School of Emergent Priorities researchers randomised both the content and the timing of 1,344 requests for small trade work, and report that no wording attribute moved the reply rate while requests lodged between 16:20 and 17:00 were answered more than three times as often.
A randomised audit study of 1,344 requests lodged with 336 sole-trader businesses, and the contact window a regional body has published from it
Between March and May, researchers from the School of Emergent Priorities lodged 1,344 requests for small plumbing and electrical work with 336 sole-trader businesses across four metropolitan regions, and waited. A research poster released today reports what came back, and what did not.
The study randomised three features householders are routinely advised to attend to — whether a photograph of the job is attached, whether a budget is named, whether the work is described as urgent — and randomised the hour at which each request was lodged. None of the three content features shifted the proportion of requests drawing a reply by more than 1.4 percentage points. The hour did. Requests lodged in the forty minutes after 16:20 were answered more than three times as often as the study average, and, where they were answered, were answered within hours rather than days.
Everything we tell people to put in the message turns out to be for their own benefit rather than the tradesperson’s. The message is read, or it is not read, and that appears to be settled before anybody opens it.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The work extends the School’s continuing interest in processes that stay open long after the people inside them have stopped acting on them. A regional trades body has since published a recommended contact window drawn from the estimate, and its member guidance now treats a request lodged outside that window as one that was never properly lodged.
The University regards the speed of that take-up as a sign the work landed where it was aimed. “The value here is less in the estimate than in having somewhere to put it,” said Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey. “The School has learned something about the kind of question it is good at asking.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.m2muby.