Online community Do the Green Thing promotes seven easy and enjoyable things that anyone can do to lead a greener life, from walking or cycling rather than using a car, to eating meat less often.
The website is home to a wealth of inspiring videos and stories submitted by green activists from more than 200 countries around the world. Together, members of the community have saved almost 12,500 tonnes of CO2.
As part of the Big Green Challenge Plus, the Green Thing team is developing a network of evangelists who can help to spread the site's videos, stories and other content to a wider audience. Project manager Andrew Sleigh explains the aims of the network: "The Do the Green Thing website features lots of highly creative content that communicates pro-environmental behaviours in a really refreshing way, but we now want more people to access and use this content.
"Our network will bring together green evangelists who are already actively sharing our content, and give them the tools and support to reach more people and be even more effective in promoting green behaviour."
The first step is for the project team to understand the information needs of green evangelists and to find out what kind of network would work best for them.
"We're conducting market research and organising a number of focus groups to explore questions such as what types of content people want and the contexts they want to use it in. For example, a university student making a presentation to his class could be looking for a really inspirational video, while a community activist might want something fun and informal to share with friends in a social setting," says Andrew.
"We're also interested in knowing whether green evangelists want to use our resources mainly online or offline and whether they'd like to be part of a formal network with meetings in real life, or part of a looser online network."
The project team will be developing and launching the Green Thing evangelist network during 2010 and the individuals involved in the research focus groups will become its first members. "Our ultimate aim is to empower this core network of evangelists to engage 500,000 people in doing the green thing," comments Andrew.
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