Applying Behavioural Science in the Italian Public Administration

2. BPA to comply with guidelines: a pilot from Italy

Abstract

This chapter describes how behaviourally-informed communications can increase civil servants’ compliance with administrative requirements. It describes a large-scale behavioural pilot in Italy that helped public administrations to publish their planning documents on a centralised, public-facing portal. The pilot found that behaviourally-informed reminders – for example, using plain-language, making key information salient, creating a sense of timeliness – were associated with a 23% increase in publications. The pilot results show how these behavioural practices can enable busy civil servants to act quickly and promote transparency.

Key messages

Clear communication helps civil servants act quickly and confidently. Behavioural insights show that small changes in how messages are framed, structured and delivered can improve understanding and follow‑through. These principles highlight how internal communications can be more effective and easier to act upon, for example:

• Use influential messengers and channels. Communications can be more effective when they leverage the formality effect, which is a tendency for people to pay more attention to more formal, serious communications; and, the messenger effect, which is the tendency to assess the persuasiveness of a communication by its messenger rather than its content.

• Draw attention to key information. Communications demanding civil servants act are more effective if they make their key “ask” the first thing readers notice. This can be done through making the “ask” in the first line of text and the subject line (if any), formatting the ask in bold, using attention-grabbing infographics, and removing unnecessary text. This means that readers with limited time are likely to notice the most important information – what they’re being asked to do.

• Explain how to perform the desired behaviour. Broad directives are hard for civil servants to act upon and require cognitive effort to understand. Instead, explain concretely how civil servants are expected to act. Consult with civil servants to understand where they would benefit most from such guidance.

• Select a range of well-chosen examples. Effective guidance provides examples and feedback. However, be mindful that providing only one or two examples can imply that they are the only way to perform the behaviour. Therefore, ensure that examples and feedback reflect the full range of desired outcomes.

• Keep the guidance short. Civil servants manage demanding workloads and may deprioritise lengthy, verbose communications. Written guidance and communications from one administration should convey key messages first and move superfluous information to the end or out of the communication entirely.

Why it matters

Public administrations are often tasked with ensuring whole-of-administration compliance with government directives which lack hard enforcement mechanisms – legal obligations that bind the parties involved and can be enforced in court. These requirements instead rely on “soft law”, such as guidelines, advice and non-binding directives (Abbott and Snidal, 2000[1]), for example: public sector cybersecurity teams might issue guidelines for civil servants to stay safe online, but following the guidelines is purely voluntary. Communications teams might publish toolkits that they encourage civil servants to use, but they cannot require them to do so. Schools of administration might teach project managers to use template plans, budgets and reports but have no means to enforce their use after the training. Public administrations often face the challenge of how to motivate compliance with voluntary guidelines, advice and directives.

Whom it involves

• Centres of government units responsible for whole-of-government strategy, including guidelines, standards and reporting frameworks for administration plans. Their work motivates, guides and co-ordinates many different public administrations to follow centrally directed guidelines, advice and requirements – often without hard enforcement mechanisms.

• Departmental planning and performance offices, strategy units and co-ordination teams responsible for foresight, strategy or long-term planning in their administration. These teams are often responsible for the high-level activities, priorities and outcomes the administration seeks to achieve across its areas of responsibility.

• Efficiency and continuous improvement teams who develop better internal processes and more effective ways of working but may lack hard enforcement mechanism to promote their uptake. These teams are often part of centres of government as well as line ministries and agencies who set the standards and oversee whole-of-administration processes.

How to motivate compliance with guidelines

Behavioural techniques can help civil servants comply with soft law requirements. There is moderate-to-high quality evidence that these techniques can lead to small, reliable improvements in civil servants’ compliance with guidelines, typically a few percentage-points improvement following low-cost changes in communication and processes. This evidence draws on studies motivating compliance in administration and broader research into effective communication techniques. These studies include:

• In Australia, the Victorian Government Behavioural Insights Unit developed a letter encouraging schools to share better quality data with the Department of Health about school-based vaccinations. The Unit developed a letter for schools which was written in plain language, highlighted that schools are authorised to share student and parent data with the department and the benefits of doing so, and included a planning sheet outlining how to share the data. Letters were addressed to school immunisation co-ordinators across 307 secondary schools, nearly half of all schools in Victoria. The Unit randomised half of the schools in each local area to receive either: the letter and action planning sheet vs. a control group who received nothing. The Unit found that more schools shared data when they received the letter and action planning sheet. The share of schools providing student data increased from 31.2% to 42%. The share providing parents’ contact details rose from 41.4% to 54%. Both increases were statistically significant (p < .05) (Victorian Behavioural Insights Unit, 2019[2]).

• In Peru, the Ministry of Education and the National Educational Infrastructure Program applied behavioural insights to increase compliance with a school maintenance program. Under the programme, schools who received funds for repairs and co-ordinators had to submit an expense report with invoices for all expenditure. Before the study, 9% of recipients filed their report late or incomplete, 11% failed to file at all, and 15% failed to withdraw the designated funding. To increase compliance, behaviourally informed SMSs were sent to these schools. Each SMS personalised the message by adding the name of the recipient and indicated the deadline for the report. Participants were randomised to one of five treatments or a control group testing additional behavioural concepts. The treatment reminders significantly improved compliance relative to the control. The share of participants who submitted their report by the deadline rose by 3.9%-points on average (p < .01) compared to 74% in control. However, results did not differ significantly across treatments, suggesting that the most important element of a behaviourally informed reminder is that it is timely and salient (Dustan, Hernandez-Agramonte and Maldonado, 2023[3]).

Box 2.1. Case study: Encouraging civil servants’ disability identification in Australia

All Australian government agencies collect employee data, including disability status. This information helps develop evidence-informed workforce policy and strategies. Under Australia’s Disability Discrimination Act, a person with disability is not required to share with their employer that they have a disability or the specifics of their disability. As of June 2023, only half as many Australian Public Servants (APS) had shared that they had a disability in HR systems (5.1%) compared to those who had shared the same information in the de-identified Australian Public Service Employee Census (10.9%).

To close this gap, the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA), in partnership with the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC), consulted APS employees with disability and HR professionals to develop guidance materials for APS HR professionals to support their communication with employees about data collection and use. Clear and complete information about data collection and data use can reduce employees’ uncertainty, discomfort or fear about sharing their information, while preserving autonomy to decide what is right for themselves.

BETA also developed and evaluated a series of behaviourally informed emails encouraging federal public servants to update their disability status in their agency HR systems. The randomised controlled trial with 20 753 employees evaluated four different email reminders, based on different principles of EAST (Easy, Attractive, Social & Timely) a widely used behaviour change framework (BIT, 2024[4]):

• Control email: with a simple reminder adapted from previous communications to be concise and direct.

• Attractive email: making updating appear more attractive by providing specific examples of initiatives that were based on HR data shared by employees to highlight the value and benefits of diversity data.

• Social email: highlighting social norms regarding diversity identification – containing a graph and corresponding text – “A third of the workforce identifies with at least one diversity characteristic, compared to a quarter in 2015”.

• Easy email: highlighting how easy it was to update this information – including a header which read, “Updating your details will only take 2 minutes”.

BETA found that the Easy email improved information sharing across multiple measures. More employees who received the Easy email or Attractive email identified having a disability in the agency HR system, compared to the Control group (5.5% compared to 5.2%). More employees who received the Easy email shared other diversity characteristics compared to the simple control group (19.9% compared to 19.6%). These differences were all statistically significant (p < .05).

This research demonstrates several principles from behavioural public administration. Clear, concise, and relevant communication is just as important for internal communications as for external communications; simple messages, such as email reminders, can have a small but highly cost-effective impact on civil servants’ behaviour; and internal processes, such as providing HR data should be not only easy for staff to comply with but the ease of compliance should also be communicated.

Source: (BETA, 2024[5]).

Improve compliance by writing clearly

There is extensive, high-quality evidence outside of public administration that clear communication improves compliance with non-compulsory requests. It is reasonable to assume that civil servants who are asked to do something are more likely to do so when the request is written clearly. Recent work has distilled research about clear writing for busy readers into a checklist (Rogers and Lasky-Fink, 2023[6]).

Table 2.1. Principles and practices for clear communication

Principle	Practice
Less Is More	Use fewer words
	Include fewer ideas
	Make fewer requests
Make Reading Easy	Use short and common words
	Write straightforward sentences
	Write shorter sentences
Design for Easy Navigation	Make key information immediately visible
	Separate distinct ideas
	Place related ideas together
Order ideas by priority
Include headings
Consider using visuals
Use Enough Formatting but No More	Match formatting to readers’ expectations
	Highlight, bold, or under-line the most important ideas
	Limit your formatting
Tell Readers Why They Should Care	Emphasise what readers value (“so what?”)
	Emphasise which readers should care (“why me?”)

Note: https://writingforbusyreaders.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Writing-for-Busy-Readers-Checklist.pdf.

Source: (Rogers and Lasky-Fink, 2023[6]).

What was done

The OECD Behavioural Science Team and Italy’s DFP (Department for Public Administration) ran a behavioural pilot to increase compliance with the specific obligations of Italian Public Administrations. Every year, Public Administrations (PAs) must publish on the DFP’s PIAO Portal their annual Piano Integrato di Attività e Organizzazione (PIAO), a comprehensive and consolidated planning document introduced by the Italian Government in 2021 and which came into force in 2022, designed to streamline and simplify administrations’ planning while focusing on creating public value. All administrations must publish their PIAO on their institutional websites and on the central PIAO Portal to facilitate transparency and accountability. As required by regulation, central administrations must publish their PIAO by 31 January, while the deadline for local administrations (which was set for 30 March in 2025) depends on the deadline for the approval of the Bilancio di Previsione (Forecast Budget). Despite this requirement, many administrations only publish their PIAO on the central portal after the deadline, and sometimes not at all.

In the Italian context, as reported in Legislative Decree No. 165 of 30 March 2001 (Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 2011[7]), Public Administrations include “all State administrations, including institutes and schools of every level and type and educational institutions, State-owned enterprises and administrations with autonomous status, Regions, Provinces, Municipalities, Mountain Communities, and their consortia and associations, universities, autonomous public housing institutes, Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Handicrafts and Agriculture and their associations, all national, regional and local non-economic public bodies, the administrations, enterprises and bodies of the National Health Service, the Agency for the Representation of Public Administrations in Collective Bargaining (ARAN), and the Agencies referred to in Legislative Decree No. 300 of 30 July 1999.”

Method

To address this, the OECD, EC (European Commission) & DFP studied the effect of behaviourally informed vs. standard reminders sent by DFP to administrations ahead of the PIAO publication deadline. The study was a field trial conducted by DFP and OECD from March to May 2025. It was a two-arm RCT with a control group and a treatment group. The control group received one standard reminder message from DFP similar to past reminders. The treatment group received four behaviourally informed reminders sent over a fixed timetable. The first three treatment reminders were emails and the fourth was an official electronic communication from the Head of DFP to each administration who had not yet published on the PIAO portal.

The treatment reminders applied behavioural science to:

• Make the demand more salient by putting the requirement to publish in the email subject line and at the top of the reminder.

• Make the deadline more salient by attaching a calendar image to the email indicating the publication due date.

• Simplify the text by removing unnecessary background information and focussing on the need the publish, how to do so and why.

• Include a step-by-step guide on how to publish.

• Correct the misperception among some public administrations that publishing information only on their own website is sufficient for compliance, when in fact they are also required to publish on the PIAO portal.

• Inform PAs that their non-publication had been noted and urge their promptly publication. A monitoring process for the status of the publication on the PIAO portal is conducted by the DFP.

• Leverage the messenger effect and formality effect in a reminder from the Head of DFP using official letterhead.

The trial was launched in March 2025, when the deadline for central PAs (31 January) was already passed, but before the deadline for local PAs (30 March). There were two different versions of the treatment emails: one for central PAs who were late in publishing, and one for local PAs whose deadline was soon approaching. Given the major impact that different deadlines would have on the likelihood of publishing, the randomisation was stratified by due date. Randomisation was done on 16 March across all 8 283 administrations that had not published their PIAO.

The reminders were sent on a fixed schedule. The control and the first treatment reminders were sent on 27 March, three days before the deadline for local PAs to publish. Subsequent treatment reminders were sent on 2, 10 and 16 April. The final publication report was downloaded on 30 May for analysis.

Results

The treatment increased publications significantly more than the control group. While both reminders were associated with a spike in PIAO publications before the March deadline, the 1^st treatment reminder was associated with a significantly greater increase than the control reminder. The 2^nd, 3^rd & 4^th treatment reminders were also associated with an increase in PIAOs published, widening the publication gap between treatment and control. As of the final publication report on 30 May, the treatment group had published 2 814 PIAOs on the portal compared to 2 278 in the control group, a statistically significant 23% increase in publications.

Discussion

The results indicated that civil servants benefitted from behaviourally informed reminders. Immediately after the first reminders were sent, PAs that received the treatment reminder were more likely to publish their PIAO on the portal than those in the control group. This treatment effect persisted for the entire study period.

This suggests that central administrations, such as DFP, can enhance the impact of their communications with other public administrations by applying the principles of behaviourally informed communications. The results of this pilot show that such communications can be effective.

Not all principles seemed equally effective. The third reminder which contained a step-by-step guide on how to publish on the portal was less effective than the other treatment reminders. The effect may have been attenuated because most PAs already knew how to use the PIAO Portal. However, qualitative feedback from PAs and the Portal administrators found that many PAs had forgotten their login password and did not know how to reset it. Administrations seeking to apply step-by-step guides in their communications may help users to understand areas of genuine and important misunderstanding to focus their guidance where it’s most needed.

These principles may apply beyond just reminders to publish documents online. Civil servants often operate in information-rich, fast-moving environments with competing demands on their attention. Therefore, it’s valuable for communications to clearly highlight its key request, to be direct and easy to understand, as well as to leverage influential messengers and communication channels.

Behaviourally informed insights

• Draw attention to key information by keeping the message short and to the point. Messages are more effective when short, clear, and visually prominent. Communications, such as reminders, should highlight the key request, for example by formatting it in bold, putting it in the subject line, and placing deadlines on attention-grabbing calendar infographics (e.g., the treatment reminder for PIAO publication). Their length should also be reduced, ensuring that less important information is not competing for attention with the most relevant one. Contextual information should be removed and deprioritised for the same reason.

• Make use of influential messengers. Messages are more effective when leveraging the formality effect and the messenger effect. People have the tendency to pay more attention to more formal, serious communications, and to assess the persuasiveness of a communication by its messenger rather than its content (e.g., the final treatment reminder sent using a formal communication channel for official correspondence between administrations and signed by the Head of DFP).

For further reading on the topic, see the EAST Framework: four simple ways to apply behavioural insights (BIT, 2024[4]) and Writing for Busy Readers (Rogers and Lasky-Fink, 2023[6]).

References

[1] Abbott, K. and D. Snidal (2000), “Hard and Soft Law in International Governance”, International Organization, Vol. 54/3, pp. 421-456, https://doi.org/10.1162/002081800551280.

[5] BETA (2024), Increasing disability identification in the Australian Public Service.

[4] BIT (2024), EAST Framework: four simple ways to apply behavioural insights (revised and updated edition).

[3] Dustan, A., J. Hernandez-Agramonte and S. Maldonado (2023), “Motivating bureaucrats with behavioral insights when state capacity is weak: Evidence from large-scale field experiments in Peru.”, Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 160.

[7] Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (2011), “DECRETO LEGISLATIVO 30 marzo 2001, n. 165”, https://www.normattiva.it/uri-res/N2Ls?urn:nir:stato:decreto.legislativo:2001-03-30;165.

[6] Rogers, T. (ed.) (2023), Writing for Busy Readers, Penguin Random House.

[2] Victorian Behavioural Insights Unit (2019), Applying Behavioural Insights in Victoria: An Update.