Earth Hero

Problem: Lack of connectivity in climate action.

Detail: The past decade has observed a surge in Climate related solutions worldwide. The remarkable demonstration of collective human efforts has helped inspire positive change, however, this came at the cost of duplicate efforts, lack of coordination and political siloes.

Efficient infromation sharing is part of the infrastructure necessary to ensure effective collective action through common understanding and general education. Without such infrastructure in place, Climate related solutions won't have the opportunity to reach their required audiences, hence creating a hostile environment for growth.

Information Technology provides the fabric of the infrastructure required to achieve effective collective efforts, and more info-technology focused solutions are required.

These solutions have the duty to surface valid infromation to as many people as possible, through an accessible, easy to use medium, which can bring all of us aligned about climate change.

Earth Hero brings climate action education, habit building nudges and communities to the fingertip of its users through mobile technology. We personalise the app experience, making it easy for anyone with a smartphone to tap into positve change and get involved. This can be through simple actions at home, to certifications and joining pre-established communities. All content in Earth Hero is scienced backed due to our in-house environmental science team who look after all content writing.

Currently 120k+ users can use the Earth Hero app from 153 countries to learn actions, make them a habit and create communities to transform it into collective action. Moving forward, Earth Hero volunteers will dedicate to leveraging Generative AI to upgrade current personalisation functionality to iper-personalisation.

Earth Hero helps primarily its users by providing them with high quality education on what they can do to upgrade their lives to a more sustainable life for the planet and a healthier, richer life for themselves. We believe in the power of networks, meaning that if we can influence 10 people to take good action, in turn they'll influence many more, and so on.

Earth Hero also sufaces the work being done by communities to address climate change, so acting as a connector to foster change.

Finally, we believe that by creating a harmounious, well informed, global user base, the users can in turn go on and help currently underserved communities.

Given that our target community is the general public with access to smart phones, proximity to the communities for us means thoroughly understanding our users.

To do such we continously conduct qualitative and quantitative user research projects as well as academic research on behaviour change.

In addition, to effectively implement a tech based climate solutions for a global audience, specialisation of skilled labour and operational excellence are necessary.

The Earth Hero volunteering team has:

• In house environmental scientists to ensure that all information is science backed.
• 30+ developers to build high quality technology for all of our users to rely on.
• Designers and User researchers to ensure that the deliverable looks and feels like a solution that people want to engage with.
• Project managers to ensure the team optimizes limited time available to deliver valuable output.

Earth Hero has 120k+ users in 153 countries. The app is available in 13 languages and it helped take 720k+ climate actions, helping to save 138kt of CO2. 

We have been featured by the App Store for Earth Day and have been mentioned in The Guadian and Wired amongs other news outlets.

All this was possible with the geneours effort of more than 300 volunteers since 2017. No funding.

Earth Hero has always relied on its own strenghts to bring their offering to users worldwide.

As an advocate for the power of networks and collective effort, Earth Hero is now looking for as much third party exposure as possible to create synergies and get further help. This includes financial and non-financial.

Around the world there are definitely enough climate solutions and motivated people to take action. What is lacking, is enough connectivity between people and solutions.

Earth Hero's uniqueness lies in the it's effectiveness in motivating users to take climate action through a simple user interface, coupled by a strong strategic vision and operational excellence. These qualities enable us to navigate the complexity of connecting people and solutions through technology.

By being a piece of software, Earh Hero does not distinguish between deliverying information to 1 vs. 1,000 users. This is because once the code required for a personalised learning experience is created, there is no cap on how many people can benefit from it.

Similarly, once the distribution of infromation is codified, whether it is for an action, project or community, there is no cap on how much information can be exchanged.

Earth Hero's only concern is to provide a reliable and enjoyable to use technology to enable such exchange of education, habit creation and community building. Then the amount of people who can benefit from this technology is uncapped.

Earth Hero has only one main KPI: number of actions taken.

So far in 6 years, 720k+ actions have been take to address climate change via Earth Hero.

There are three core pieces of technology worth mentioning. All of these are well known and accessible technologies because 1) we believe in empowering exising solutions as much as possible, 2) A solution like Earth Hero needs to be as accessible as possible, 3) We rely on volunteers only, using commonly known technology, makes it very easy to onboard volunteers at scale.

 Mobile applications technology: Firebase backend and iOS/Android development. Our applications leverage such well known technologies because it is key for us to be accessible by as many people as possible with no costs associated.

AI/ML in python: We use network analysis to map the user-action behaviour, to drive our action reccommender system. We use various Gen Ai tools to optimise operations.

Content Management System: We use Aritable to store and edit all of our content as well as store all of our academic references. 

Active Volunteers part time: 72

Active Volunteer full time: 1 (Ben Gerhold, CEO)

2017-2024 Volunteers part time: 300+

6 years

Earth Hero is very proud of how it is run. 

Being a volunteers only team, there is no formal reporting line, teams are created through an innovative approach and volunteers choose which teams to join. 

Volunteers can decide to contibute with their unique skills developed through their professional journey, or can venture into something completely new.

Many volunteers are young professionals who are looking to partner with more experienced members to upskill and find a job. It is also common for Earth Hero to help bringe a non-Climate related career to a Climate focused career.

For this model to work without disrupting ongoing projects, we have a few volunteers who's only role is to project manage and be nible in terms of swapping in and out resources from projects.

When referring to operational excellence in the application, I referred to the tremendous work done by volunteers in maintaining projects alive and on time, whilst handling such inbound and outbound of resources.

Earth Hero provides education, habit building functionality and ability to join communities for collective actions. The business model is to reach as large as an audience as possible to help take climate action.

In the next year, Earth Hero will explore monetization strategies to bring onboard a small full time team. This is in order to scale the solution faster and integrate latest Gen AI technology to improve the offering.

Monetization strategies being evaluated are B2B agreements and partnerships.

Earth Hero is an example of where the power of community has removed the need for financial investment to create a global scale solution.

Earth Here doesn't need financing to remaing active, however, funding and revenue streams would be required in order to scale the solution faster.

With the ability to sustain a full time team, Earth Hero could invest in iper personalisation and state of the art mobile technology development to become the de-facto mobile technology to foster climate action by connect unlimited people with the solutions.