The Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) provides& government-funded English language tuition to migrants with less than a vocational level of English. Not all migrants who are eligible for the AMEP currently enrol in it and those who do, often disengage before exhausting their eligibility.
BETA partnered with the Department of Home Affairs to test whether sending people translated information would increase participation in the AMEP over sending information in English.
What we did:
We ran two randomised controlled trials to test the effect of translating material on participation in the AMEP.
Trial 1:
We tested whether a letter and email in English or a letter and email in participants’ Home Languages would lead to more registrations in the AMEP.
Trial 2:
We tested whether a text message in English or in participants’ Home Languages coming from either the Department of Home Affairs or their former AMEP service provider would lead to more participants who had prematurely left re-engaging with the AMEP.
What we found:
We found no difference in participation between people sent the English and translated material across both trials.
We didn’t see a difference in participation between people who received a text message from the Department of Home Affairs and those who received one from their former AMEP provider.
We did find a difference in clicking embedded links in Trial 2. More people clicked the links if they received the text message in their Home Language (rather than English) and with the Department of Home Affairs as the sender (rather than their former AMEP provider).
We saw a 4.4 percentage point increase in link clicks.
While translating information did not result in higher participation in the AMEP, translating text messages can help encourage people to click on embedded links to obtain more information.
