Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In an effort to help businesses comply with safety and health regulations, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) offers a free and voluntary consultation service to small establishments in high-hazard industries.  OSC consultants provide employers with guidance on how to avoid workplace injuries and illnesses.  In conjunction with behavioral marketing experts at Applied Research and Consulting, LLC, we developed multiple theory-based messages and formats that we believed would increase take-up of OSC.  We used these messages and formats to develop OSC marketing brochures. We then used a factorial research design to test the impact of each message, exemplar, and delivery mode. For this study, we randomly assigned more than 34,000 establishments to 18 treatment arms, with each establishment being mailed three brochures in spring 2014. Our analysis compares the impact of each marketing strategy on program sign-ups, in comparison to both the current OSC brochure and a no-marketing status quo. This presentation reports the results of analyses of the impact of these 18 marketing interventions on request for consultation (measured from OSHA administrative data).