We are
Reason Digital

Who was the client?

Living Streets is the national charity that stands up for pedestrians and works to create safe, attractive and enjoyable streets, where people want to walk.

What was the campaign trying to achieve?

Imagine the impact on hunger if the 58 million hours spent growing virtual crops in Farmville were spent growing vegetables in real gardens. Imagine the impact on culture and the arts if everyone playing Guitar Hero on the X-Box 360 learned to play real instruments instead.

My Living Streets is a supporter engagement and reporting tool, to encourage, collect and manage supporter activity for campaigns such as Walk to Work Week. The campaign hopes to reduce congestion and carbon emissions, improve public health, and ensure the community enjoys vibrant public spaces through walking.

What technologies did we use?

We chose to focus on tried and tested digital media channels, that are familiar to the largest numbers of people.

Email

Living Streets used existing email lists to kickstart the campaign, targeting supporters who had taken part in previous years. We drove registered users to invite other participants directly from the website to create a viral effect.

Website

We developed a simple, self-contained social network for walking, www.mylivingstreets.org.uk - a central location where all Work to Work Week activity could be encouraged and recorded whilst communicating and competing with colleagues.

Social media

We bucked the trend of setting up a presence on  Facebook and Twitter, preferring to use user’s status updates to drive traffic to the charity’s main Twitter account, @livingstreets and the new website.

As such, we minimised the administrative burden of building and maintaining separate, new communities, given the campaign’s short timescale.

Game mechanics

We made taking action for the campaign fun and addictive by exploiting the psychology of competition and social relationships to drive more activity and achieve our campaign goals.

We implemented a points system as a way to reward users for positive activity to give a sense of progress. This simple, virtual reward encourages further participation, and points act as a proxy for the engagement level of supporters.

Points mean prizes, or at least virtual badges. These "achievements" were used to surprise and delight and to keep up interest and engagement whilst delivering messages to reinforce positive behaviour.

People love to shout about their progress and badges. Encouraging them to do this with two clicks of a mouse on social media allowed the campaign messages to spread virally, with a reach of hundreds of thousands. The share by email option was also popular, and used thousands of times.

The tool puts all of Living Street’s supporter engagement in one place. Supporters are encouraged by the system, and by each other, to contribute to social goals, and spread the word.

This single point of activity provides unrivaled, real-time reporting opportunities, and allows incredibly detailed historic data to be generated with the click of a button, by campaign, user, area and more. It’s a game changer.

Why a digital campaign?

Put simply, this wouldn’t have been possible without digital media. Tens of thousands of people taking hundreds of actions a minute. All without human intervention. All recorded for later reporting to funders.

Making the campaign digital allowed us to give every user, workplace and area a custom page to track progress, swap messages and compete on leaderboards. All in real time as the week unfolded.

What were the outcomes?

Evidence was available in real time to us, and to Living Streets, through the monitoring and reporting tools we built into the website. In addition to these, we used Google Analytics to measure traffic to the site.

During the five days of Walk to Work Week, 33,000 visitors viewed over a quarter of a million pages (260k), looking at an average of 8 pages per visit. The website traffic was highly targeted with 98.7% of traffic came from the UK.

The social gaming network proved popular, with 8300 people taking part from over 1000 companies. The busiest section of the website was the Workplace portal, where participants left messages of support for each other and compared their performance against colleagues in workplace league tables.

Around 2,000 photographs were submitted of people participating in walking-related activity, and more than 700 geo-tagged photos were of problems along walking routes, allowing Living Streets to campaign directly to local authorities to improve public streets.

In terms of social benefits, participants walked more than 75,000 miles - that’s more than three times around the world! Over 7 million calories were burned and more than 11 tonnes of CO₂ emissions prevented from harming the environment.

All in a single week.