Tree-Nation

Inspiration

At Avisi Apps, we really want to make an impact and become more socially responsible within our day-to-day business and projects. When the monday.com climate app challenge was launched, we thought about our options to contribute to this great initiative. We had several other ideas, before we contacted Tree-Nation as we knew this non-profit organisation fights back against the alarming rates of global deforestation. Initially, the idea was to plant a tree for each task that is completed. With the app we want to connect people’s actions to sustainable results. We allow companies to reforest the world by growing their own forest, in the same pace as their business grows.

What it does

The Tree-Nation app is an integration that allows every monday.com user to connect their business goals to grow their own company’s forest. As a user of the app, you can set up automations connect an event that happens in monday.com to planting a tree.

For example: You have an overview board containing all information around running projects. On this board, you activate the following integration: “When Status changes to Done, plant a tree”. As a project is finished, the status of this project item is changed into done. This will result in planting a tree in your company’s forest.

Apart from the integrations, we have also created a dashboard widget which can be implemented on your existing monday.com dashboards. This widget shows your own animated forest, with the amount of trees that have been planted and the CO2 that has been absorbed. Using the app, you can select which Tree-Nation project you want to contribute to and choose from different species to plant. More information about the project, such as the exact location and the type of forest can be found in the dashboard widget. An example of our own company’s forest can be found here: link

How we built it

We used prior knowledge about the monday.com ecosystem to create this app. We used a monday.com board for prioritising our backlog tickets. First, we started with setting up the connection with the Tree-Nation API and then we developed one of the first integrations to connect both platforms. Next up, we dived into the dashboard widget of the app. We created a design with Figma and implemented this using Fulcro and ClojureScript amongst other technologies. When both the integration and widget were finished, we did an extensive testing session to ensure the app is working secure and properly.

Challenges we ran into

We had limited time and resources to develop the app, so we had to come up with a minimal viable product at first. While this first version was finished, we concluded that some more time needed to be spent on the dashboard widget to create a seamless monday.com experience and give more attention to the user experience of setting up the app. We really needed to time-box the effort we put into this app as our running business needed to be continued.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to contribute to a greener world is the first thing that comes to mind here. Creating a solution to contribute against deforestation has made our daily job more meaningful.

Also, we are proud that as a team with limited capacity, we’ve created an app that offers a great look and feel and technically functions really well. We went through the complete process from idea to implementation in a really short timeframe. Each member of our team contributed to this app in their own way.

Lastly, the fact that the app is a collaboration between Tree-Nation and Avisi Apps makes us really proud. We are very keen to help Tree-Nation support their goals and we learned a lot from the passionate team during the meetings we had together.

What we’ve learned

A marketplace app that contributes to a greener world seems like a far-fetched idea at first. We’ve learned that if a creative idea comes to mind, we can go from ideation phase to production really fast. In today’s world, everyone wants to “do good” and through building this app we realised you can only start contributing if you make an actual effort. We encourage others to start spending time on a greener tomorrow (by using the Tree-Nation app).

On the technical side, we learned more about creating dashboard widgets as an app feature and we’ve implemented a new technique that enables us to perform real-time updates of data on dashboards. While developing the user experience of the app, we learned how to motivate users to stay involved with our app. By applying specific gamification techniques, the user is encouraged to come back to the dashboard widget to see how the forest is growing. This adds to the motivation to plant more trees.

What's next for this Tree-Nation app?

Looking to the future of this app: we are always open for suggestions to improve. If a customer has an idea for connecting one of their business goals in a way we can support via the app, we will certainly consider this. Next to that, support and questions will be answered at all time.

From the moment the app is live in the marketplace, we hope we can inspire a lot of companies using monday.com’s work OS to start making an impact and go green. As Avisi Apps, we have already connected our project goals to planting trees, will you join us in Tree-Nation’s mission to reforest the world?