Using Social Networking to Save Energy, Earth Aid Style

By Cole Ingraham 9 months ago

In addition to using economic or environmental motivators to encourage households to conserve, at Earth Aid we are also utilizing social networking as a tool to promote energy savings in individual households. Today I wanted to highlight several of our innovative current or soon-to-be-rolled-out features that do just this.

Comparing with a friend: At EarthAid.net, you can choose to invite individuals to be your friends on your Earth Aid account. When individuals accept your invitation, you will be able to view one another's utility consumptions and savings. This creates social incentives for individuals to save energy, since you know your friends will be able to see if you are saving energy or using a lot. By raising the visibility and increasing awareness of a household's utility usage, it will encourage members of that household to reduce their energy usage, or continue to do well saving energy respectively.

Earn Points by Helping Friends Save Energy: To encourage your friends to save more energy, we recently launched a new feature where you not only earn Rewards Points when you save energy and water, but also when your friends join Earth Aid and save energy. This is another way Earth Aid is leveraging peer-to-peer networks to promote savings, and it makes sure that everyone – even if they’ve already saved a lot themselves – can be involved in saving energy and water (and earning points!). This allows people who do not pay their own utilities, whether they live in an apartment building or their landlord pays for them, to get involved in conservation efforts.

Compare to Your Community: Lastly, we will soon be rolling out a new feature that lets you compare your energy and water consumption with other that of individuals in your community, city, state, and nation. Taking this feature one step further, we will also be empowering communities to run challenges amongst themselves. We'll help you to track the overall savings of your groups and communities, and compare them to other groups. Whether it's between elementary school classes, neighborhoods in a city, or an inter-city competition, we will be offering many different options for various groups to encourage energy savings in their community.

While we've seen the overwhelming majority of Earth Aid members conserve energy and water, our goal with these features is to encourage new and existing members to use these tools to save even more energy.

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User Comments

  1. David Corne said:

    Social networks can indeed save energy - here is an academic paper describing how this would happen via simulations of a planned eco-village in Edinburgh.
    Hawasly, M., Corne, D., Roaf, S. (2010) Social networks save energy: optimizing energy consumption in an ecovillage via agent-based simulation, Architectural Science Review, 53(1): 126--140.
    pdf:
    http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~dwcorne/asr10.pdf

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