A School of Emergent Priorities trial finds a text reminder made no measurable difference to spare-key lockouts, and the street's neighbourhood watch committee is establishing a permanent household register regardless.
The neighbourhood watch committee is proceeding to a permanent, published spare-key register regardless
A trial built to test whether a text reminder could cut spare-key lockouts on one residential street has returned a flat result, and the neighbourhood watch committee that commissioned it is moving ahead with a permanent register regardless of what the trial found.
The School of Emergent Priorities treats a plainly reported null result as evidence of a partnership working, not a partnership failing, and the new brochure profiling the trial, Towards a Lockout-Free Street, was built on that premise from the first page.
A reminder that changes nothing is still an answer. The street asked a direct question and got one, which is more than most reminder systems can say.
— Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
The trial rolled a coded text reminder out to every household with a lockbox on the street, prompting a return visit whenever a code sat unclaimed for more than a day, and tracked lockout reports across the full rollout. Households that received the reminder were no less likely to report a lockout than households that didn’t, in either direction, and no segment of the street broke from that pattern once the results were checked. Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Demo Quarter in the School of Continuous Improvement, called the trial “the shape every partnership at the University eventually takes: a plain question, and a published answer, whichever way it lands.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jboc2v.