Designing Campaigns that Change Behavior

A practical guide for creating Campaigns

Behavior change rarely happens through a single message or one-time intervention. It develops when people receive consistent, relevant prompts that make the desired behavior easier to recognize, apply, and repeat over time. Activate campaigns are designed to create that reinforcement by connecting organizational priorities to practical actions employees can take in the flow of work.

The effectiveness of a campaign depends on how intentionally the experience is designed. Focus, relevance, timing, and repetition all matter. Campaigns are most effective when they concentrate on a small set of related behaviors, reach the people for whom those behaviors are most relevant, and run long enough for repeated exposure to support meaningful change.

This guide outlines the core decisions that shape an effective campaign strategy: how campaigns fit within the broader nudge experience, how to select and target the right priority, how much content to include, how to sequence campaigns over time, and how to provide the context employees need to understand why each nudge matters.

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• Create and Manage Campaigns
  
  
  

1 Start with a priority worth reinforcing

The strongest campaigns reinforce a priority already visible in the organization: a business transformation, talent challenge, cultural shift, or specific opportunity identified through employee listening. Activate campaign templates align with common priorities and organizational focus areas, making it easier to connect insight to a focused behavioral response.

Target the audience deliberately. Relevance is a primary driver of attention and follow-through. Before launching broadly, confirm that the behavior is relevant to the group's work, feasible within their operating conditions, and closely aligned with the challenges or priorities they are facing.

2 Choose focused content that can be reinforced over time

Campaign design requires balance. Too few behaviors can create repetitive content or risk running out of nudges. Too many dilute exposure so that no single behavior receives enough reinforcement. As a starting point, select two to four closely related behaviors that represent different expressions of the same underlying change.

3 Understand how campaign nudges enter the rotation

Activate is designed around a best-practice cadence of one nudge per person per week. Adding a campaign does not increase that cadence. Instead, it adds another focus area to the individual's nudge rotation. The engine rotates across each person's active action plans, personal focus areas, and campaigns, so every campaign occupies a place in an individual queue.

Because each person's queue is different, campaign exposure will vary across the population. The examples below illustrate three common starting points.

Each column shows one person's nudge queue, read top to bottom, across six consecutive weeks. The rotation cycles through whatever is active for that individual. Action plans, personal focus areas, and campaigns each hold a place in the queue.

The key planning principle: Campaign exposure is determined by both campaign length and the number of other priorities in a person's rotation. A 12-week campaign may deliver only two nudges to someone with a full queue, but six or more to someone with fewer active priorities. In many cases, fewer campaigns create a stronger behavioral signal.

Campaign exposure will vary based on the depth of each person's nudge rotation. A fuller rotation may mean less frequent campaign nudges, but it also creates a more relevant and individualized experience overall. This is an intentional trade-off, and personalization should remain the priority.

4 Sequence campaigns rather than stacking them

Each additional campaign adds another focus area to the weekly rotation, increasing the time between nudges from any one campaign. The practical implication is important: running one campaign instead of two can approximately double the exposure each person receives for that focus area. Campaigns also need more time than many teams initially expect. Behavior change depends on spaced reinforcement, and a four-week campaign within a full rotation may deliver only one nudge per person. That is enough to create awareness, but rarely enough to build familiarity or support follow-through.

For example, rather than launching four campaigns at once to reinforce four core values, sequence them across the year, one value per quarter. When all four run concurrently, each campaign competes for limited space in the nudge rotation, which increases the time between exposures and weakens the behavioral signal. Sequencing preserves a similar annual nudge volume while giving employees repeated, coherent reinforcement around one value at a time. This makes the desired behaviors easier to recognize, practice, and connect back to the broader culture priority.

The same principle applies during transformation: build readiness first, reinforce the new behaviors during implementation, and then help the new way of working become routine. You can have more priorities than campaigns. Campaigns should behaviorally reinforce the few priorities that matter most right now.

5 Make the purpose clear

Campaigns can be personalized with the "Why this nudge" message that appears within every nudge in the campaign. This helps employees interpret the message as part of a coordinated organizational effort rather than an isolated communication.

Use "Why this nudge" to explain the organizational purpose. Action-plan nudges connect to a commitment made by the employee's team, and personal focus areas reflect an individual choice. Campaign nudges are different: they introduce a priority the employee may not have selected. A concise and credible explanation can make the experience feel supportive and intentional rather than imposed.

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