New White Paper on Google and Recyclebank’s Partnership in Gaming for Good

Throughout Earth Month in April, Recyclebank hosted an online game, the Green Your Home Challenge. Visitors interacted with virtual rooms to learn how to be more environmentally conscious and implement new “green” changes in home and lifestyle. Players were also given rewards, challenges, and leaderboards as well as bonuses for referring new players. Recyclebank teamed up with ROI Research and Google Analytics to produce a case study that has just been released via white paper.

The primary goal of the project was to prove that an educational gaming strategy could support their central goal of increasing ecologically conscious and sustainable habits. Recyclebank is trying to solve the issue of awareness by making learning more engaging to everyone. The primary goal was broken down into three points of consideration: first, encourage participants to do their part through small green actions; second, increase levels of engagement; and lastly, drive new member acquisition.

The conclusions of the study are positive. ROI Research sums it up, “Recyclebank’s Green Your Home Challenge was successful in employing Gamification techniques online to have an impact on offline behavior, specifically the level of eco-friendly activity of participants, and Google Analytics played a key role in evaluating the initiative’s success.” This illuminates a key point on gamification: goals and analysis for gamification must go deeper than examining online metrics. Offline changes in behavior should be evaluated in order to determine the impact of the campaign.

The recommendations at the end of the report are particularly interesting. Be sure to check out the full report, and Recyclebank’s Chief Revenue Officer, Samantha Skey, will be sharing insights on Recyclebank at our upcoming Gamification Summit in New York. Interested players also have a new chance to participate as Recyclebank continues to iterate on the first model and has released a new Green Your Vacation Contest in time for the summer holidays.