Lessons from Scottsdale, AZ: Sending mailing inserts to help residents switch to paperless billing

Learn how Scottsdale increased sign-ups for paperless utility billing with behaviorally designed mailing inserts

Case Study: Increase the uptake of paperless utility billing among residents by adding mailing inserts to paper bills.

Project Summary
City: Scottsdale, AZ
Goal: Increase the uptake of paperless utility billing
Department Lead: Utility Billing Department
Timeline: 2–3 Months
Intervention: Mailing insert that encourages switching to paperless billing included with paper utility bills
Evaluation Method: Randomized Control Trial
Result: Residents who received the mailing insert in their utility bill were 56 percent more likely to sign up for paperless billing than those who did not receive the insert.

Want to try this yourself?

Read an overview of the project below and then download the evaluation replication worksheet here.

NOTE: This worksheet includes detailed steps that you can follow to implement this project in your city and design a rigorous evaluation. This resource is best suited for city staff working in utility or billing departments, offices of innovation/performance, and staff who are interested or experienced in running evaluations.

Physical utility bills are wasteful and costly for cities. E-billing services are a convenient and cost-effective alternative.

With nearly a quarter of the population — over 56,000 residents — receiving paper utility bills, the City of Scottsdale wanted to encourage residents to switch to electronic utility bills. Having more customers sign up to receive their bills electronically saves the city a considerable amount of time and resources that would go into paying for the postage and bearing the operational costs of sending paper bills. In addition to the operational costs, each monthly paper bill costs the city $0.25 to send — adding up to over $168,000 annually. Scottsdale wanted to offer their residents the opportunity to sign up for paperless billing and gain access to their utility bills from the last 12–18 months online.

Paperless bills are more convenient for residents, as they can be accessed electronically from anywhere. In addition, e-billing reduces the barriers for residents to choose convenient electronic bill payment options, and may help them make on-time payments and avoid fees. Finally, increasing the number of people switching to paperless billing will contribute to significantly reducing the carbon footprint of printing and sending paper bills.

Attaching a behaviorally informed mailing insert with the existing paper utility bills to encourage residents to switch to paperless billing.

Scottsdale’s Utility Billing Department worked with the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) to understand how to get more Scottsdale customers to sign up for paperless billing. The Executive Team identified this issue as an ideal target for a low-cost evaluation since the uptake in paperless billing had been lower than expected. After conducting research and reviewing the existing evidence on the main cognitive and behavioral barriers preventing residents from signing up for e-billing, the city concluded that the best way to nudge more residents to sign up for paperless billing would be to add an insert to the paper utility bills that the Utility Billing Department prints out every day. These inserts were behaviorally designed to overcome the most likely barriers to switching, and to leverage behavioral science concepts that help facilitate the uptake of a new behavior.

[Check out this worksheet to replicate the evaluation that Scottsdale conducted to see if their campaign was successful.]

Scottsdale employed a few key behavioral science concepts in the mailing insert that you can adopt, too:

The message on the insert was designed to:

• Express a clear call to action to switch to paperless billing. This acts as a salient and pertinent reminder right at the moment when they are receiving their utility bills.
• Make it easy to sign up for the paperless billing system by breaking down the process into a few actionable steps.
• Provide an example of a relatable group of people who have already signed up for the new service. The insert does so by emphasizing that thousands of Scottsdale residents have already gone paperless.

How we know the mailing inserts work and how cities can run their own similar evaluation and project.

In partnership with BIT, Scottsdale designed and launched a randomized control trial (RCT) to evaluate the impact of their insert on customers who were still receiving physical copies of their utility bills. This trial included both customers who receive paper bills but pay them online and those who receive paper bills and pay them via mail. These distinct subgroups were identified by those who don’t receive a return envelope (because they now pay their utility bills online) and those who get a return envelope for mailing payment. To measure the impact of adding the insert, the city measured the proportion of residents that signed up for paperless billing within 20 days of receiving their bill and compared the sign-up rates between the group that received the insert and the control group that received a regular bill with no insert.

The team found significant differences between the two groups. Residents that received the insert along with their utility bill were significantly more likely to sign up for paperless billing (by an additional 56 percent) than those in the control group. In the control group, 112 people signed up to go paperless, while in the treatment group 171 people signed up. If the insert were to be sent to all ~56,000 Scottsdale customers who received paper bills each month, this could mean that approximately 287 residents would switch to paperless that month. This number represents an additional ~118 residents switching to paperless in that month due to the mailing insert (versus just receiving a regular utility bill). Considering that each paper bill costs the City of Scottsdale $0.25 every month, 287 new paperless billing customers could result in at least $861/year in recurring savings for the city. (Note: This is a conservative estimate, because it does not take into consideration that some customers that switch to paperless billing also typically receive a return envelope for payment, adding an additional $0.25 cost to paper billing.)

When the team broke down the treatment effect by sub-groups, they saw that it was entirely being driven by people who pay their bills online (the ‘no return envelope’ customer group), even though they still receive paper bills. A conclusion we can draw from this is that a different approach might be necessary to capture some of the customer group that continues to mail their bill payments. The insert, however, is highly effective for the over 28,000 customers who are already paying their bills online and represent about 52 percent of the total customer base. If we were to scale up this intervention to just the 28,877 customers who already pay their bills online, the recurring annual cost savings would be $528.45.

The success of this intervention showed that adding a behaviorally designed insert to the envelope containing paper bills is an effective and cheap method of outreach to convince customers to make the switch from paper billing to e-billing.

The Evaluation Protocol

The remaining section of this guide will walk you through a step-by-step on how to adapt this intervention and evaluate its impact on your community.

An evaluation project has four key steps:

• Scoping Your Evaluation: Identify your goals, target population, and approach
• Designing Your Evaluation: Develop your evaluation method, outcome measures, and randomization approach
• Implementing Your Evaluation: Deliver your solution, ensure everything goes to plan, and collect data
• Analyzing Your Results: Conduct data analysis based on your collected data

To design an effective evaluation of this project, Scottsdale with the support of BIT developed an “Evaluation Protocol” to guide these four stages of their evaluation design and implementation. While sending a mailing insert may seem straightforward, evaluations need to be implemented in a careful and precise way to generate results that you (and others) can learn from.

Creating a protocol structures your thinking around your evaluation. Protocols keep stakeholders involved and informed, help prevent unwanted method variation and unnecessary rework, and can serve as the record of your research method. Protocols provide a convenient place to keep track of the many moving parts of your project.

Scottsdale’s careful planning helped ensure that its evaluation ran smoothly and that it could use the results of their trial to inform decisions about their paperless billing campaign. We’ve made it easy for you to replicate this project in your city by providing you Scottsdale’s protocol to follow along.

Download the evaluation replication worksheet here to see Scottsdale’s evaluation protocol and develop your own approach.

How to use your evaluation results

Congrats — you’ve implemented your evaluation, analyzed your results, and (hopefully) increased sign-ups for paperless utility billing in your city. We also hope you learned about evaluation too — and have a new set of tools you can use to design evaluations in the future! The most important part of running an evaluation is using the results to make decisions and scaling up what works.

After Scottsdale’s project with BIT, they had a few ideas of what they could do using what they learned:

• Consider scaling up the mailing insert intervention to the broader population that still receives paper bills, while potentially focusing efforts primarily on those customers that receive paper bills but pay them online (to increase the cost-efficacy of the intervention)
• Consider other potential interventions to target the population of customers that receive paper bills and do NOT pay them online, considering that the mailing insert was much less effective for this group
• Use the findings and behavior change concepts that were applied to the mailing insert to inform other communications from the City of Scottsdale
• Document the process as a proof of concept that the city could implement a trial using the a batching system to randomize and assign treatment groups to trial participants that receive bills that are printed daily (see the Evaluation Protocol for more information on how Scottsdale randomized by batches!)

In 2019, Scottsdale achieved What Works Cities Certification at the Silver level for data-driven excellence.

Launched by Bloomberg Philanthropies in April 2015, What Works Cities (WWC) is one of the largest-ever philanthropic efforts to enhance cities’ use of data and evidence. Want to learn more about What Works Cities? Contact certification@whatworkscities.org.

The Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) is a social purpose organization that helps governments around the world boost their impact through the application of behavioral science and rigorous evaluation techniques. As part of What Works Cities, BIT helps cities develop and rigorously evaluate ideas for improving government services. We define rigorous evaluations as evaluations that utilize experimental or quasi-experimental methods. We believe this is the best way to help understand the impact of a program or policy.

Want to learn more about the Behavioral Insights Team and services available to cities? Contact info@bi.team.