Many social housing tenants are invited to participate in retrofit programs, yet engagement and cooperation are often lower than expected. Tenants may ignore letters, delay action, or feel uncertain about what is required of them. As a result, retrofit works are delayed, requiring costly follow-ups such as door-to-door visits. To address this challenge, Cork City Council partnered with Sapience to redesign their communication using behavioural insights and increase proactive tenant engagement.
Methodology
At Sapience, we focus on real-world behaviour and co-creation to ensure interventions are grounded in context. For Cork City Council, the project started with a hands-on workshop involving project managers and stakeholders to identify key behavioural barriers to participation and cooperation.
During this workshop, we explored why tenants were not engaging, uncovering barriers such as low attention to long letters, lack of trust, unclear benefits, and uncertainty about what action to take.
These insights were translated into a structured behavioural framework focusing on three key levers: attention, persuasive communication, and actionability.
Based on these insights, we redesigned the invitation letters. The new versions reduced complexity, highlighted personal benefits (e.g. warmer homes, lower bills), used social norms and reassuring language, and made the next step explicit and easy - encouraging tenants to directly contact the council to schedule appointments.
- Redesign the structure to guide attention
- Use behavioural insights to persuade
- Drive behaviour with clear call-to-actions
Results
The redesigned letters led to a substantial improvement in proactive engagement:
✅ ~50% of tenants proactively called the council to schedule an appointment ✅ Reduced need for door-to-door follow-ups → significant operational time savings ✅ Shorter project timelines → smoother execution of retrofit works ✅ Improved cooperation and trust between tenants and the council
By combining co-creation with behavioural science, Cork City Council was able to transform a passive communication process into an active engagement channel - turning letters into a powerful driver of citizen action.