An Overview Of Our Solution
WeSpire is a SaaS mobile/web engagement platform, designed using the principles of behavioral science, to inspire people to embrace positive choices. Forward-thinking companies use WeSpire to design, communicate and measure the impact of their sustainability initiatives. Since our founding, WeSpire has inspired150K employees to take over 10M actions that have led to reductions of 25K metric tons of C02, 26K megawatts, 74M gallons of water, 2M tons of waste, and 4K trees plus measurable contributions to innovation, employee retention and customer loyalty. Over 50 companies, with 2.7T market cap, have used WeSpire including Unilever, Dell, Bank of America, MGM Resorts, and Cox Enterprises. Awards include Fortune Great Green Idea (2012), Environmental Leader Product of the Year (2014), EY Entrepreneur of the Year NE (2015), and an Edison Award (2016).
- Population Impacted: 147K employee participants to date
- Continent: North America
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Context Analysis
WeSpire operates in the workplace. Some companies face significant, highly material climate change issues driven by risk, resource scarcity, carbon policies and customer demands. Some company see the value of engaging employees in climate change initiatives as a moral imperative, as well as the opportunity to create Shared Value.
As a result, the behavioral interventions (aka: engagement programs) must be tailored to each client to deliver the climate change awareness, activation and outcomes needed. We need absolute clarity about how success will be measured. For example, BASF’s goal for the first three years was to deliver “One Ton Each” of GHG reductions. As a result, the engagement programs that ran were those that would heavily reduce emissions at home and at work. Whereas MGM’s MyGreenAdvantage program emphasized water and waste reduction in addition to GHG reductions given their business sector and most locations are in water-starved Las Vegas.
Describe the technical solution you wanted the target audience to adopt
The technical solution is a SaaS platform that integrates into a company’s Intranet platform, mobile app (if they have one, if not it can be directly added to a phone), social platforms (Jive, Yammer, etc), email systems, reward/recognition systems, and HR systems.
From the sustainability team's perspective, the program managers use WeSpire administrative tools to do three things: design the behavioral initiative they seek (or modify one of over 300 existing interventions from our Behavior Programs Library), communicate with employees about the initiative, and measure the environmental and business impact of the participation in the initiative.
From the employee perspective, they see communications and start to participate in a set of company branded campaigns, challenges, events or idea generation activities that they see promoted and accessed through existing communications channels. They likely do not know they are on WeSpire.
Type of intervention
Describe your behavioral intervention
The behavioral interventions on WeSpire are designed using the principles behind BJ Fogg’s behavior design model and Robert Cialdini's social norming work. They are expressed in the form of initiatives that increase a person’s ability and motivation to take action and put nudges and triggers in the right place at the right time to close the gap between intent and action. The sustainability interventions save energy, reduce waste, water, fuel, electricity and GHG emissions at work and at home, but also improve health, reduce toxins, increase time spent outside, and even drive advocacy.
To validate user adoption, some actions require the user to post a photo or story showing they took the action. We can survey users about pre/post intervention attitudes or actions. Companies can audit how energy, waste, water or fuel use has changed and compare to aggregate results data. For example, Sony Electronics published a case study showing how their Green Office Certification program drove financial savings of $84 per participant and validated using an in person audit.
WeSpire has published an academic paper on our behavior design through the HCI International conference/Springer in 2013 and been cited by numerous authors for our behavioral science work including Jon Radoff’s Game On, Andrew Winston’s The Big Pivot and Kevin Werbach’s For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business.
As needed, please explain the type of intervention in more detail
Two of our most common behavioral intervention templates are campaigns (go your own pace) and challenges (group competitions). The elements of these interventions include:
Content expressed simply with information about why a behavior matters, how to do it, learn more links. We use positive vs. preachy language and break complex changes into simple micro-actions to reward small steps. We then layer in a lot of features that build on social norming, including aggregate data and photos of who in workplace social network has completed the action; the ability to share your story and photos. Stories are displayed within each intervention and provide peer to peer learning and motivation to others. Peers can also like and comment on acts completed which provides positive feedback, recognition and dialogue.
To increase motivation, we use techniques common in game design like points (which align with impact through a proprietary algorithm), leaderboards, streaks, achievements, levels and other aspects to create urgency, highlight progress and drive persistence. Nudges and triggers include a variety of notifications, both in app and via email to keep users making progress.
Describe your implementation
The WeSpire platform is a multi-tenant system, meaning every customer is using the same technology and tools, but a version is hosted at their sub-domain (gm.wespire.com) and integrated into their corporate systems. The customer can select which engagement programs they want to run from our behavioral programs library, which contains over 300 proven interventions. Once they find one that fits their goal, they can edit the intervention in numerous ways using our tools (or ask us to help). They can target the program to everyone or just a specific group of employees only. If there isn't a campaign that works, we (or they) can design one from scratch and they can decide whether to keep it private or share it back into the behavioral programs library for others to use.
We have had clients with us for 5+ years who have run literally dozens of different engagement programs. We've definitely learned best practices for user adoption and impact generation. It really hinges on four core factors: an effective programs strategy, a well-thought out, multi-channel communications plan, clarity for how employees will be recognized for their contributions, and measurement to show business impact. To ensure adoption, we assign a customer success manager to every customer who works with them regularly to ensure that those elements are in place, in addition to the core elements built into the platform.
Our biggest challenge have been champion turnover. No matter how effective a program, if we lose the person who sponsors and runs the program, we often "start from Ground Zero" with their successor. No matter how compelling the ROI, the environmental impact or the number of employees participating, many leaders aren't comfortable with behavior change and would much rather focus on PPAs or green leases (things 100% in their control). I see building awareness within the climate change industry about the importance of behavior change as one of the greatest opportunities for scale.
External connections
Every WeSpire customer is actively engaged in either editing our implementations or designing new interventions with us from scratch so from that standpoint, all customers are key stakeholders and partners in our development. Our largest customers include Cox, MGM Resorts, Intuit, Dell, Caesars Entertainment, and Unilever.
We use Quantis International to "score" all the actions for environmental impact; Heroku and AWS to deliver the platform; and various communications agencies will be used by clients to help communicate the programs and initiatives internally and externally. Otherwise the platform has been designed and built by WeSpire employees.
We've been blessed to have an amazing advisory board including a member of BJ Fogg's lab, Robin Krieglstein, work with us. Other advisory members include Adam Grant from Wharton's people analytics division, Andrew Winston, author of The Big Pivot and Bill Weihl, former head of sustainability for Facebook and Google green energy czar. From time to time, we've partnered with external experts to bring in specific expertise into program design, often when we want advice as to the right set of micro-choices to deliver the desired outcomes.
Who adopted the desired behaviors and to what degree?
We've worked with a total of 51 clients, who collectively inspired 147,000 people to participate and who shared their impact with a broader audience of nearly 2M employees, along with shareholders and customers through their sustainability reporting. Employees took a total of 10.9M actions or an average of 74 per participant to date.
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
The cumulative platform benefit are direct reductions of 25K metric tons of CO2, 74M gallons of water, 2M tons of waste, and 4K trees. We estimate the indirect/ongoing impacts of these habits to be nearly 10X that. We work with Quantis International to score each action for it's corresponding environmental impact in energy, waste, CO2, water, fuel and trees and then track when users complete each action and differentiate whether it has a one time impact or an ongoing impact. We then summarize the resulting impact at the user, group, company and platform level.
What were some of the resulting co-benefits?
In addition to environmental benefits, we (through our clients) have been able to show that sustainability engagement programs have an impact on employee engagement scores, retention, and customer loyalty and have several third-party validated case studies demonstrating this impact. It's also spurred companies to recognize the power of WeSpire's behavior change approach beyond environmental sustainability and some of our customers are using our technology to run their social impact programs, wellbeing programs and positive workplace culture programs (ie diversity, equity and inclusion; responsible gaming; cybersecurity, etc). We've also inspired the early beginnings of some community engagement initiatives. We have a pilot with Santa Barbara county to do resilience work -- which includes, but is not limited to, climate change.
Sustainability
Companies pay, on average, about $6 per eligible employee per year to run sustainability programs on WeSpire (depends on size of company). We rely 100% on market-based revenue and have generated a total of $6.3M in revenues since our founding. We are just getting to profitability -- which requires about $2M in recurring revenue per year for the core team of designers, engineers.and customer success people. Key to getting to profitability was adding other positive impact program types, which have fortunately proved very additive to sustainability, driving increased participation and impact and reducing the impact of champion loss.
Return on investment
We've spent $7.5M over eight years in platform development and generated $6.3M in revenue to date. Customer acquisition costs are $50K and lifetime value is $500K. However, we measure our ROI as much, if not more, by what our customers save relative to what they pay. We've driven total direct savings of $10M across our customers, an average of $68 per participant. One of our largest customers has saved more than $1,000 per employee user over 5 years. In addition, we've shown up to eight percentage point improvement in engagement rates. Aon Hewitt research shows a five percentage point increase in engagement drives a 3 percent increase in revenue.
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
Our vision is that positive behavior change technology becomes as ubiquitous as email in the workplace. To scale WeSpire, we need access to growth capital and/or catalytic distribution channels. In addition to US corporate, we see opportunity in international, mid-market/SMBs, government, and education. It's fascinating to consider whether the WeSpire platform could scale at the community level, similar to the Santa Barbara initiative. Finally, we are sitting on a treasure trove of aggregate data about behavior change and have limited data science resources to share our insights. $25K would be hugely helpful to us right now and we'd be thrilled to be one of the finalists. Beyond that, we are looking for ~$2M in capital to quadruple our sales/marketing capacity (strong payback), add data science resources, add design/engineering resources to open up the platform to third-party content partners and enhance our measurement integrations with platforms like True Impact/CDP/GRI.