Designing What Communities Actually Value. How Choice Modelling Can Help Community Organizations Design Better Programs - James Harris

Why do so many well-intentioned programs fail to attract the people they are meant to serve?

Community organisations, not-for-profits, public agencies, and social service providers often face the same frustrating problem. Surveys show support. Consultations produce enthusiasm. Stakeholders say the program is needed. Yet when the program launches, participation is lower than expected.

The problem is not always poor marketing, lack of interest, or bad intentions. Often, the problem is that people support programs in principle but make different choices in practice.

Designing What Communities Actually Value shows how choice modelling can help organisations design better programs by revealing the real-world trade-offs people make when deciding whether to participate.

Rather than asking people whether they like an idea, choice modelling asks them to choose between realistic program options. These choices reveal how people weigh factors such as time, location, cost, convenience, duration, format, and effort. The result is a more practical way to design programs around what people are actually likely to choose.

Written for practitioners, executives, policy officers, analysts, researchers, consultants, and program managers, this book explains the choice modelling process in plain English. It assumes no prior knowledge of economics, statistics, or R, and uses a running community wellbeing program example to show how each step works in practice.

Inside, you will learn how to:

Define the decision your organisation needs to make
Identify the program attributes that influence participation
Design realistic choice tasks
Build a survey instrument
Recruit respondents beyond the "usual suspects"
Prepare choice data in the right format
Run a basic multinomial logit model in R
Translate model coefficients into utilities and probabilities
Compare program scenarios in Excel
Understand trade-offs between program features
Segment results for different participant groups
Present findings clearly to boards and decision makers
Monitor real-world outcomes after implementation

This is not a theoretical textbook written only for academics. It is a practical guide for organisations that need to make better decisions under constraint. It recognises that resources are limited, community needs are complex, and good intentions are not enough.

If your organisation has ever asked, "Why aren't people coming?" or "Which version of this program should we run?" this book provides a structured way to move from assumption to evidence.

Designing What Communities Actually Value is for anyone who wants to design programs, services, policies, or community initiatives that better reflect what people value when they actually have to choose.