Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer
I see the climate crisis as the problem of our times. I am currently focused on smaller, community-based, adaptation projects, but previously I have volunteered at Climate Action Tech, been a board member of Kerry Sustainable Energy Co-op (KSEC), and been Ireland country lead for Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL).
While at CCL I worked closely with Maurizio Liberante, where we often discussed the barriers to taking climate action, and our shared interests in media and news. As we worked quite well together, we set up our own initiative in the climate and media space - first called Climate Ireland, and later renamed Climate Local.
Initial Hypothesis
There is a wealth of climate crisis information - traditional and social media, and everything in between - often in depth and difficult to parse for the casual consumer of climate news, or someone interested in taking climate action.
We hypothesised that providing context for a climate news story would lower the barrier for understanding the current state of the crisis, and give people a platform for taking informed action. Context would be provided through classification and taxonomy, and also giving history for the wider topic.
Testing and new Hypothesis
I built a prototype in Figma, manually categorising current media articles using our taxonomy. For test subjects we targeted people who were heavy news and media consumers, with an emphasis on people who weren’t actively involved in the climate crisis or environmentalism. There wasn’t much engagement with the context features, to allow users to explore more about a topic. What was interesting was the gravitation of most of the participants to a component which had been included as an afterthought - “What you can do” - where climate action related to news articles were shown.
With this result, and further qualitative research, we updated our hypothesis:
When consuming news or other media related to the climate crisis, if specific actions are associated with the content, topically related to the news and located geographically close to the user, that person will be more likely to begin their climate action journey.
With an updated prototype, we tested our new hypothesis from a usability standpoint. Engagement was markedly increased from previous rounds, and we were encouraged enough to move forward.
To profit or not to profit
As we explored our concept and the problem further, we realised there is no incentive for any organisation in the present media landscape to push people towards climate action. When KPIs and organisational goals are based around keeping people within a set digital environment, a service whose outcome is essentially leaving that environment is generally seen as detrimental.
If we wanted to be a regular startup, see saw ourselves as having to make a choice between two different revenue streams, neither of which we were comfortable with:
- Paid subscriptions - besides this not working as a revenue stream from individual users in the long term (how often does someone actually want to ‘take action’?), asking people to pay to take climate action didn’t sit right with us
- Featured content - having partnerships with either media outlets or other source of news would invariably result in putting a finger on the scales, and not in keeping with our core value of neutrality
We decided on being a non-profit, and looked for funding outside the usual tech/VC route.
Building
As a proof of concept, and to garner more insights into engagement, we created Instagram and LinkedIn profiles. I started developing a signature visual style for Climate Local, and created multi-image posts on specific topics which had recently been in the news.
What we learned from social media was fairly limited. After an initial burst of follows and engagement on posts on both platforms, this trailed off pretty quickly. Our suspicion was that this was due to our not posting often enough, or some other factor which those platforms didn’t see as valuable to push to their users. In effect it confirmed our understanding of there being no incentive for something like what we wanted to build.
Leveraging what we had learned from our prototype, and using the visual identity developed for social media, I built out the initial product using the Bubble codeless platform. This was relatively painless, as I quickly translated Figma UI designs into Bubble, and set up the database and backend for basic actions-to-news matching. We also wanted to keep the journalistic angle we had pursued on social media, so I set up a headless Wordpress instance to act as a CMS, which was then plugged into Bubble.
Wind down & wrap up
Unfortunately, after roughly two years of operations we decided to wind down the org. We had been seeing reasonable growth in usage, considering how much marketing we were able to do, but a number of factors conspired to force us to make the decision.
Chief among those factors was our commitments to both regular work, and other climate related activities. Maurizio still holds Climate Cafés under the Climate Local name in Belfast, whereas, as mentioned above, I spend more of my time with local, community resilience focused projects.
Funding was also difficult to secure because of our position as a non-profit. Most climate related tech funds are investment focused, and would not consider us as attractive. Funding for local initiatives would not suit us either, as we weren’t considered ‘local’ enough, regardless of our ‘hyper-local’ principle for action.
Finally, a major disagreement with regards the direction of the project arose around AI (specifically LLMs) and its use. Automation of some sort was needed in order to reduce the manual effort needed to update the product with recent news, however, in my opinion, use of LLMs is both antithetical to any climate effort, and also never fully trustworthy with regards to its output.