The Challenge - Community Climate Engagement

2018

The city of Duluth, Minnesota adopted a climate action plan goal of reducing City emissions by 80% by 2050 to combat climate change. City controlled municipal emissions account for only 4% of community-wide emissions though.
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2020

The Duluth community, led by Ecolibrium3, drafted the Duluth Citizens’ Climate Action Plan to enable the city’s goal community-wide. The Plan contains actions for individual residents to lessen their eco-footprint, advocate for consumer choices, and states a goal of a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030.

The community had yet to learn about and implement steps from Duluth Citizens’ Climate Action Plan.

​The challenge emerged: how can we easily engage our residents in their daily lives with climate actions from the plan?

Fox21 Duluth - GetGreen Duluth launch

Duluth News Tribune - App to Fight Climate Change

Duluth Reader - Taking Climate Action Together

The Solution - GetGreen Duluth

2022
GetGreenDuluth was developed in collaboration between GetGreen, Ecolibrium3, and Grid Catalyst to meet the shared goal of engaging more Duluth residents in taking climate-positive actions -  an inviting, easy and fun mobile application implementation.

For Duluth, this meant adapting actions from the Duluth Citizens' Climate Action Plan into the available catalog of actions in the GetGreen app before the launch, adding in customized goals and badges for Duluth residents, and creating social elements from leaderboards to contests to allow residents to see their progress.

GetGreenDuluth currently features more than 150 actions from the Duluth Citizens' Climate Action Plan, plus hundreds more from the standard GetGreen catalog, which continues to grow. Duluth residents download the app, take sustainable actions that directly benefit themselves and the community, and participate in a meaningful, measured way. 
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The partnership developed communication plans to spread awareness of the app. This included working with local environmental and  municipal and higher education partners, planning in-person events and leveraging local print, TV and social media.

Actions, leaderboards, goals and user progress from GetGreen Duluth

The Results - Over 3,000 actions completed

The six month program started quickly with strong early adoption, driven by community, municipal, and coordinated media events. In the first week, the program reached 25% of the six month user engagement, action and emissions reductions targets.  The results below reflect the six-month usage and engagement:

November 2022-May 2023
Overall pilot results:  316 users engaged, and approximately 10 times (1000%) user increase in engagement from Duluth Citizens’ Climate Action Plan  website-based platform.

Users completed over 3,600 actions, exceeding the project goal by 44%

Users earned over 9,000 leaves, exceeding the project goal by 80%

Users’ Greenhouse Gas emissions reduction of 90,000 lbs CO2E (1 leaf = 10 lbs of averted CO2E emissions)
For six months of GetGreenDuluth use, 45 tons of GHG were avoided by 300+ people

Other results were realized beyond Energy Efficiency/greenhouse gas emissions reductions, actions from the Climate Action Plan put into practice! Ecolibrium3 saw an an overall community wide 200% increase in climate advocacy and engagement reach-outs from residents. 

GetGreen and Ecolibrium3 ran multiple user contests during the program, rewarding users who earned the most leaves or completed targeted goals around local climate education and advocacy or completing specific actions (like signing up for a free home energy audit). The contests were particularly effective at driving high levels of user engagement.

Local merchants and businesses were a key part of the program, with GetGreen directing sustainability minded users to those businesses. Support from those businesses and others provided some contest rewards to users and help to fund the creation of the LNPK micro-mobility center, providing electrified and other transportation to local residents.