After two months, we ask you if you completed your pledge or not. It’s a simple sliding scale, from “totally nailed it” to “oops! I completely failed”.

You can respond either by clicking the link in the “how did you do?” email that you’ll receive at the end of the pledge period, or by logging in and following the link on your profile page.

If you don't answer, we have to assume you didn't do it (brutal, but fair).

Of course, you could lie, we wouldn't know. But your colleagues, friends or family probably would, and you’re making your commitment to them, not to us. They will probably have a good idea if you’re being honest about your actions.

A bit of gentle peer pressure goes a long way…

Unfortunately not. At the moment it's not possible to go back and edit your pledges - but it is something we are working on for the future!

You tell us. After two months you’ll be asked to return to the site to confirm how you got on; at that stage you can simply say that you weren’t able to complete it. If that’s the case, your carbon savings won’t be added to your campaign's total.

Lots of people don’t complete the actions, a lot of them are easier said than done, so there’s no need to feel bad about it. We’d love to hear what got in the way and made it tough though - it's super useful to know that stuff.

Two months.

Why two months? We can’t ask you for a life-long commitment upfront - that would scare most sane people right off. Instead, we ask you to try yourchosen Do Action for two months.

Two months is a nice amount of time – it’s short enough not to be too intimidating, but it’s long enough for you to get a true taste of the Do Action, and hopefully to form long lasting habits. Which is obviously our ultimate goal.

It’s also just about long enough to have a reasonable impact on its own.

Not too many. We’ll send a five in total: four to make sure the process runs smoothly and that you don’t forget what you’d pledged to do, and one at the end of the two months asking you to let us know how you got on.

This is part of the pledge service, so I'm afraid the only way to unsubscribe is for us to delete your pledge. Contact us if you'd like us to do that. See our privacy policy for more info.

We will also send fortnightly Do Action of the Fortnight emails to members of our mailing list - you can subscribe to that here.

Alone, very little. But together, they really do add up to make a big difference. Cliche, but true.

Each pledge makes a very real contribution towards that campaign's target - you can see that on the campaign page itself.

Within organisations, each of their campaigns then combine to form an even more meaningful impact. And if you then combine all the doers of Do Nation together, as we grow and grow, the difference could become pretty staggering.

42% of the UK’s carbon emissions are a result of individual’s actions, at home and in travel. That means that our actions, collectively, influence almost half of the nations carbon. So together we could make a pretty big difference…

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to complete their pledge so we’ve done the research for you and, where appropriate, recommended some good, reliable and truly green products that can help you out.

For some referrals, we receive a small commission, which we feed back into developing and improving Do Nation.

We have developed a clear affiliate selection policy to enable us to maintain our values and promote the best products possible, that truly help to deliver on sustainable living. If you have any queries, concerns, or feedback on any of our affiliates, please drop us a line.

Initially, we came up with a long list of possible Do Actions through literature research and a string of brainstorming sessions with a team of volunteers.

We wanted to build a selection that would appeal to a broad range of people, whether they own a palace or live in student digs; drive a Porsche or are welded to their bike; are up for a challenge or just want to make a quick one-off contribution.

We were also careful to make sure they really did have all-round environmental benefits, as well as helping boost people’s finances and health if possible.

Over time, we are adding to this list through requests and suggestions from users like you. We're even broadening out to include a wider range of sustainability impacts.

So please send us your suggestions!

No, I’m afraid not. It makes consistent impact measurement very difficult, and it also makes it harder for you to see how many people are doing the same action as you. We always think it’s nice to see that, so you don’t feel so alone.

But if there’s something that you think should be up there then let us know and we’ll add it to our wishlist.

CO2 is the currency of Do Nation, not the soul.

We also measure waste and water savings, although this impact data is only available through professional programmes, on the programme admin’s impact dashboards.

We believe in a lot more than just carbon, water and waste though. We're strong advocates of a more holistic view of sustainability: health, wellbeing, community, biodiversity, pollution - all of it matters.

Hopefully that’s made clear through the site. And one day, we might even have metrics for these too...

With the help of ERM. For each Do Action there are a few short questions that allow us to calculate the difference between the carbon emissions created by the existing and pledged behaviours. Clearly there are a few (very sound) assumptions involved, and the numbers are more indicative of scale of impact than anything else.

It’s not designed to give you a robust and all-encompassing carbon footprint report, just an indication of the impact each Do Action could have. We used national averages where appropriate and made a few other reasonable assumptions to help make the pledging process as straightforward as possible. Some of these are:

• People do the Do Actions over the full two months (this gets adjusted when they return to confirm how they got on, depending on how they did)
• When single pledge actions have a long-term impact, their savings are calculated for the most appropriate period (e.g. three years’ worth of savings from Soak in the sun, Sun power, and Clean your bills are counted).
• An emission factor of 0.4836 CO₂ per kWh of grid electricity (Defra conversion factors 2013) is used.
• A fuel price conversion factor of 0.16 £/kWh of electricity (Act on CO₂ July 2009) was used.
• The average household has 2.34 occupants.

Some Do Actions have no obvious or calculable carbon saving, yet we have decided to include them anyway because they are worthwhile actions that have a strong positive impact elsewhere. Sustainability isn't only about climate change, after all.

However, our system was designed to block any pledges with 0 kgCO2 carbon savings, as we are all about encouraging new actions and additional impact. In order to overcome this, we have given actions that have a strong but non-carbon impact a negligible saving of 1 kg CO₂. Sure, it's not ideal, but we think it's a pragmatic work around for now. One day, we'd like to have a full range of impact metrics to measure actions by. Watch this space...

We're currently running a closed pilot with a handful of schools, but are looking to open this up to more schools soon.

Please register interest for your school here.

It can take as little as two minutes to get a campaign up and running on Do Nation.

As with any good campaign, the bit that takes most time is the planning and preparation. Deciding when you’re going to launch it, who you’re going to target, how you're going to promote it, etc. Timing for that mainly depends on the size and structure of your team.

That depends on your aims, size, and how you plan to use Do Nation.

We tend to recommend raising pledges in short, sharp bursts of 2 weeks to 1 month. This allows you to have a focused burst of communications to promote the programme and get people on board.

Users then do their pledged actions for 2 months, supported by communications from us about their pledges.

In month 3, they begin to confirm how they got on, meaning you can see the impact tot up.

That's why we recommend a minimum subscription of 3 months.

Once the first wave of pledges is completed, many organisations launch another wave, getting employees to record new pledges and start the cycle again. Perhaps with a different theme and a new seasonal range of Do Actions on offer.

The dates don’t affect the functionality of your campaign at all; they’re purely for descriptive purposes. People can still record pledges on your campaign after the end date.

The end date is optional, but it’s good for creating a sense of urgency, encouraging people to get on and record their pledges now.

Yes. Once published, you’ll be able to return and edit your campaign later. Just go to the page that you want to edit and there should be an ‘edit campaign’ button in the menu on the left.

For more info, see How do I edit a campaign or Editing your list of Do Actions.

Team competition can really motivate people to get behind your Do Nation campaign.

Within schools, teams are often set up by year group, class, or house.

This allows each year or house to really 'own' their impact, and strengthens the sense of community that Do Nation can help to build.

It's well worth assigning a team leader to each, getting them excited about the programme, and making them an editor of their team's campaign page (see below for how to do this).

Assigning team leaders is highly recommended. Delegating responsibility for customising team campaign pages and promoting the campaign internally is a great idea for several reasons:

1. It lightens the load on your shoulders, allowing you to focus on the really important stuff.
2. Team leaders can personalise campaigns more than you could, knowing which strings to pull to get key players from their team on board.
3. If team leaders have ownership of the campaign pages themselves, they’ll put more effort into promoting them internally. They’re probably best placed to get staff, parents, and students on the ground involved too.
4. It helps to develop leadership skills amongst team leaders – a great bonus point. For this reason, it can be good to assign students as team leaders too.

All in all, team leaders are a great recipe for engagement, as our clients show time and time again.

You can give any user editor controls for specific campaign pages. This is ideal for delegating responsibility to team leaders or for simply sharing control with your colleagues.

Here’s how:

1. Make sure all the people you want to add as an editor already have accounts on Do Nation. You can add them through your user management portal or ask them to sign up here if not.
2. Go to the campaign page you want to add an editor to (make sure you’re logged in).
3. Select controls > editors on the admin panel on the left, and add the email address of the person you want to make an editor. Make sure it's all lower case.
4. They’ll receive an email notifying them that they’ve been given editor rights, including a link to the page.
5. Repeat for each team’s campaign page.

What permissions do Campaign editors have?

• Edit the banner image
• Edit description text
• Edit the priority Do Actions
• Add new editors
• Receive weekly update emails

They will NOT be able to:

• Edit other campaign pages
• Edit your organisation’s information and logo
• Add new teams or remove old ones
• View the impact dashboards
• Edit the overall list of Do Actions
• Manage your organisations users or subscription

If you’d like to give them these additional controls, you’ll need to add them as a business admin - contact us to do that.

Before you create your leaderboard, you must create separate campaign pages for each of your teams.

My advice would be to keep team campaigns simple and use the standard content to begin with, then delegate editor rights to each team leader. They can customise them more heavily themselves if they so wish.

Here’s how you set up your leaderboard, from start to finish:

1. Create your first campaign for your organisation, this will also create your organisation profile page.
2. From the organisation page, click Create > Campaign in the left hand menu bar. You’ll then be able to create another campaign. Complete information and click create. You’ll then be taken to the new campaign page.
3. If you want to add a team leader as editor of this campaign, click Editors on the left menu (under Controls) and follow instructions.
4. Head back to the organisation page (click the logo) and repeat steps 2 & 3 for each team.
5. When you’ve created all your team's campaigns, click Create > Leaderboard from the organisation page and fill in the form. Remember you can save it now and return to edit it all later.

Here is an outline of the leaderboard form:

Leaderboard name: this should be the umbrella name for the series of campaigns, e.g. “[organisation name]’s Do Nation challenge”.

Description: optional, but a good opportunity to explain a bit about what you’re doing and why you want people to get involved, plus where visitors can find more information.

Default ordering: leaderboards can be sorted by a range of metrics. Pick the metric that will become your default when people land on the page. Remember you can edit it at any time.

Hit create and you’re ready to release the starting gun!

If you want to add rounds to your leaderboard, refreshing the competition every through months, just drop us a line.

Absolutely. The most recent one will be dominant on your organisation page, with older campaigns sitting below it.

Campaigns can appear on more than one leaderboard at once.

Updating Priority Do Actions:

These are up to five Do Actions that are highlighted on your campaign page, and are listed above all others in on the pledge forms.

Pro and Plus users can edit the priority Do Actions at any time to reflect their current priorities. This can either be done campaign-by-campaign, useful if each team has different needs, or for all campaigns within a leaderboard at once.

Update a single campaign's Do Actions: campaign editors have permission to do this.

Head to the campaign page and in the left hand editor controls menu, click Update Do Actions. Select which Do Actions you’d like to be prioritised and hit ‘confirm’.

Bulk update: only organisation admins have permission to do this.

Head to the leaderboard page (from your organisation page, click the title above the leaderboard), and click Update Do Actions in the left hand admin control bar. Select which Do Actions you’d like to be prioritised and hit ‘confirm’.

While the Do Nation platform takes a lot of the weight of your behaviour change campaigns off your shoulders, there’s one thing we can’t do for you. That’s promoting your campaign.

Your role is to get people to your campaign, we can then take them from there. There are a few things to think about when it comes to promoting your campaign:

1. Who are you aiming to target? Perhaps break this down into sub groups, so you can really tailor your messaging.
2. What’s your aim from the campaign? E.g. are you going for maximum carbon savings, or are you more concerned about the number of people you engage? How many pledges would you like to raise? Typically, 40 - 60% of employees take part, making around 3 pledges each.
3. What other initiatives are going on that you could tie into? Either in the wider world or within your organisation.
4. What communications channels are available to you? We’d always recommend using a mixture of the below.

• Email
• Face to face through team meetings and all-staff presentations
• Internal media - Slack, Yammer etc.
• Your intranet or blog (we’ve built some great widgets to help with this)
• Offline materials – postcards, stickers, reusable bottles and more. See our brochure for more info.
• Good old posters
• Videos and photos to bring your programme to life.

For more tips, check out our Guide and Checklist for running a Do Nation campaign.

We can help you to design a kick-ass comms plan around your campaign, just drop us a line for more info on our bolt-on support packages.

We’ll be adding more tips and advice to our blog soon, so keep an eye on it.

By default the only the creator of a campaign has permission to edit it. They may add people as Campaign Editors on a campaign-by-campaign basis.

Once you've been made a Campaign Editor, when you go to your campaign page you'll see a dark blue menu on the left of the page. Within it, you have the option to:

1. Edit the campaign information, including the banner image, the title, and the description of the campaign or team.
2. Edit the Priority Do Actions so that they match your specific campaign's priorities at that time.
3. Add other editors to help share or hand over the responsibility.

Each of these should be fairly self explanatory.

You will also find a 'Share' section which has all sorts of useful tools to help you share your campaign more widely.

There are four levels of impact measurement:

Headline impact stats

Four key impact stats are publicly displayed on campaign pages, whether on a paid plan or not. They show:

1. Carbon pledged - this is based on the potential savings over the two month pledge period
2. Number of pledges made
3. A stat to bring your pledged carbon saving to life
4. Confirmed annual savings - this is based on how people say they did at the end of two months, and whether they plan to carry on. It will read 0 for the first two months, and then often rises above the ‘carbon pledged’ value, as it includes a whole year's worth of savings.

Impact dashboards

Organisation admins on paid subscriptions can access more detailed impact dashboards. Simply head to the organisation page and find the various dashboards listed on the left hand menu. They include data and graphs covering:

1. The number of pledges vs time
2. The number of people pledging
3. Percentage of pledges completed
4. Popularity of different Do Actions
5. Carbon saved by each Do Action
6. Water, waste, and carbon pledged and confirmed
7. Chickens worth of meat saved through Veg out, or Mt Everests’ climbed through Step up, for example.

CSV file of pledge data

We can send this to Plus clients on request, up to once a month. This gives them unlimited ability to geek out on analysing and assessing their impact.

Deeper impact survey

After confirming their pledge, users are invited to fill in a deeper impact survey, covering things like impact on health, wellbeing, and pride in the organisation.

We send this to Plus clients every six months.

You can edit the name, description, teams, and default order of a leaderboard at any time.

First, get yourself to the leaderboard page. You can find it through the search, or on your organisation page. On your organisation page, the leaderboard title links to the dedicated leaderboard page (I know - it's not that intuitive, we're working on it).

Once on the leaderboard page, just click "edit leaderboard". It should then be fairly self explanatory.

Plus clients can add rounds to refresh their leaderboards at any time. We’d recommend doing this for each new discrete wave of promotion that you do to raise pledges, to level the playing field again.

For example, one client was focusing their campaigns on four themes throughout the year – the first quarter was on energy, the second on travel, the third on waste and the final one on food. They created four corresponding rounds on their leaderboard, meaning that users could sort the teams based on how many pledges they had raised during that quarter.

This stops teams that are lagging at the bottom of the leaderboard getting left behind for too long, having the chance to catch up can be very motivating.

We haven’t yet developed the interface for you to manage rounds yourself, but drop us a line and we’ll sort it out for you.

Yes, people will continue to be able to pledge after the campaign end date, if you gave your campaigns an end date.

If you are on a paid plan, once your subscription ends it’ll no longer be possible to pledge towards your campaigns. Instead, anyone who tries will have their pledges moved over to our central community page. They’ll still be able to take action, but it just won’t be added to your organisation’s impact.

Until a pledge has been completed, we can’t confirm how much carbon has been saved by it.

Each pledge lasts two months (short enough not to be intimidating, long enough to form lasting habits). At the end of this time, your supporters will be sent an email asking them to confirm how they got on. At this stage, based on their response, "Confirmed CO₂" will be calculated and published on your campaign and organisation pages.

If they don’t return to confirm how they did, we’ll have to assume that they failed and leave their confirmed savings as 0 kg CO₂. Brutal, but important for our credibility.

We always recommend downloading the newest version of your browser for the best experience on Do Nation. We have designed and tested our site on the following browsers:

Desktop

The following desktop browsers are officially supported:

• Google Chrome - the latest version and one previous
• Firefox - the latest version and one previous
• Safari - the latest version and one previous
• Edge - the latest version and one previous
• IE11

Tablet and Mobile

The pledging experience is designed to be mobile responsive, and it should work fine on most tablet and mobile browsers, however it is not yet officially supported. We advise creating and editing campaigns from a desktop. If you have any particular issues please do report them to us via our contact form.

I want to use a browser that isn't supported

If you are interested in using Do Nation in your organisation but run a browser that isn't officially supported please get in touch and we'll see what we can do.

There are a few different pages for your activity on Do Nation. Here’s an outline to help you get settled in. We’re aiming to make it more and more intuitive over time - we really shouldn’t need to tell you this stuff. But for now please have patience and feel free to make any recommendations.

Personal user hub:

Purpose: This is you. It lists your pledges, campaigns you’ve created personally, and organisations you’re a part of. From here you can update your contact details and report back on how you got on with your pledge.

Where you find it: the avatar on the top right of the site, which appears by your name when logged in.

Organisation page

Purpose: To allow programme managers to manage their programmes. From here organisation admins can update organisation details, subscription info, manage users, create new campaigns, and view impact dashboards. It also lists all your campaigns and leaderboards.

Where you find it: hover over your avatar on the top right and you should see your organisation listed in the drop down.

Leaderboard page:

Purpose: To create a bit of friendly competition, and a sense of working together as a wider community. Programme managers can edit leaderboards from here too.

Where you find it: On your organisation page, hit the title above the leaderboard and it’ll take you to its dedicated page.

Campaign pages:

Purpose: To act as the hub for communities of people taking action together. From here you can make a pledge, see who else has pledged, and see the total impact you’ve achieved together. Organisations can create one of these for each team.

Where you find them: The bottom of your organisation page. If you have a leaderboard, they will be listed within this. If you don’t, then your campaigns will simply be listed as tiles at the base of your organisation page.

Do Action pages:

Purpose: provide more information, inspiration, and advice on each action to users.

Where you find them: any time a Do Action is mentioned in a list of pledges, it should link to its Do Action page.

You can also find any of the pages above by searching for them in the search bar at the top of all pages.

Our first answer to this is that contrary to popular belief, the scientists rarely dispute the answer: 97% of climatologists believe that human activity is a significant contributing factor to climate change. Sure, it might not be the only factor, but it’s the one that we can control. Our second answer involves a touch of high school science and a dose of intuition:

Over the past 300,000,000 years plants have been using the sun’s energy to trap carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into plant tissue.
In turn, these plants die, rot, and gradually (over millennia of geological processing) this carbon is locked tightly away as fossil fuels deep under the Earth’s surface.
In the course of a single generation we are likely to have exploited and burnt almost the entirety of these fossil fuel reserves. 300,000,000 years of natural investment, squandered in a mere 100 years.

Surely that’s got to have an impact on nature’s finely balanced systems? So let’s ask that question again: are humans causing climate change? Intuition tells me there’s a pretty good chance we are…
This isn’t the place to go into it – but you can read more on the debate through the Energy Saving Trust or Skeptical Science.

With 96% of climatologists believing that mean global temperatures are rising, I think we can safely say that there is a scientific consensus on the matter.

And we’re beginning to see it with our own eyes – we can’t escape the photos of melting ice caps, catastrophic floods, bush fires, droughts, and hurricanes. They’re happening more and more often, and nearer and nearer to home.

Yes, we do. We have to in order to follow up and allow you to confirm how you did with your pledges.

We don’t share them with any third parties, unless you explicitly opt in to sharing with a Do Action sponsor or campaign owner.

Check out our privacy policy.

Simply drop us a line and we'll remove your account details for you.

NB if you have any active pledges when we delete your account, you will no longer be able to confirm how you got on and so we’ll have to assume you didn’t manage to complete them.