Climate Kik – Climathon
Building a global community of innovators and start-ups to help cities achieve net-zero emissions.
Creating a digital brand and platform, to evolve Climathon from a local, event-led activity to an always-on, global movement. Bringing people, ideas and investors together regardless of boarders and time.
Creative Director – Great State
Website | Brand | Design System | Service design | Strategy
Background
Climate-KIC is an EU-funded initiative. It helps eco-innovation start-ups around the world source funding and collaborate. They had been running hackathons (Climathon) for a few years; one-off public events to bring people together and tackle local climate issues.
Whilst gaining popularity, and raising awareness they were less effective in delivering change. Hackathon outputs by their very format were restricted by the event time limits, available skillsets and location.
We were tasked with helping them grow from local events into an efficient, effective global community that could make a real impact all year round.
Approach
Our first port-of-call was to look at how volunteers gave their time. The logistical difficulties of aligning people for one day in a single location meant you rarely had the right people together.
We flipped the model on its head, allowing people to donate their time as it suited them, developing a hive-mind model of micro-tasks that could utilise specific skillsets anytime and anywhere in the world. Whether you had one minute, one hour or one day – volunteers could contribute any time they had, anywhere.
Previous Strategy
The previous model relied on growing the number of cities that participate to grow the number of people participating. The website acts as the organisational and registration tool. The majority of activity and community engagement occurs at local levels duting Climathon events, limiting the reach by physical area.
Our revised strategy
By transforming the website into a community hub, participants can share ideas, collaborate and build online groups with anyone in the world, all working together to find solutions. This model exposes far more people to Climathoin activity all year round, not only during local Climathons events.
The results
To date, Climathons are running in over 200 cities in 65 countries across the globe, with over 9000 active participants and an impressive 800 live ideas online. It’s a global movement making a real difference in climate change.
