Learning for Civic Action Challenge
Tiramisu: Incentives for civic action
What is the name of your solution?
Tiramisu: Incentives for civic action
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
Tiramisu is an action platform where young people can find fun & collaborative ways to get locally involved - while cities and sustainable companies can encourage & reward civic action.
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Of a total population of approx. 5.6 Million young people age 18-24 in France, over 85% want to make an impact in their communities and environment*, yet only 13% turned out to vote, and 62% reported having suicidal thoughts. A similar picture is emerging in other global locations. What is happening?
Feelings of disillusionment & powerlessness
Young people are overwhelmed and anxious because of the scale of global issues, along with personal hardships that are often connected to those same issues. In general public discourse, they are encouraged to vote, to donate, to buy responsibly. But they feel unheard and unrepresented in governance so they are not voting, and financial uncertainty makes donations and sustainable product choices impossible options.
Growing up with digital platforms, many young people turn to social media to make their voices heard and/ or to seek information. While this can be very effective when turned into actions (as many global movements today started with hashtags), too much passive engagement with global doom increases the feeling of disillusionment & powerlessness.
Competing incentives & digital tools
We are living in a world where almost everything BUT civic engagement is nudged & incentivized.
There are rewards and reductions for shopping choices, recommendations and auto-playing follow-ups for movies to watch and posts to like. Especially social media is a huge time drain, with many young people reporting to spend 2-10 hours daily on platforms*. This leaves limited perceived time for meaningful real world action - and a lack of easily accessible options to even start participating.
*based on our analysis of data from gwi.com
What is your solution?
Tiramisu, which literally translates to “lift me up” in Italian, is a platform that helps young people to easily find opportunities for collaborative and fun civic engagement in their area, according to their interest.
For activities they complete through the platform, participants get points. Those points are translated to donations with the help of sponsors. The sponsor makes a donation in the name of the participant, who can choose the recipient organization, thereby doubling the participant’s impact - and sense of empowerment.
Sponsorship can also include free access for participants to otherwise paid (and often educational) events, and is usually part of a larger campaign in which the city or a responsible brand can encourage people to act on a priority topic, along with communicating the tangible results of their engagement.
Activities include fun & collaborative introductions to local engagement that we organize together with partners, like a scavenger hunt that includes meeting & learning about local community organizations. Activities also include actions directly organized by those local organizations: cleanups, homeless walks, food distributions, runs with refugees and more.Once they are onboarded to the app, people can also engage in personal exchange (peer-to-peer support) and start creating and organizing their own activities.
Tiramisu thereby provides a starting point to civic action that is easily accessible, collaborative & healthy (tapping into the health benefits of both real-world social connection & volunteering), intrinsically rewarding (making direct community impact) and incentivized (doubling the impact), and leaves participants with a feeling of empowerment.
Here is a short demo video of our app.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our target audience are mainly students and young workers initially in France, UK and US, hopefully growing globally. Many of our early conversations have been with women, members of ethnic minorities & LGBTQ youth. Some are already actively engaged in community efforts (for example student club leaders), others want to find ways to become engaged.
A few points stood out from our conversations & further research:
Young people move a lot (especially for secondary education, first jobs), which increases the need to easily find engagement opportunities in new places. But networks and information around civic engagement are usually very local - and hard to get into. Besides sometimes having found local groups, volunteering opportunities, or student clubs (mainly in the US), many wish they would have better means to find initiatives.
Personal mental health has been declining, and professional care is often not used or available, while the systemic reasons behind mental health struggles often remain unaddressed (both points are especially true for minority groups). Understandably, people sometimes need to put their personal health first, and are more likely to engage in a context that acknowledges struggles and makes personal and community health a priority.
Voting is not always an option for people, and if it is, many (especially minorities) are very disillusioned by the process. Even vocal activists with a seeming sphere of influence still feel left out of public decision making processes, as their participation often feels tokenized.
Social networks are now a primary means to connect with friends, and also a key outlet for activism. It works really well for some (especially very active creators + activists that found their community online), but others are tired of “hashtag activism” and wish they could find more tangible means of engagement. Many young people, including successful creators, want to spend less time on social media and build healthier habits.
Apart from governments, many young people have very high expectations towards companies (that they buy from or work for) to take responsibility on social and environmental issues.
They are tired of narratives of personal accountability and instead look at issues from a more systemic perspective - but want to personally contribute to solutions.
Our platform provides a powerful way to easily find & experience civic engagement in action, to feel like a meaningful contributor, to build healthy & collaborative habits, and to get to know community-led initiatives that could lead to a more long-term engagement, and maybe even influence a career choice.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
Working and living very internationally, we often felt excluded from official civic participation (as a North African applying for French citizenship, as a European living outside the home country, as an international worker), we often depended on digital groups and connections to find meaningful ways of local engagement, and we became heavy (professional and personal) social media users.
While we are deeply immersed in the tech world, we have become much more reflective about the use, benefits and pitfalls of technology solutions. Working in both the for-profit and nonprofit world on building and implementing solutions shapes our belief that there is a strong need to bridge those two worlds to create lasting impact, and most importantly, that we need to rethink incentives - and create better structures.
Our work has allowed us to build a large and intentionally diverse network of thinkers and practitioners that heavily influences our thinking and decisions.
Beyond our fascination for tech, we are design & system thinkers with a people-centric approach and mindset. A big part of our work on this project has been conversations with young people and young leaders: of student clubs, youth organizations, and those still finding themselves and their way.
While many people have been informally involved, we work towards formalizing some of these (and new) relationships by building a group of advisors and contributors that deeply reflect the people, and different perspectives, we are trying to serve.
Our current focus is on building a local minimum viable ecosystem: the people & organizations that can shape our solution, build up meaningful and locally grounded activities, and help us test sponsorship options in a meaningful way within our first pilot city (Paris). We will then replicate this approach (and apply our learnings) in further locations.
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Enable learners to bridge civic knowledge with taking action by understanding real-world problems, building networks, organizing plans for collective action, and exploring prosocial careers.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Paris, France
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Pilot: An organization testing a product, service, or business model with a small number of users
How many people does your solution currently serve?
650
Why are you applying to Solve?
The more we worked on this project, the more we realized that both the solution and the broader topic is so much bigger than us. We would love to be part of a peer network of innovators working on similar & related topics, and we found that one of the best ways to improve & scale is to build meaningful knowledge exchange and collaboration with those peers.
We would also be extremely excited to find potential partners & advisors through the Solve network and the exposure that would come from our participation in the network. This includes private, public and institutional partners that can help us to refine our strategy, inform & support further technological development and pave the way for a go to market in further locations, along with municipalities and brands that would be willing to test and refine our sponsorship solution.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Maike Gericke
What makes your solution innovative?
We believe that our solution could provide a meaningful entry point to real-life civic action for young people around the world, by applying similar mechanisms that successful social networking platforms have applied with huge success: easy findability of relevant actions, recommendations, gamification & powerful incentives.
Our sponsorship model, if successful, could fill a very important market gap.
We have seen that many community-driven platforms that list local engagement opportunities struggle with financial sustainability and close down eventually. Larger volunteering platforms on the other hand are often financed through donations or non-profit subscription fees that take away from the limited available resources that our solution aims to extend.
While we have seen a lot of platforms that encourage, incentivize & reward either personal environmental actions (e.g. we will plant trees if you turn down your heater, take the bus) or facilitate and sometimes reward in-company engagements (employee volunteering & similar action rewards), we did not come across solutions that incentivize public collaborative civic engagement.
Our hope is to build up this pillar in the larger context of encouraging and incentivizing sustainable action, and to find ways to combine these systems and models across consumption, employee engagement, personal and collective action.
By involving municipalities and sustainable brands as sponsors, we also hope to build up larger conversations around sustainable marketing practices that will hopefully lead marketers to rethink engagements and budget allocations, and open up access to a large group of talented communicators as advocates for change.
What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?
In one year
involve at least 20.000 young people in direct civic action, with at least 40% repeat actors
At least 25.000 hours spent on direct community engagement
Positive indications on feelings of wellbeing & empowerment by over 70% of participants
At least 20.000€ raised for local causes through sponsors
We will achieve this through
Building a close partnership network in our first 2-3 launch locations
Starting with co-organized, time-driven activities that allow us to test all aspects of our model (including sponsorships) in a small scale
Involve the growing community in making our launch successful (highlighting success stories & local partners, building a referral program, recruiting directly from our community)
Incorporating direct feedback mechanisms towards participants (and partners)
In five years
Involve at least 20 Million young people in direct civic action, with at least 50% repeat actors
30 Million hours spend on direct community engagement
At least 10M€ raised for local causes through sponsors
Our network has brought about at least 10 future leaders (moving from community participants to leadership in our own organization, in partner organizations, founding their own organization)
We will achieve this by
Creating high-profile and high-impact partnerships in existing locations
Scaling our approach (with incorporated lessons learned) to further locations
Build up focused local teams and regional exchange
Continue to focus on participant feedback with special attention to highly engaged repeat participants
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?
Measurements we gain directly through our platform
Activities completed (total/ by participant/ by cause)
Time spent per activity (total/ by participant / by cause)
Personal participant feedback (on wellbeing & feelings of empowerment)
Sponsorship funds allocated (total / by cause)
Indirectly, we further aim to gain impact insights through our partners
Impact generated through funds (by cause)
Impact generated through participant action (by cause)
Insights on platform diversity
Demographics of platform users, % of participation, wellbeing indicators by demographics (in case people opted in to share this data)
Insights on education & skill development
Number of participants & time spent in activities related to skill development
What is your theory of change?
Our platform provides easy access to fun & collaborative civic participation opportunities. This leads to more people signing up to those activities, learning about local organizations, and (because activities are fun & collaborative) becoming repeat participants.
Raising funds through participation in those activities is an additional incentive to participate and do more, and an additional way to feel empowered in civic engagement (analogy: the success of e.g. charity runs).
Over time, participants will feel more empowered (through the impact they generate with their actions + sponsored funds) and healthier (through proven health impacts of collaborative action & volunteering).
This feeling of empowerment + the added proximity to local causes & organizations might lead the most engaged participants to make career choices influenced by their experience.
As people are more likely to donate to organizations with which they have volunteered, more funds will go to those local organizations that people built proximity to (both sponsored donations + possibly personal donations of participants with growing personal income).
An increase of funds + time-based support allows those organizations to increase their impact.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
We have developed a mobile application (available on Android & iOS) for community participants. The app includes the following functionalities:
Filtering and joining activities & peer support
Adding new activities and support offers / requests
Personal chat & video chat for accepted offers, community chat for activities
Problematic message detection (based on Machine Learning, sends alert to moderator)
Reporting & blocking users
Personal profile & badges
Features we are still developing:
Feedback mechanisms (on the impact of completed activities)
Reward selection & allocation
We will further develop a web application for campaign creation & management of our sponsors that we have concepted and partially prototyped to gather customer feedback.
We are considering to build blockchain-based impact verification processes and reward/ donation flows that would allow for verifiable credits and reports, but we are first testing the necessity & building up the right process and stakeholder model for such a solution.
We further aim to use machine learning for recommendations based on predictive modeling, (starting initially with building up the logic and gathering data), for example:
Activity recommendations to participants based on previous activity, feedback & activity of others with similar interests
For sponsors & community organizations: recommendations of activities and campaigns based on positive outcomes in other comparable regions
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new business model or process that relies on technology to be successful
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
If your solution has a website or an app, provide the links here:
https://tiramisuapp.com
In which countries do you currently operate?
In which countries will you be operating within the next year?
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
How many people work on your solution team?
2
How long have you been working on your solution?
3 years, part time
What is your approach to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into your work?
Our leadership team is diverse in nationality / culture (Moroccan, French, German) and gender, and we have taken the action to involve people of various age groups, gender identities, nationalities and cultural/ social backgrounds in the design & development of our solution.
Further actions include:
Team & advisors:
Inclusive hiring, active reachout to e.g. non-top tier universities & hiring directly from our communities, building unbiased processes & transparent compensation schemes.
Creating boards and advisory bodies that reflect different perspectives, demographies, lived experiences and viewpoints, including adequate compensation for all participants.
Platform participants:
Make sure that our processes to attract participants are inclusive in message and approach, work with experts that represent diverse backgrounds
active invitations to groups and initiatives we would like to see represented on the platform (without problematic targeting)
Local partners & non-profits:
Building long-term collaborations with local, community-led organizations & making sure that the collaboration is mutually beneficial
including financial returns to those organizations in our own business model and financial projections.
Customers (campaigns & sponsorship):
Select our campaign partners based on value fit, and refuse campaigns by partners that do not share those same values
Community guidelines
We already developed (and will further improve) a code of conduct ensuring a welcoming and supportive environment within our community that is enforced by moderators
On our app, we included easy reporting mechanisms that lead to a direct look by moderators, and we aim to work with a diverse group of experts & users to further build our content moderation approach
Data privacy
Make sure that we do not include vulnerable personal data in our data collection
Avoid any personal targeting based on social, cultural and identity-based attributes (other than personally expressed interest in causes that might relate to these attributes & identities)
Technology development
develop our technology, especially on content moderation & safety, reward/ impact verification & recommendation systems with direct involvement of our community in a representative and inclusive way
involve leading researchers & research institutions, encouraging open dialogue and constructive feedback to avoid coded bias and harmful applications
consider open-source development where possible, combined with audits on data & methodology by independent entities
What is your business model?
Municipalities and local / regional businesses will be able to launch campaigns on our platform.
A campaign includes a call to action on a specific topic (e.g. climate action, dialogue across age groups), and will include rewards to participants.
Different sponsorship options include:
Reward Sponsorship: make a donation in a participant’s name
Activity sponsorship
Food & beverage: sponsor a picnic or other food-related event, become a stop on a treasure hunt (give out a clue with a snack/ ice cream etc).
Event space: provide an event space where people can gather
Entry fee: provide free entry to an otherwise paid activity (free guided tour, course)
We provide:
A platform to set up and manage campaigns
Impact insights & analytics
Creative services (campaign templates, execution support)
Our value
For cities, we provide an easy & effective way to engage young citizens on priority topics
For sustainable local & regional brands, we provide opportunities to meaningfully connect with a young audience, and to combine marketing with community engagement & tangible impact.
Our pricing
We offer tiered subscriptions & one-off campaigns (to be confirmed by our tests)
Our impact
A % of our campaign fee directly goes to donations made in the name of our participants
Community organizations as co-organizers of activities get additional payments
The actions of our participants provide additional direct value to local communities & local organizations
Do you primarily provide products or services directly to individuals, to other organizations, or to the government?
Organizations (B2B)What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable?
We fund initial developments before finding product-market fit (and impact fit) through self-funding, grants and non-financial support, aiming to gather first revenue through dedicated sponsorship trials relatively soon. We then aim to fund our growth & further technical development through a combination of grants + investment capital along with reinvesting platform revenue, and hope to reach breakeven over the next 5 years with this approach.
An option we additionally consider is to provide broader services & solutions within the topic of incentivizing civic participation, e.g. for in-company solutions or impact-themed loyalty programs, thereby building a broader network of solutions with related technological and knowledge components, a larger opportunity for financial returns, and less early profitability demands on individual solutions that often hinder impact focus.
Solution Team
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Khalid Belghiti Co-founder/COO, Tiramisu
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Maike Gericke Co-Founder & CEO, Tiramisu
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Our Organization
Impact Bakers