.e. reduce the number of shifts they miss).

Lessons Learned: Based on these results, text message reminders do not impact show up rates. Possible explanations are: forgetfulness is not the biggest behavioral barrier, our reminders may have been insufficient, and/or our reminders may have increased cancellations.

Description: This field experiment examines how different framing of an in-app screen may impact a users' willingness to take on additional work.

Lessons Learned: Changing the framing of the Income Booster screen alone has not proven to be an effective method in increasing users' willingness to enroll in new jobs/earn extra income.

Description: This field study seeks to assess how the branding aesthetiic of a child savings program affect perceptions of credibility and trustworthiness of the program.

Lessons Learned: A combination of trusted logos may be benefinicial in helping increase interest in a CSA program. However, these results suggest that it is not alone sufficient.

Description: This field study seeks to increase the number of people who set up automatic transfers.

Lessons Learned: The way overdraft protection was used in this email intervention provided was unsucessful and provided null results. The authors suggest that mentioning "overdraft" within the email may have scared people away if overdrafts were not already top-of-mind.

Description: This field study seeks to encourage members to save through a website pop-up.

Lessons Learned: Based on the results, a one-shot pop-up that focuses on the type of goal (hedonic or serious) as well as the specificity (general or specific) was not effective in changing behaviors.

Description: This field study explores how the creation of a mental account specifically targeted for “rainy days” might increase motivation to save funds in that account.

Lessons Learned: Defaulting new members into an opt-out "Rainy Day Savings" account was not shown to be an effective strategy to improve savings behavior.

Description: This study aims to nudge members to set up a recurring savings transfer as part of the refinancing process.

Lessons Learned: While there were no differences in savings rates, the substantial interest in automatic transfers during the loan process (16% of members asked with some choosing to save up to 100% of savings) indicates that automatic transfers could be a strong strategy for savings, but only if the technology and labor allows for it. Without the proper technology for the employee to set up the automatic transfer, there is not enough intrinsic motivation for the member to set up automatic transfers to their savings themselves.

Description: This field study seeks to encourage members to get their CFSI Financial Health Score.

Lessons Learned: Based on the results, an email conveying either personal benefit or social comparison does not seem to be sufficient to increase completion of a financial health survey.

Description: This lab study investigates whether making opportunity costs more salient is likely to encourage someone to overspend on discretionary expenses.

Lessons Learned: This evidence suggests that making categories more salient may serve as a counterproductive reminder that could lead to more spending now.

Description: This field experiment seeks to shift the spending behavior of low-income female entrepreneurs away from using cash and towards using a a dismursement card.

Lessons Learned: The text message was a fairly light-touch nudge. Barriers to card usage, particularly concerns about institutional trust, run deeper than what the nudge was likely to impact.

Description: This study explored whether traditional-style budegting is effective at changing behavior and tests whether different budgeting styles can affect spending behavior.

Lessons Learned: The two types of budgets tested (overall budget & category-by-category budget) impacted user engagement, but did not impact the financial decisions of Clarity Money's users.

Description: This field study seeks to encourage employers to register their business for a employee retirement program in a timely manner.

Lessons Learned: This study suggests that just providing one option for registration made the starting process easier. The condition with only one option at the bottom (the Re-designed Control condition) had employers that registered, on average, 4 days earlier.

Description: This field study seeks to increase conversion, and ultimately savings, through their enrollment flow.

Lessons Learned: Although we did not see any difference in sign-up rates, we did see that adding two extra screens to an enrollment flow did not significantly reduce completion rates of the flow.

Description: This field study seeks to encourage more prepaid cardholders to take advantage of the available savings features.

Lessons Learned: Email interventions are unlikely to drive significant uptake in prepaid card savings behavior.

Description: This field study seeks to help SNAP recipients stretch their benefits by using reminders to anchor them on a specific day to go shopping for groceries.

Lessons Learned: This in-app reminder likely was not strong enough to significantly change the way SNAP recipients use their benefits.

Description: This lab study assesses whether the extra time spent getting a very detailed budget would make people perceive the budget as more accurate and whether it had any other psychological benefits.

Lessons Learned: Tthis evidence suggests that budgeting may actually make people less likely and receptive to change. Budgets may still be a helpful tool for guiding or informing our choices, but this study suggests that our assumption that people ought to make a budget before they consider other changes to their finances may be misguided.

Description: This field study seeks to increase the retention rate of DMP clients.

Lessons Learned: Encouraging messaging that occurs at the three designated points (activation day, three-month mark and six-month mark) did not have an affect on DMP retention. For future studies, researchers could try to capitalize on the analysis results, which suggests several other potential factors that could be important for DMP behavior change.

Description: This community-level intervention seeks to encourage more community residents to switch from paid tax preparers to the IRS's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) services.

Lessons Learned: These results suggest that there are likely stronger barriers that keep people from switching from paid preparers to VITA sites.

Description: This field study seeks to help parents save for college through a postcard intervention.

Lessons Learned: These results suggest that sending out postcards, even with different psychological framing, to parents may fail to impact college savings behavior.

Description: This field study looks at ways to encourage more borrowers to repay their loan.

Lessons Learned: The planning prompt let to a slightly sooner repayment but did not impact repayment rates.

Description: This study aims to increase "Income Boosters", which Steady gives out when users sign up for new jobs or services (e.g. Postmates), by testing out two different types of social proof

Lessons Learned: The addition of social proof messaging (displaying either "Dollar amount paid to Steady members" or "Number of Steady members paid") has not been shown to be successful in increasing new job enrollment among the Steady app userbase. Either a different way to display social proof messaging or a different strategy entirely may be needed to move the needle with regard to new job enrollment.

Description: This field study seeks to increase how families engage with a child savings account.

Lessons Learned: Many low- to moderate-income families file their taxes as soon as they can to receive their refunds. Our interventions, however, were sent a few weeks into tax season, Interventions may thus be more successful if they are timed when families receive these refunds.

These findings suggest suggest that timing of the ask may not affect college savings, at least in relation to tax time and payday. It may be more effective to consider more structural changes to increase deposit activity – for instance, looking for ways we might re-design the incentive structures for CSA accounts to be more appealing or motivating.

Description: This field study seeks to increase the open rate of mailers and emails that contain information about child savings accounts.

Lessons Learned: Inputting the name of a parent's child (vs. the parent's name) in an email did not result in any differences in opening a PA 529 account. Moving forward, the research team hopes to pursue more structural changes that might make these benefits an easier choice for parents.

Inputting the name of a parent's child (vs. the parent's name) on a mailer did not result in any differences in claiming the state-offered grant. Moving forward, the research team hopes to pursue more structural changes that might make these benefits an easier choice for parents.