In 2016, New York City wanted to help keep its employees healthier by encouraging them to visit a work-site flu vaccine clinic. These vaccinations had been widely available before, but many employees had not gotten the flu.

ideas42 was brought in to determine how more employees could benefit from existing resources like the clinic. We developed two behaviorally designed emails, allowing us to evaluate the most effective communications. However, to protect staff privacy around protected health care decisions, the city’s Office of Labor Relations, which we worked with, couldn’t collect individual data on its employees or their participation in vaccination events.

To accommodate this, we also partnered with the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which was able to randomize employee email addresses and track visits to the clinic, honoring employees’ health care privacy. It was the first time these two departments had worked together on a project like this. Through this collaboration, we identified how the city could be more effective with its emails. The result? A 10 percent increase in work-site flu vaccinations.

This impact showcases how behavioral science can help governments and organizations be more effective and efficient. It also highlights the unique possibilities of embedded behavioral design teams.

Embedded behavioral design teams can take impact to the next level for any organization trying to solve social problems while grappling with budget issues.

The difference between occasional behavioral insights and an embedded behavioral design team is like the difference between a spark and a sustained flame.

Embedded Teams Offer Unique Benefits

A behavioral design team doesn’t just visit your organization—it becomes part of its fabric. It’s led by behavioral scientists and subject experts among the organization’s existing staff, building relationships, understanding institutional knowledge, and developing scientifically sound and contextually appropriate solutions. This integration creates something more valuable than the sum of its parts.

The advantages of this approach are both profound and practical:

Solving Surprising Problems: A behavioral design team often begins with one design that’s been effective in other places, and can then scaffold into other, more profound changes. For instance, in our work in NYC to increase flu vaccinations among city employees, we realized there were opportunities to make other impactful changes, such as expanding the use of one-minute clinics and telemedicine. Too often, consultants focus so narrowly on a single question that they miss the opportunities that lie alongside it (behavioral scientists call this tunneling); embedded teams can encourage more expansive and creative thinking.

Institutional Learning and Experimentation: Behavioral scientists know that sometimes interventions don’t work, or can even have unintended consequences. That’s why testing is such a crucial part of our approach. One embedded team in a health center in Pennsylvania found that a nudge led to a temporary improvement, but that change fatigued physicians over time. Because the team evaluating the work was embedded in it, the designers could consider and design for long-term solutions, rather than walking away after seeing an initial boost that was only temporary.

Cumulative Impact: An embedded team is better positioned to build on past interventions so they snowball into greater impact over time. In 2015, ideas42 helped begin the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, a behavioral design team embedded at the White House. Initially, the team focused on quick, small-scale projects, but because they could think about successive projects rather than one-offs, these incremental changes led to bigger changes down the road. One project with the Department of Defense initially led to a 5 percent increase in re-enrollments in a savings plan. Because of the success of this program, the Department of Defense expanded the scope of this work for service members across the country.

Leveraging Internal Expertise: Behavioral design teams structurally combine behavioral scientists with people with expertise and experience with the problem we’re trying to solve. Fusing scientific methodology with practitioner wisdom creates solutions that neither could develop alone. Calbright College meets the needs of adult learners by offering online and flexible-paced education. Administrators found, however, that eliminating term structures and deadlines, while making their programs more accessible to people juggling jobs or kids, also made it harder for some learners to hold themselves accountable to their completion goals. Working with ideas42, Calbright developed new personalized timelines, easing some of the burden and uncertainty students felt, and greatly accelerating their progress through their programs, roughly doubling how many students completed the program within a year.

Cost-Efficiency: Perhaps counterintuitively, integration often costs less than repeatedly engaging external experts. Embedded teams streamline processes, optimize existing resources, and prevent the “reinventing the wheel” phenomenon when institutional knowledge isn’t preserved. For instance, ideas42 worked with the NYC Human Resources Administration on several related projects to make SNAP enrollment easier and reduce admin churn for staff. Because we built a deep understanding of both the SNAP enrollment and recertification process and the behavioral barriers within that process, we could quickly design and test impactful solutions without having to do discovery work every time. A firm engaged in one-off projects for each endeavor would have had to do that work every time, which adds time and cost.

A Strategic Imperative for Uncertain Times

As nonprofits, governments, and anyone engaged in social change face economic uncertainty and increasing scrutiny, the case for embedded behavioral design becomes even more compelling. We aren’t just talking about incremental improvements—we’re discussing transformational change in how effectively we deploy our limited resources.

The impact ideas42 has had by applying this model across diverse contexts has convinced me that embedding behavioral science expertise isn’t a luxury—it’s a strategic imperative for organizations serious about maximizing their impact.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to integrate behavioral science into your organization; it’s whether you can afford not to.

Building Your Organization’s Future

Every government team, private-sector organization, and mission-driven organization deserves access to the power of behavioral science, not as an occasional consultant’s report that gathers dust but as a living, breathing part of how they approach their mission daily.

There are more than 300 embedded teams worldwide, and they demonstrate many approaches to this model. That means no plug-and-play formula works for every organization; embedded teams should shape their context like behavioral interventions.

I would love to hear more about how embedded teams adapt to fit this moment so that we can build timely and responsive teams ourselves. What new challenges could this model help solve in your field? Has your organization had success with embedded behavioral design teams? I invite you to share in the comments.

By embedding behavioral design, we’re not just solving problems—we’re designing a future where every organization can transform potential into powerful, lasting impact.