Give City: Wieden + Kennedy New York Responds To PSFK Future Of Health Report

Give City: Using the power of social gaming to make giving more interesting & fun.

It’s no secret that social online games have become an important and enduring part of our online lives – from the classics like World of Warcraft (where, according to Institute for the Future’s Jane McGonigal, gamers have spent a collective 5.9 million years playing), to the more recent mainstream games like Farmville and Social City. But for all the time and attention we give to the problems within these virtual worlds, we haven’t even scratched the surface for ways to harness this collective energy for good in the real world. Social gaming represents an entirely new paradigm for giving.

Let’s create an entertaining online environment that provides you and your social network with a friendly, competitive playing field for solving real problems, donating and doing good in very specific ways.

Give City is a social online “game” that visualizes contributions to real communities with real needs on a world map that can then be shared and compared with friends. It’s already a model that millions of people are familiar with in games such as Social City, where people save their virtual money to buy virtual things for virtual people to make money to buy more virtual things. So it doesn’t require a behavioral shift to just make it real and make it matter.

Multiple levels of detail on the Give City world map will reveal different levels of specific need as you zoom in closer and closer. Updates from Community Health Workers on specific needs for supplies, devices and vaccinations can put these location-specific needs on the map. It can also help tell the real stories of the history of each village, current events, the number of people suffering from different diseases, access to drinking water, etc. Putting this kind of education into a pastime can be a simple way to get the most important messages across.

Your donations become status updates with a link, providing your friends with a way to support and “compete” as well. Networks of friends can engage in healthy competition, encouraging one another to give more while spreading awareness with each donation. You can also raise more donating dollars by interacting with participating brands: watch ads, rate videos, create content and earn donation credits to spend where you’d like.

As a modern culture, we spend countless hours online in a perpetual and indirect state of connection. We read status updates, we create public/private messages and we send IMs. We raise cartoon crops, exchange gifts and share pictures. Being a part of these networks is a powerful thing, and there’s no question about it. Let’s create ways to leverage this power for a charitable cause, and build an interface that makes a real connection and a real impact.

PSFK’s Future of Health Report shines a light on innovation occurring within the health and wellness space around the world. This document brings together both literal and lateral inspiration to provide a framework within which businesses can begin to contemplate the issues facing UNICEF and community health workers. These issues include limited resources, technological constraints, lack of health education, and limited access to timely and relevant health and wellness information.

In an effort to start this exciting conversation, PSFK challenged advertising and design agencies from around the world to react to the Future of Health report. They were tasked with developing concepts in the form of products, services or communications that addressed one or more of the needs set forth by UNICEF. The end result of this initial phase of ideation is more than 40 innovative concepts.

The following ideas are from Wieden + Kennedy New York. The agency has responded with three ideas: two products and a service. The full response is available for download on request here.

PSFK presents the Future Of Health Report for UNICEF