Forward: a location-based game for local civic engagement

The United States has experienced an alarming decline in metrics of both civic health and trust in government to the point that, in 2016, the country was for the first time downgraded from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy.”  In the wake of disruptive media technologies, declining resources for local journalism, and atrophied civics curriculum in public schools, many people lack the requisite knowledge to effectively advocate within either local government or civic institutions. Forward is a hyperlocal marketing platform for nonprofits that crowdsources place-based art and media to raise awareness about local organizations and issues. Targeted at Millennials and teens, and built on the principles of educational game design, Forward uses a location-based mobile game to help players leverage their existing talents and interests to support issues they care about, improve their understanding of civic processes, and bolster the whole community’s participation in local democracy.

It is no stretch to say that political conversation is taboo in many parts of America today. Over the past forty years the country has experienced an alarming decline in metrics of both civic health and trust in government. A 2016 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that “26 percent of people can name the three branches of government...a statistically significant decline since 2011, when 38 percent could name all three.” Meanwhile, Pew found that metrics of trust in government have declined from 80% in 1964 to 17% in 2019. My research at MIT over the last two years explored this crisis in rural and central Wisconsin, identifying three key challenges in the existing technology landscape: 

1. There is a lack of transparency and access to information about issues and political opportunities at the municipal and county levels.

2. There is a lack of collaboration between nonprofits, even within the same issue areas.

3. There is a lack of creativity, personalization, and diversity in the calls to action made by nonprofits and civic institutions.

First, we serve nonprofits and civic institutions by making it easier to recruit, train, and strategically deploy supporters to influence issues at the municipal and county levels. Second, we serve Millennial and Gen Z activists by giving them choices between a wide variety of ways to take action on the causes they care about and enabling them to be part of the success of many interwoven movements, rather than following one at a time.

We’ve so far tested 18 iterations of this game through playtests at MIT, playtests in central Wisconsin, and public library installations in 3 central Wisconsin cities. I’ve additionally conducted 4 focus groups and 32 interviews with city staff, nonprofits, and youth throughout the state of Wisconsin, as well as a digital engagement survey. This survey compared the civic practices of young people and traditional activists with results that were reflective of the mainstream literature arguing that there is a massive generational divide between participatory and institutional forms of engagement. This research forms the backbone of my Master’s thesis at MIT.

On July 3, 2019 we’re launching the first public pilot of the Forward platform in Appleton, WI. Follow along at playforward.io/follow.

Forward is a location-based mobile game that helps players leverage their existing talents and interests to support issues they care about, improve their understanding of civic processes, and bolster the whole community’s participation in local democracy. Targeted at Millennials and teens, Forward supports bottom-up crowdsourcing of place-based art, media, and data to support local nonprofits and advocacy groups.

The game is built on four principles from the field of educational game design: 1) scaffold learning and engagement, 2) enable identity exploration and expression, 3) foster collaboration and community, and 4) offer on-demand opportunities for engagement. In recognition of the deep interconnectivity of many of today’s most pressing issues, Forward supports organizations working in the following four areas: Social Justice & Democracy, Environment & Wildlife, Education & Opportunity, and Health & Well-Being.

The story of Forward is that players must collaborate to defeat a mad inventor from the year 2076 who is intent on creating a “Dark Future” for humanity. To win, players must work with each other - and a group of time-traveling laser-cats - to complete Missions that support local organizations. These Missions promote public awareness of local issues while training players in three skill areas: research, advocacy, and creative activism.

To begin, players can “check in” at Portals around their community to discover and complete Missions. Missions are opportunities to playfully learn about and influence current issues in the community (for example: chalk art about a local climate change petition at the library). By completing Missions, players earn Impact Points in the four issue categories and Catnips to fuel their laser-cats. Catnips can be used to charge Bright Futures that are capable of defusing the Dark Futures sent by the mad inventor. Advanced players can also create their own custom Missions and earn bonus points when other players complete those Missions. Players are rewarded for participation with Badges, access to resources, tools and trainings, and “Bounties” from the community such as issue-related swag and gift certificates from local businesses. 

The ultimate goal for this project will be to develop a platform that functions in communities throughout the country with minimal organizational oversight by automatically generating and geotagging content (similar to games like Pokemon Go and Foursquare). By 2021, our goal is for players to be able to use Forward to follow and support local causes in any community, anywhere in the country.

Our first innovation is in the use of a location-based mobile game (existing technology) to connect residents with local government and organizations (new application). This approach enables us to address all three of the core challenges identified in our problem statement by:

1. Increasing transparency and access to information about issues and political opportunities at the municipal and county levels.

2. Incentivizing collaboration between different causues and nonprofits.

3. Centering creativity, personalization, and diversity in the calls to action made through our platform.

Our second innovation is in our business model. In a marketing ecosystem in which both global brands and local businesses are increasingly recognizing the value of alignment with social causes, we believe Forward can ethically employ the revenue models of for-profit platforms like Facebook to convert its own user engagement into funding. Our idea is to form a benefit corporation with a seed round led by the national nonprofit and advocacy organizations that stand to benefit most from the platform’s creation. In return for small investments, these organizations will become voting members and partial owners of the platform. Furthermore, 10% of profits would be returned to the player community in the form of arts grants and prizes.

Coordinating meaningful local action at scale is a key challenge facing many organizers today; I believe that crowdsourcing through a location-based mobile games (LMBG) can address this logistical challenge. In the “hybrid reality” of an LMBG, “Users are required to move through physical space as they tag, collect, trade, and battle for digital artifacts and player achievements, accessing a microworld through their smartphone via the digital overlay of game objects and virtual locations across the actual environment. Through this augmented layering of the digital onto place, banal and familiar surroundings are transformed to become significant game loci.” We leverage this microworld to support local democracy.

Games scholar Eric Gordon suggests that "the systems that best take advantage of physical spaces coming online are ones that treat physical locations as yet another organizing structure of social life and attempt to fit them into accepted platforms for online interaction.” Given the central role of local information and action in grassroots organizing, LBMGs can help organizers use geolocation to structure the delivery of content and calls to action to supporters. Forward is not only a LBMG, but also a crowdsoucing game that, at scale, aims to enable our players to collectively maintain up-to-date data on the stances of the more than 513,000 elected officials in 85,000 government units throughout the United States. 

Shifting forms of participation in today’s networked world demand an expansion of the pathways that enable people to engage with traditional civic institutions. The digital natives of Generations Y and Z have different expectations than their predecessors. Today’s youth activists, armed with smartphones, social media savvy, and a proliferation of affordable tools for creativity, are redefining what it means to engage with politics. But the tools and practices used by organizers, elected officials and governments have failed to evolve. Although more organizations today rely on digital fundraising tools than mail-based subscriptions, emerging technologies have not significantly changed the practices of many civic organizations. Organizations that rely on checkbook support without creating opportunities for sociality—either face-to-face or digitally mediated—miss opportunities to build social capital and true democratic participation.

My feature comparison of over 19 tools used by social movement organizations (SMOs) and individual activists echoes the gap between these groups. SMOs primarily rely on constituent relationship management tools like NationBuilder and Salesforce to track supporters and make a narrow set of asks. Apps built for direct use by activists, however, also often fail to engage users beyond a narrow set of actions, rarely leverage connections between organizations to drive engagement, and generally fail to support local engagement beyond large urban areas.

I’ve spent years researching this problem and am ready to continue a highly user-centered approach to bringing Forward to life.

We're launching our first public pilot this week with the goal of engaging 500 players throughout the summer. We hope to engage another 500 players in a second pilot later this year. By 2024, our goal will be to reach 100 million users throughout America, and potentially in democracies around the world.

The Immediate goal for this project is to define what success looks like for our partners, including the city of Appleton, Wisconsin and the nonprofits that are participating in this summer’s pilot. From here, we’ll spend the remainder of 2019 improving the technology to the point that it can be simultaneously deployed in many cities and supported by local organizations. These city-based tests will take place throughout 2020. After thorough vetting with this multi-city deployment, the final goal will be to develop a platform that functions in communities throughout the country with minimal organizational oversight by automatically generating and geotagging content. This will function similarly to games like Pokemon Go and Foursquare, which can be played in any community, anywhere in the country. We will continue implementing city-based games throughout 2021 while this platform is developed with the goal of launching nationwide three years from now, in 2022.

This is an early-stage project with extraordinary potential to transform the field of grassroots organizing, but it is fragile.

First, as my Master’s thesis project at MIT, Forward has primarily been self-funded, and I soon need to begin repaying the student loans that enabled it to be developed.

Second, I must take Forward beyond its scrappy origins in academia by building a robust team. I have identified potential team members for most roles that will be required in the next year, but no one can afford to contribute significant time to the project without pay. Although I had the technical capacity to build this summer’s pilot myself, the most important team member I am still missing is a CTO, which will be crucial to identify in the next few months so we can make decisions about the technical direction of this project.

I’m relying on this summer’s pilot to achieve proof of concept. Afterward, I’ll seek formal commitments from advisors and team members that have already expressed interest in joining the project before launching a seed round in fall of 2019.

• 1 full-time volunteer
• 15 volunteer advisors, <part-time
• 24+ student volunteers

Libby Falck has 17 years of experience in social entrepreneurship, education, and game design. She was previously the founder of ChangeX Education, a co-founder of IDEAco, an Education Consultant at Autodesk, and the lead creator of the K-12 design thinking curriculum the City X Project, which is used in over 75 countries. Her strengths are in strategic planning, partnership development, user research, and educational game design. Forward is based on Libby’s Master’s thesis at MIT.

Game development has further benefited from the guidance of Libby’s thesis advisors, educational game designer Scot Osterweil and social movement scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock.

Foundational research for this project took place within theComparative Media Studies Master's program at MIT.

Additional research and programmatic partners have included:

• City of Appleton, WI
• Appleton Downtown, Inc.
• Boys and Girls Club of the Fox Valley
• Appleton Public Library
• Menasha Public Library
• Wautoma Public Library
• Neenah High School Launch Leaders program
• League of Women Voters, Appleton Chapter
• Wisconsin United to Amend

Advisors include mentors from the following organizations:

• MIT Sandbox Fund
• MIT PKG Center of Public Service
• BU Law Clinic
• MIT Center for Civic Media

In a marketing ecosystem in which both global brands and local businesses are increasingly recognizing the value of alignment with social causes, we believe Forward can ethically employ the revenue models of for-profit platforms like Facebook to convert its own user engagement into funding. 

We are testing the following long-term revenue streams:

1. Listing Fees | Organizations pay a fee to list Missions on the platform for the Forward community to engage with. Missions are calls to action that invite players to create playful, arts-based public experiences that deliver messages for organizations.
2. Contests | Organizations can create “bounties” as prizes for players who get the most tractions with their creative campaigns. Forward takes a transaction fee on each bounty.
3. Sponsorship | Mission-aligned businesses can increase visibility by sponsoring bounties. 
4. Crowdfunding | Players with the resources to do so can also sponsor bounties to drive more engaged with Missions they care about. 
5. Marketplace | Players can sell the movement-related art and other merchandise created for Missions directly to other players. 
6. Data | The Forward player community may vote to sell data collected within the platform to mission-aligned partners.

Our idea is to form a benefit corporation with a seed round led by the national nonprofit and advocacy organizations that stand to benefit most from the platform’s creation. In return for small investments, these organizations will become voting members and partial owners of the platform. Furthermore, 10% of profits would be returned to the player community in the form of arts grants and prizes. My goal is to match these seed round investments with foundational support to raise a budget for our first two years of operation by the end of 2019.

Additional short-term monetization will begin in 2020 with the sale of a white-labeled platform with packaged training to cities, community foundations, and coalitions of local organizations within cities. The long-term revenue streams described in the previous response are based on a platform model designed to connect activists and organizations, at scale.

I'm applying to Solve for the opportunity to launch the Forward Seed Round, which uses a unique coalition-based approach to fundraising that seeks to include a wide range of stakeholders in ownership and governance of the Forward platform (potentially including other Solver teams). I additionally hope exposure through Solve will lead to the growth of our two advisory boards, which will be taking shape throughout summer/fall of this year, and to meeting key team members.

The Forward Seed Round seeks to share governance and ownership of the Forward platform with a coalition of advocacy organizations seeking to promote local democratic participation in America. These organizations can fall into four categories: Justice & Democracy, Health & Wellbeing, Education & Opportunity, and Environment & Climate.

Ideal partners for the Forward Seed round include:

• 350.org
• Represent.Us
• Sierra Club
• League of Women Voters
• ACLU
• Organizing for America
• MoveOn.org
• No Labels
• Third Way
• The Climate Project
• Everytown for Gun Safety
• Climate Action Network
• World Health Organization
• American Cancer Society
• American Heart Association
• Many, many more...

Introductions to the following funders for grants that match the investments of these nonprofits would also be helpful:

• Omidyar Network
• Democracy Fund
• Knight Foundation
• National Endowment for Democracy
• Joyce Foundation

The Morgridge Family Foundation prize would enable our team to hire a consultant responsible for on boarding MFF partners onto the Forward platform in preparation for launching next year's series of city-based game pilots. This will increase exposure for these partners in every city where we run the game. We will additionally use a portion of the prize to sponsor a game in a city chosen by the foundation.