Egon de Bruin is Founder of Treemagotchi, a digital tree you place on your Facebook, your blog or on the Treemagotchi site. The tree grows by feeding it biweekly with one green or fair action. As participant in the SOCAP/Europe scholarship program, he will join us at SOCAP/Europe. In his blog he shares some innovative online applications that enable transparent collective action for a just and sustainable world, similar to Treemagotchi, and he reaches out to share his ideas with fellow SOCAP/Europe attendees.

The power of the collective moment and other keys to sustainable behavior change.

What difference does it make when you on your own in the supermarket use your shopping bag and with pride refuse plastic bags? Or when you ask that clothing saleswoman about child labour? Send an email to your bank and ask what they do with your saving money?

If you would be the only individual acting, it wouldn’t quite improve the situation. But you’re with a lot of individuals. And ‘a lot of individuals acting’ is one of things that 26.000 people in The Netherlands have found in our service Treemagotchi. Last period I’ve been analyzing the results of our latest (behavior) impact assessments. And it made me happy. Participants found it fun, easy to act, and they saw the collective impact. ”Especially the idea you actually cán change things gives a very positive feeling”, as one of them reported.

Showing thát in an easy and attractive way is one of the pillars for initiatives like Treemagotchi. Other examples are Dothegreenthing.com in the UK or Care2.com in the US. An overview you can find at socialactions.com. Thé key to let you experience your influence on a larger scale lies in the power of the collective moment: large crowds of individuals doing the same thing at the same time and getting as much as possible instant feedback about the impact it brings. And I don’t only mean petition platforms like Avaaz.org and its 8 millions members. Even Unilever wants to engage its billions of customers like this: have a look here and here. Last year I was invited to Unilever’s Research & Development department to present our Treemagotchi method.

I would like to challenge and inspire our fellow micro-action / engagement  platforms to take a step further than one-off micro-actions, pledges and signing petitions and to incorporate more elements that help their community members to actually change some of their behaviors in daily life in a more structural way. That would even make their influence more sustainable. At SOCAP/Europe I would love to meet people to exchange experiences. From our side: we’ve experimented in doing this and managed to actually trigger some structural behavior: more than half of the active participants report to have changed at least some things in daily life. We’ve developed our service based on theories of behaviour change and successful examples of persuasive technology and serious gaming. Ask me about it at the conference

For more impact assessment results and examples of actions performed by our participants, see our Prezi.