Inspiration
The inspiration for our project stemmed from one of our team members, Gareth. Sustainability has always been an area of interest close to his heart. Since young, he has participated in various sustainability projects and initiatives, as a means to be more grounded to his community. When he was 17, he stumbled upon Ground Up Initiative (GUI), and had taken part in a few of their workshops. Interacting with the volunteers and other participants typically energised him, as they really ‘walked the talk’ for sustainability-related matters. Although the demands of his other commitments (such as family, National Service and university) unfortunately led him to grow distant from GUI, Hack4Good provided an amazing opportunity to give back to an organisation that once inspired Gareth.
When ideating for GUI’s problem statement, all three members tapped on their prior experiences in various community-building efforts. They compared car clubs, heartland sports teams and photography interest groups, and noticed that while all communities had a healthy stream of face-to-face interactive events, the more vibrant ones were those whose members regularly communicated outside of the events as well. Qualitatively, to enable continuity of the community’s values beyond events, members needed to feel a sense of belonging and connection to each other.
In GUI’s context, we synthesised that an avenue for socialisation and connection was needed. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to nudge individuals to share their post-activity sustainable behaviours. Changes in their mindset over time would be almost impossible to notice by GUI.
What it does
Conceptualised as a ‘Sustainability Scorecard’, we propose a community app that enables participants to post about various sustainable behaviours they partake in after completing the GUI activity. Our platform weaves in gamification features that incentivises users to continually share about their little acts of sustainability in their daily lives, but without feeling burdened to commit.
Crucially, this enables GUI to remotely track the post-activity impact of its initiatives on participants. GUI would have an analytics dashboard platform that lets them understand the effectiveness of their programs over the long-term. Having this data makes it easier for GUI to communicate its impact to external stakeholders for funding-related purposes, as well as to optimize its various activities.
How we built it
Admin Dashboard: Developed using React and Firebase, our Admin Dashboard for Group Up Initiative (GUI) offers comprehensive functionality for environmental activity tracking, financial management, and grant reporting. Notable features include:
Activity Tracking: Real-time monitoring of environmental initiatives, workshop attendance, and volunteer participation. Financial Tracking: Integration of financial management tools to track grants, donations, and expenses. Grant Reporting: Robust reporting capabilities to showcase financial data for grant requests and accountability purposes. Data Visualization: Graphical representation of both environmental and financial data trends for informed decision-making.
This integrated solution provides GUI with the tools necessary to effectively manage their operations, track their financial resources, and demonstrate impact to stakeholders and grant providers.
Community App: Our Community App, built on React, aims to engage users in sustainability efforts through gamification and user-friendly design. Key features include:
Check-in System: Enables users to track participation in events and activities easily. Sustainability Challenges: Interactive challenges incentivize engagement, with badges awarded upon completion. Leaderboard: Fosters healthy competition by showcasing top contributors within the community. Minimalistic Design: Tailored for less tech-savvy users, our app follows a minimalist approach for intuitive navigation and accessibility.
By incorporating gamification elements such as badges and leaderboards, we aim to motivate users to actively participate in sustainability initiatives while ensuring ease of use for all members of the community.
Challenges we ran into
Our team had to figure out how to incorporate a tech-based solution in a no-tech work environment. The nature of GUI activities often has participants putting their mobile devices away, which lets them focus on their work. It would be incongruent to have a tech-heavy solution to measure their post-activity behaviours. With this constraint in mind, we needed to reconcile with the overarching objective of nudging and gamifying the process of self-directed sustainable behaviours, and explore what alternatives to Learning Management Systems (LMS) would be feasible.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
That we were able to implement a digital solution that augments the enthusiastic nature of the GUI community. While there are many follow-up conversations needed on execution, but we are confident that we have conceptualised a feasible tradeoff between gamification and self-directed behaviours.
What we learned
There’s always a temptation for us to go for big and lofty designs that scream ‘innovation’ and ‘cutting edge’, but the conundrums we faced for this case competition was a sanguine reminder that there is beauty and meaning in simplicity.
What's next for The Sustainability Scorecard
Ideally, once we go into the final round and win, we wish to engage GUI in further conversation about materialising our ideas, and form-fitting it for their daily operations. It has been a long-standing conundrum for sustainability-related organisations to quantify their impact on the environment, so if we are able to develop a practical solution for GUI, it would be a milestone in developing this conversation.
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