An Overview Of Our Solution
Joro is a mobile app that helps people automatically track their carbon footprint across daily activities, discover climate-friendly habits, and see their small steps add up to big impact.
We are solving an awareness and motivation challenge: individuals don’t know where their footprint comes from and behavior change is hard. Joro brings to sustainability what Strava and FitBit brought to health and fitness: personal tracking paired with social gamification to support daily, positive behavior change. Joro is based on our teammates’ research and tests conducted while students at MIT.
Our target market is young (20-49) smartphone users who care about climate change and track personal data on their phones, a market of 24M people in the US (Sources: Pew, Nielsen, Census data).
- Population Impacted: 200 people to date, plan to grow to 10,000 in 2019
- Continent: North America
Last name
Organization type
Context Analysis
Consumers, especially millennials, want to make climate-friendly choices (66% of Americans, Nielsen 2015), but often do not have the information to determine which choices make a difference. Research by Grinstein A, Kodra E, Chen S, Sheldon S, Zik O (2018) shows that most people are carbon innumerate - they don’t have a “quantitative understanding of the carbon footprint tied to their everyday decisions to make efficient sustainable decisions.”
The health community done significantly more to build daily awareness of key indicators than the environmental community. 70% of Americans track their own health data (Pew 2017) and over 50% of US smartphone users downloaded a health-related tracking app in 2015 (http://mhealth.jmir.org/2015/4/e101/). Existing footprinting apps overestimate the importance of financial metrics (E.g. Oroeco), require significant manual input (e.g. JouleBug), and/or provide insight into only a narrow slice of a user’s overall footprint (e.g. CommuteGreener).
Describe the technical solution you wanted the target audience to adopt
The technical solution is a mobile app that enables people to track their carbon footprint in real time across every domain of daily energy use (home, away from home, food, travel, purchases) with significant automated data collection. Specifically, the app guides participants in creating a profile with baseline data (e.g. last month’s utility bill), entering food consumption data (vegan, vegetarian, meat, etc.), enabling GPS tracking to estimate emissions due to travel and time use, and connecting credit cards to estimate embodied carbon in purchases. The app then provides tailored feedback on actions to reduce footprints (e.g. “Go dairy-free today to reduce your footprint by 5%”).
In Spring 2018, we launched a pilot with 200 testers at MIT and Harvard. We asked testers to download the app, complete an onboarding carbon footprint survey (15 minutes), and track and validate data on their daily activities for 3 weeks (2 mins/day), so that they could view tailored feedback in the app.
Type of intervention
Describe your behavioral intervention
We seek to help people identify small behaviors that they can change their daily lives to have significant impact over time. This includes understanding and participating in emissions-reducing actions across how they eat, spend money, travel, and consume energy at home. By providing a single, comprehensive carbon footprint metric in the form of kg CO2, Joro helps individuals make tradeoffs between choices across different energy domains (e.g. comparing a bike ride to a burger) to make changes that align with their lifestyle.
The app helps individuals track their emissions impact through a combination of automatic (GPS and credit card data) data collection and user input (meals eaten, recycling and composting habits, etc.). After a week-long baseline data collection period, the app uses predictive algorithms to suggest tailored, emissions-reducing actions to each user based on their past pattern of behavior. The app can provide short-term support in discovering new climate-friendly behaviors, as well as long-term support for behaviors such as eating less meat and dairy; biking, walking, and taking public transit more; spending more time outdoors; and spending less on non-essential goods & services.
As needed, please explain the type of intervention in more detail
Choice architecture: Participants can view tailored suggestions based on activity histories, which highlight climate-friendly choices. Because we connect via smartphone, we can test more effective timing for each choice set.
Social: We emphasize the social context of people’s actions: leaderboards and daily summaries show progress versus other participants’, and community group comparisons (school, employer, city) show the magnitude of contributions to emissions reductions.
Emotional: We connect personal actions to emotions by framing footprints as appeals to users’ diverse concerns: contributions to the US Paris Climate Goals (12% reduction), tons of ice melting, trees that would need to be replanted, and the social cost of carbon.
Describe your implementation
1: Automated Data Collection. Through 75 interviews with people in our target market, we found that manual data entry is a critical barrier to users’ ability to engage with their carbon footprint. With our intervention, we focus on making it easy for users to engage by minimizing the amount of daily input required. Through completing the onboarding survey, enabling GPS tracking, and linking with a credit card, we are able to generate a relatively accurate picture of a user’s daily carbon footprint with minimal data entry, compared with existing carbon calculators. By using smartphone sensors and expenditure records, we are measuring both observable and reported changes in behavior.
2: Single Metric. Second, we aggregate data across energy domains to provide users a single metric - kg of CO2 - that summarizes users’ emissions impact across daily activities. From user interviews, we have learned that people wanted to be able to understand how to compare non-similar actions - e.g. eating a burger with an uber ride - and that providing a comprehensive score is critical to enabling behavior change.
3: Social Comparisons. It’s challenging for people to understand the meaning of their carbon footprint. Is my footprint big or small? Do any of my actions really make a difference? This is why we provide personal comparisons (“Your footprint today is 10% lower than your daily average”), community comparisons (e.g. Average US is 20 tons per year, Average MIT student is 17 tons), and impact translations (“it would cost you $0.28 to offset your emissions today”, or “6 tons of ice will melt due to today’s emissions”).
External connections
In developing our solution, we have engaged with stakeholders and partners from our universities, namely Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Our team participated in and won recognition and grant funding from the Cleantech Open, a non-profit that runs the world's largest business competition for cleantech entrepreneurs. We also received funding and recognition from MIT’s Clean Energy Prize and IDEAS competitions as well as Harvard’s Rock Center Accelerator.
We have been learning from personal behavior change apps in the health and fitness space. In particular, we have been lucky to have relationships with the executive teams at fitness apps RunKeeper and Strava and health apps MeYouHeath and LoseIt!. In particular, these companies have thought deeply about how to hook and motivate people around behavior change, build long-term habits, and build on “feel-good” attitudes in areas that can also be known for creating shame and guilt.
We see strong connections with policy and especially city and state governments. We have ongoing conversations with MassCEC and the City of Boston, as well as with advocacy nonprofits GreenAmerica and Mothers Out Front.
We also see enormous potential to partner with companies to encourage sustainable behavior among employees and customers. We have begun to interview companies about their interests and needs, including Patagonia, Clifbar, GE, Morgan Stanley, and Wealthfront.
Who adopted the desired behaviors and to what degree?
Our goal for the Spring 2018 app pilot was to evaluate engagement, both daily and long-term, and the potential for broadening the scope of emissions-reducing actions. In interviews with participants, we found evidence of positive spillover effects among behaviors: those who joined the pilot due to interest in their travel impacts, for instance, also gained awareness and willingness to change consumption behaviors in other domains, such as purchases and food. Our interviews suggest the app will provide long-term support for behaviors including eating less meat & dairy overall; biking, walking, and taking public transit more; spending more time outdoors; and spending less on non-essential goods & services.
Our pilot also demonstrated long-term engagement with the app, which we anticipate will translate into measurable behavior change in upcoming experiments. Half of users check the app when reminded on a weekly basis, and one in five checks and validates activities on a daily basis.
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
In the next pilot program, we hypothesize we will be able to measure statistically significant and meaningful GHG emissions reductions (i.e. from 5% to 15%, depending on the user segment) that are consistent with previous literature on the effects of real-time feedback on energy use behaviors. We have also piloted data collection via home energy monitors to test additional feedback strategies, and the next pilot will expand the use of HEMs.
Recent studies on which we are building include a meta-analysis of 40 feedback programs that most frequently achieved 8%-12% electricity savings by combining real-time feedback with social comparisons and goal setting (Karlin et al. 2015); a study of a university student competition that reduced energy use by 55% using high-resolution feedback, versus 31% for low-resolution feedback (Petersen et al. 2007); and an experiment testing continuous, automated feedback for travel emissions, which measured a 33% reduction (Jariyasunant et al. 2013).
What were some of the resulting co-benefits?
Several co-benefits are emerging. First, many climate-friendly behaviors have health and fitness benefits. User interviews reveal that tracking calories through the app can help people eat appropriate portion sizes and cut down red meat. Walking, biking, and spending time outdoors increase physical activity.
Spending less on goods and services creates direct savings. Furthermore, we estimate that users who reduced meat intake, biked and walked more, and replaced ride sharing with public transit saved an average of $2 per vegetarian meal, $5 per 2mi bike ride, and $2.50 per public transit ride, creating up to $40 savings/week.
Our conversations with companies reveal that better understanding of consumer preferences can improve their ability to offer climate-friendly products and services. Companies want to understand which behaviors individuals want to adopt to inform business planning (e.g. Whole Foods offering a wider selection of vegetarian proteins).
Sustainability
We raised $35K in grant funding to support MVP tests. However, Joro will scale by earning revenue from advertising and offset subscription fees.
For companies selling to millennial conscious consumers, Joro is a targeted advertising channel. Companies like Whole Foods, for instance, will pay Joro to engage users who have made commitments to eat less meat. This model is similar to Mint.com’s.
Joro also earns revenue through subscription fees. We partner with Terrapass to offer personalized monthly offset subscriptions from $12/mo, taking a transaction fee ($1/mo, margins improve with scale). A survey of 25-35 year olds in Boston revealed 20% were willing to pay a up to $12/mo to lower their footprint, demonstrating demand alignment.
Return on investment
Our only costs are mobile development, server fees, and marketing. We estimate our team will require $500K to scale Joro to 10K weekly active users. Initial investor conversations indicate a $4M post-money valuation for an initial funding round, indicating an 8X ROI.
Based on relevant literature, 10% average emissions reduction across active users is a good assumption. Assuming users have an average footprint of 18 tons/year, the initial $500K could reduce emissions by 18,000 tons at $28/ton. Compared to other technologies, Joro is highly cost effective: a company producing 2MW wind turbines at an average cost of $1.5M will need to invest $10M (20X more) to compete with Joro’s emissions savings from 10k active users.
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
Successful analogous apps are helpful to estimate the funding and scale potential of Joro. Through conversations with the RunKeeper, Strava, LoseIt!, and MeYou Health teams, we understand that $500K is approximately the initial seed funding required to achieve 10,000 weekly active users. 70% of costs are salaries, 15% are marketing, and 15% are overhead, legal, and technology fees.
There is enormous potential for scale. Fitbit had 25M active users in 2017. In 2018, Strava is adding a million new users every 40 days. Like Strava, Joro is a purely mobile application and can run on top of existing platforms including phones, Apple Watches, or Fitbits.
To scale, we seek partnerships with organizations who have existing communities of users who are passionate about addressing climate change (e.g. Nature Conservancy, Universities, sustainable employers) and organizations interested in advancing climate-friendly behaviors (e.g. city governments, sustainable companies).