A new Slop University research poster reports a pre-registered cluster-randomised trial of plain-language development notices across nine wards, finding sizeable gains in recall and comprehension alongside a difference of 0.02 submissions per notified property.
A cluster-randomised trial across 168 notified developments lifted recall of the notice by 16.7 points and left the submission rate where it was
Two versions of the same planning notice went up on front fences across nine wards. A research poster published today by the School of Emergent Priorities counts what came back.
Neighbours sent the redesigned notice were 16.7 percentage points likelier to recall seeing it and 15.8 points likelier to name the date submissions closed. The share who lodged one moved from 5.8 to 6.1 per cent, a difference of 0.02 submissions per notified property against a threshold the team had registered in advance as the smallest it would treat as a change.
Six hundred people opened their front doors to tell us whether they had read something fixed to a fence. The result belongs to them rather more than it belongs to the redesign, which did what it was asked to do and nothing further.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The design pairs a randomised notice treatment with a doorstep survey of 604 notified neighbours, holding the exhibition cycle, the ward allocation, and the assessment register steady so that comprehension and lodgement can be read apart from one another. Thresholds were fixed before the first notice was issued.
“A notice worth reading is worth having whether or not it moves the count, and the School will go on making them plainer,” said Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities. “What we would welcome now is a better sense of what sits between reading one and answering it.”
The University counts a carefully measured negative among the results it is most willing to put on the record, and the poster is part of its wider work on how priorities are notified, understood, and acted on.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.5n7uk8.