Connecting people who give a sh*t, with people who get sh*t done
Groundswell
The climate crisis is here.
It’s here and now and it’s accelerating. Scientists tell us we have less than a decade before climate change crosses thresholds that are much more dangerous and harder to respond to.
At its core, Groundswell funds climate action to keep fossil fuels in the ground and accelerate a just transition to a decarbonised world. As such, it relies on a community of givers to fund strategic high-impact climate advocacy.
Our brief: in two weeks, optimise the Groundswell website to create an experience that turns good-willing supporters into motivated members.
Approach
In a single, rapid sprint, I as the designer, alongside a product manager and strategist conducted a round of current state testing with would-be members to understand the friction and blockers in Groundswell’s digital platform.
Pain points identified included rigidity in the giving options, clunky IA was hiding the otherwise resonant ‘why’ and ‘how’ of Groundswell’s collective giving model, and a lack of clarity on subscription terms were giving people reason to pause.
Identifying a number of opportunities, we worked with the client to prioritise the most impactful ones and set about making a plan for change, before getting stuck into making as much of the change as possible real within their existing CMS.
Highlight
This project illuminated for me that even two weeks worth of well-formulated human centred design thinking can make a tangible positive difference. Beyond providing our client with a material outcome, we were able to give them tools to run their own mini-experiments to continue exploring the opportunities that weren’t prioritised in our project.
Impact
We have all the solutions we need to solve climate change. We just need to fund them.
Simple tweaks reassuring potential members of subscription flexibility and building a narrative hero-ing the power of the collective-giving model saw Groundswell double their member donations goal set for World Environment Day, funding 5 new grant rounds.
Those who donate have voting rights on a shortlist of grant applications, with the winning grants funding grass-roots organisation such as Seed Mob: the country’s first and only youth-led First Nations organisation, living the principle of self-determination by providing the space for mob to make decisions and lead work to protect country; and Rewiring Australia, an organisation on a mission to Electrify Everything. That is, to replace all fossil fuel-based machines with efficient, electric ones powered by renewable energy.
The greater the collective input - many members funding many grants, tips the scales of climate change for the better.
