TheCityGame is the place for doing social and environmental good actions while playing. It is a mobile application that gives users the opportunity to have fun and get rewarded for performing responsible actions. At the same time, brands and organizations use the platform to participate and enable users to perform the actions while achieving marketing and CSR goals.
TheCityGame is a “serious game” that puts users into a quest for performing good actions and eventually creating a habit out of it. Users participate every time they recycle packaging, batteries or electronic devices, donate shoes and clothes, use public transportation, keep utility bills low or learn through quizzes. Every accomplishment is measurable, rewarding and sharable, all of which are key factors to create a new, consistent, and loyal behavior. Eventually users achieve a social status of how “good” they are.
Brands, organizations and businesses participate by creating missions within the game in order to support sustainable initiatives, collect valuable material or drive more traffic to their real-world locations, which serve as verification points.
With the SME instrument, we intend to conduct market research, user testing, and run mini-pilots in order to iterate on our application quickly, and finally be in a position to launch full-scale. Final products of these actions will be a comprehensive feasibility report and a business plan.
The overall objective is to grow TheCityGame, the mobile application that educates motivates and rewards good actions around the environment and society, into a massively popular application and to place it in the hands of citizens world-wide in order to help them with achieving a more sustainable lifestyle and spreading the word. The opportunity lies in the development of a high-growth business around the commercial opportunities that arise with some of these socially and environmentally good actions.
With TheCityGame, it is the first time that gamification, social networking, and real-time “reporting of good” have been brought together to create a unique platform for millions across the globe to socialize, have fun and at the same time act responsibly in respect to the environment and society. In very few words ta typical use case is the following: The user opens the application, sees which good actions they can perform by browsing through them or by seeing other users’ performed actions, learn about the importance and the impact of an action, perform the action and verify by taking a picture, earn points which serve as a social indicator of “how good you are”, challenge other friends to do the same, and finally redeem these points for gifts.
At the same time on the business side, TheCityGame offers a great communication channel to brands and organizations that want to reach this very valuable community in order to have a platform to promote their CSR initiatives, drive commercial traffic to their stores, and gain access to valuable materials for re-use and recycling. In addition, online donation platforms and charities can benefit from the user engagement that TheCityGame can deliver. This is an issue that they are suffering from, and the tools for TheCityGame to offer charity and donation missions are there (affiliate programs, commissions, and APIs).
The problems that TheCityGame helps solve are the obvious environmental and social problems we are facing, at the level of individual and his/her contributions. Taking action at the individual level is very important here, and can bring much more impact than a top-down centralized mandate, law or directive. The fact that TheCityGame can create a bottom-up movement where desired behaviours are achieved through fun, gamification and social pressure through challenges and mimicking the good actions of others is the real game- changer.
