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The biggest challenge for Creative Citizen is helping people to realize that going green “is realistic and beneficial…rather than a sacrifice.”
We’ve tracked the progress of Creative Citizen from its private beta to its recent launch. The green wiki platform has generated significant buzz on green and tech blogs, popping up on Mashable and VentureBeat among others. We’ve kept in touch with co-founders Scott Badenoch (CEO) and Argam DerHartunian (CIO) throughout.
The pair recently graduated from Pepperdine Law School, but typical lawyers they are not. They are entrepreneurs dedicated to sustainability, which is exactly the type of people who will make a big difference.
How did Creative Citizen come about? What’s the backstory?
Argam and I were in law school, brainstorming ideas for our next business venture, when I had a revelation after searching for ways to go green online. I spent hours and hours and found nothing but contradictory information and white noise. At the end of the day, I had no new concrete information to act on and a great deal of frustration. This was our aha moment: there needed to be a community-driven website to aggregate and disseminate the world’s environmental information. With the successes of Wikipedia and social networks, we realized this was achievable with the right platform.
What is the problem and how is Creative Citizen the solution?
The problem is that people don’t know what to do in their daily lives to reduce their ecological impact. While awareness of the environmental problems facing us has grown tremendously due to movies like An Inconvenient Truth and The Eleventh Hour, people still are unsure how they can truly make an impact on such a global problem.
Creative Citizen is the solution because we focus on actions that people can immediately incorporate into their lives. We show the tangible effects in terms of waste, water, energy, emissions and money. People will come to realize that these solutions, especially when aggregated among the community as a whole, truly have global impacts. Creative Citizen allows people to learn about solutions for eco-friendly living and provide feedback, edits, links and media to help the community expand our knowledge base. We also help people to weed out the companies who are greenwashing from the ones that are genuinely providing environmentally friendly products or services.
Our wiki platform allows the solutions to evolve, so we can embrace the ever-moving target that is sustainability. Simple things like turning off the water while brushing your teeth are no-brainers, but the vast majority of green is actually gray. It’s an evolutionary base of knowledge.
What are Creative Solutions? How do they work?
Creative Solutions are any habit, product, or service that yields environmental savings. This can be anything from unplugging your appliances when not in use to installing wind turbines on your home and everything in between. All of the solutions are user generated by our community, and we currently have over 500 of them. The quality and depth of each solution improves as more people adopt the solutions and provide feedback.
Each solution displays the yearly savings in terms of waste, water, emissions, energy, and money. This way people can see how much these solutions actually save in real terms. Our wiki functionally also allows each solution to be perpetually improved. This includes both the solution itself and its effects.
How accurate are the “Personal CC Effects”? Is there a way to reconcile what someone may have already done?
The personal CC effect is as accurate as the community makes it. In other words, the data given is user generated, and the more accurate information that is brought in from scientific reports, studies and the news, the more accurate the effects will be for the Creative Solutions.
What’s the next step in terms of technology and features?
We have many extremely useful features coming out in the next few months. Our public beta has allowed us to hear the community’s feedback and improve our service. One feature that is on the horizon is our comprehensive taxonomy, where people can find Creative Solutions based on certain categories. We will also be improving the communication tools within the site and creating widgets where people can host their Greenage, Personal CC Effect, and Creative Solutions on their MySpace, Facebook, blogs, and dashboard.
We will also improve the user interface in several ways in the near term. The rest of our new features we’d rather wait to tell you when they launch…but they are very exciting.
What’s the revenue model and how does it work?
Our revenue model is predominantly based on contextual advertising and sponsored solutions. Companies can purchase real estate on the site to get more impressions on the site and our search results. Then the community has the opportunity to weigh in the value of the products and services that companies are sponsoring. We will also be releasing reports about the green industry as a whole, given the findings of the community.
What are your biggest hurdles or challenges?
Our biggest hurdle is people’s actual adoption of the solutions. Again, while there is massive awareness of the environmental problems at hand, this is a still a big gap to action. We don’t want people to act out of guilt but rather because they understand the facts and truly believe in the solutions. So the biggest hurdle is people recognizing that green is not a sacrifice but is really about living a better, healthier, more effective lifestyle with the resources available to them. And as a result, they do great things for the health of our environment.
Photo: Badenoch (left), DerHartunian (right)
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3 responses so far ↓
1 The Universal Animation of 350.org | Max Gladwell // Jul 28, 2008 at 5:47 pm
[...] to an article written today by Scott Badenoch in ecoTimes, this “is based on the research of leading climatologist Jim Hansen of NASA, who [...]
2 Creative Citizen - Scott Badenoch | Melodies in Marketing // Aug 27, 2008 at 9:39 am
[...] also: 7 Questions for Creative Citizen CEO Scott Badenoch Share with: [...]
3 wismislek // Oct 6, 2008 at 10:39 am
thats for sure, guy
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