Party Pledge

To ensure everyone contributes in a major way to fighting climate change, Party Pledge converts big, scary goals with uncertain long-term rewards into simple, short-term goals with immediate rewards.

Although many of us still live comfortably now, climate change is rapidly impacting the world as we know it. For those people living in their comfort zones, the impact of climate change on their current lives is muted and feels far off into the future. In order to prevent climate catastrophes that would hurt billions of people, we need millions of people to change their daily non-ecofriendly behaviors, but it's very difficult to get people to change their behavior when the threat doesn't feel immediate. That's why we created Party Pledge, presenting short-term and simple goals for people to work towards with the support of immediate rewards and community.

Party Pledge started as our middle school class project to reduce plastic use within our school. We offered kids the goal of not buying plastic party supplies and not buying plastic party favors. Word spread about Party Pledge and we have received pledges from all over the world, from people of all ages. Future calls to action can include any type of pledge, not limited to plastics, parties, or the environment.

These small, discrete, and easy to achieve goals are great first steps on the path of change. They're not scary or hairy or audacious, which is important because research shows that small steps don't trigger our fears that could prevent us from making any change at all. And yet, small steps build our momentum and lead to the achievement of much larger goals. 

Not only does Party Pledge reduce the emotional overwhelm of big goals and the intellectual overwhelm of choosing which eco-friendly actions to take, Party Pledge aims to provide a certain short-term payoff in the form of community recognition. It would take minimal funding to be able to provide rewards to pledgers such as social media badges (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn) or NFTs, which would get attention, recognition, praise, and community belonging for our pledgers. These rewards would reinforce their positive changes and encourage others to participate as well.

Together, we can make a big difference by respecting the complexities of human behavioral change while making room for the different challenges that each person faces by allowing pledgers to customize their contribution to fighting climate change.

Elevator Pitch:
https://youtu.be/vCpo2p4pmuw

Party Pledge was launched as a middle school project by Amelie and Zara, as a team. It consists of a website at the domain partypledge.org, where a pledger can fill out minimal information to acknowledge their participation. The technology used is a free Google Form. Responses are monitored and enumerated. The free Gmail service is used to answer questions and message pledgers.

With funding, we can develop a simple API that interfaces with social media and posts badges for pledgers to receive recognition from their own communities and from the global pledger community. We can also or instead provide NFTs for pledgers to use as their social media profile photos. Other short-term rewards can be explored as well, such as prizes donated by corporate sponsors. Additionally, with funding, we can use a service such as MailChimp to send reminders to pledgers to encourage their participation. We use TikTok and YouTube to encourage pledgers but with funding, we can build out an Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Twitter presence and following. 

Climate change impacts billions of people and most dramatically impacts the underprivileged and marginalized. The dire consequences of climate change will impact millions of people who will be forced to move, millions who will have to change their occupations, millions who will need to find alternative sources of energy, and so forth. Before we reach catastrophic levels, we need to help people simplify the hundreds of complex decisions that they make every day and embolden them to take action. Billions of us have good intentions so let's make it easier for each individual to act according to those intentions.

As kids, we are taught The Ant and the Grasshopper story early in our lives. This is meant to teach us the difference between short term rewards and long term goals. Choosing to work toward a long term goal instead of a short term reward is especially difficult as a kid. In addition, kids often feel that adults will take care of problems for us, or we don't understand how important a global issue is, or we don't believe that we can actually make a difference by changing our behavior. Therefore, in many ways, we kids most need a service that will convert long term goals with uncertain rewards to short term goals with immediate rewards. If it works on kids, it'll work on everyone. In addition, kids stand the most to gain from fighting climate change.

As a child of immigrants and with our pledges from all over the world, I know all of us are interconnected so all of our lives depend on making behavioral changes. 

We have done some learning on helping making humans change their behavior. For example, we did research on motivation, rewards, Kaizen, and atomic habits. We are starting to learn the neurobiology of fearing change and how to take small steps that don't trigger the amygdala's fear response.

Our solution is innovative because it considers how humans actually behave, how their psychology and brains work. As far as broader impact, we can apply the same principles of converting big, hairy, audacious goals into small goals to issues outside of climate change - practically any pro-social behavior that any pro-social movement can use as a tool.

With funding, we will increase the number of pledge options beyond the two party supply pledges. For the party supply pledges specifically, we will measure success by the reduction in plastic party supplies on stores shelves and in reduced sales of plastic supplies everywhere. We hope to reduce the number of plastic party supplies bought so that companies get the message and stop manufacturing so much of it.

During this process, we will help people build their confidence in making positive change and we will help them see what a difference they're making.

We can also add pledges outside of climate change for other MIT Solve funding recipients. 

Our solution relies on technology to function because we have a global community of pledgers. We use the internet for pledge sign ups, we use algorithms to get views on social media to boost the number of pledgers, and we create videos to encourage people to pledge. If we receive funding, each pledger will want to spread the news of their participation to their own personal community. Additionally, we can use the platform as a way to test how small the behavioral goal has to be before people agree to sign up and report a positive experience. 

We just launched the pledging website as a middle school project and very quickly reached 40 sign-ups. We have limited money to reach people. We would like to empower everyone by teaching them about supply and demand, as well as the difference we can make. We interviewed the Shark Tank winner of Cabinet Health, we will be interviewing an employee of Anthropocene Institute, and others. We will post these educational videos for kids to learn from. We post shorts on TikTok as well for kids to learn from. Our most viewed video has nearly 1800 views and we did not pay for promoting it. 

The main barrier is financial.
1) Rewards - Our parents taught us how to complete many of the video creation and website creation pieces of the project but we will need to find someone to help us technically with the rewards badges. 

2) Mailing - We will need the money to automate reminding people about their pledge, if they choose that option. 

3) We will need to make sure we comply with any legal requirements around contacting children so we will need to hire a lawyer and add terms and conditions to our website.

The other barrier is time. We are 7th grade students with plenty of extracurriculars, including sports and opera. We will need to have our parents help us build a team so we will not fall behind in our school work.

We have interviews with Shark Tank winner Cabinet Health, and we will soon be interviewing Repair the Sea, and Anthropocene Institute. These are the closest thing we have to partnerships.

By adding new pledges and tallying what people sign up for, we will see how small a call to action needs to be in order to get engagement quickly and cheaply. One of the keys to any for-profit, non-profit, or political campaign is a call to action.  Therefore, practically every entity will find our knowledge useful and could use our platform to get engagement as well for their own calls to action. Paying clients could pay us a subscription fee or flat fee per pledge/call to action. This money would be used to fund the pro-social pledges of non-profits.

Our platform can serve as a tool for socially progressive organizations,  businesses, and even for political campaigns. Any initiative that needs a call to action will be able to use what we've learned and developed. They can pay a subscription fee for the use of our platform or a flat fee per campaign. This would hopefully cover the costs of running free services for non-profits. A sliding scale could help us determine who to charge and who not to charge.