Are you looking for real-world inspiration to supercharge your health gamification projects? This Series 3 Episode 10 of Health Points is a must-listen for anyone passionate about designing impactful, inclusive, and sustainable health interventions. We sit down with Stephen McPeake, founder of Civic Dollars, to explore how a simple idea—rewarding time spent outdoors—has evolved into an award-winning, globally recognized platform that’s transforming communities, public health, and the very fabric of citizen engagement.
What Makes Civic Dollars Different?
Civic Dollars isn’t just another step-counting app. Stephen’s journey began with a desire to make cities smarter and more responsive to citizen needs. What started as a way to report local issues grew into a vision for incentivizing healthy behaviors, without increasing health or wealth inequalities. Unlike many programs that reward only the fittest or wealthiest, Civic Dollars is radically inclusive: anyone can earn rewards simply by spending time in parks, whether they’re running, walking, or just sitting on a bench.
Key Takeaways for Health & Gamification Professionals
1. Designing for Inclusion and Equity
Stephen shares the critical insight that many health gamification schemes unintentionally widen health and wealth gaps. Civic Dollars flips the script by rewarding time spent outdoors, not just physical activity, making it accessible to people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. This approach is especially powerful for engaging older adults, people with mobility challenges, and underserved communities.
2. The Power of Localized, Meaningful Rewards
Forget generic incentives. Civic Dollars partners with local businesses, charities, and community groups to offer rewards that truly matter (like public transport vouchers, gym sessions, or even tools for community gardening projects). The platform’s flexibility allows rewards to be tailored to each community’s needs, driving deeper engagement and real-world impact.
3. Altruism as a Motivator
One of the most fascinating findings is the high rate of Civic Dollar donations to local groups which is sometimes over 40%. The ability to give back to one’s community is a powerful motivator, creating a virtuous cycle of engagement and social connection. This episode dives into how altruism can be harnessed as a core mechanic in gamified health interventions.
4. Data-Driven Iteration and Community Co-Design
Stephen’s story is a masterclass in agile development and user-centered design. From experimenting with IoT fobs to refining geofencing and privacy features, Civic Dollars has evolved through constant feedback, focus groups, and academic partnerships. The result? A platform that adapts to local cultures, seasons, and even tourism needs (like “cuddle a cow” rewards in Donegal or tree-planting for visitors).
5. Real-World Impact and Social Connection
The episode is packed with moving stories: an elderly woman overcoming loneliness, a father reconnecting with his son, and entire communities rallying around shared goals. Academic research backs up the impact, showing measurable improvements in health and wellbeing. Civic Dollars demonstrates how digital gamification can spark genuine, lasting social change.
What You’ll Learn
- How to design gamified health programs that are truly inclusive and equitable
- Why local context and community-driven rewards are key to sustained engagement
- The surprising role of altruism and group dynamics in motivating behavior change
- Practical lessons from scaling a health gamification platform across cities and countries
- How to use data, feedback, and partnerships to continually improve your interventions
Ready to Level Up Your Health Gamification Projects?
Whether you’re a public health professional, a gamification designer, or a community leader, this episode is packed with actionable insights and inspiration. Stephen’s journey with Civic Dollars is proof that with the right mix of technology, empathy, and community spirit, we can create healthier, happier, and more connected societies.
Tune in now to discover how you can apply these best practices to your own projects.
You can listen to this episode below:
Episode Transcript:
Ben
Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of Health Points where we talk about anything and everything gamification and health. And today we have Stephen from Civic Dollars. Stephen's been working in technology for 25 years and has spent the last 10 focusing on smart city solutions and citizen engagement technology, including the Report All app and in the last few years founding Civic Dollars. Civic Dollars is an award-winning community currency platform that is designed to improve public health by incentivising activity, by encouraging people to spend more time in parks and open spaces. With a vision to connect people with their local outdoor spaces, Stephen leads Civic Dollars in promoting healthier, happier, and more engaged communities through innovative, rewarding initiatives. Stephen, it's great to have you join today.
Stephen
Hey, thanks for having me, guys.
Ben
So it'd be great to start with the journey to creating Civic Dollars. How did it start? Where did the idea come from?
Stephen
If I take it right back, and as you mentioned, we've developed Report All initially back in 2011 with an idea to allow people to report problems very easily back to their councils or city authorities. And rather than just one app to report water issues, one app to report waste, one app to report rd issues, that I decided to have one app to report them all. So that's where we come up with Report All. And lucky enough, we got it picked up by a few of the councils here and people were reporting the usual stuff they don't like, dog fouling and litter and fly tipping and st lights that were out.
But whenever we were onboarding one in 2013, I came up with an idea that I'd love to reward people for reporting those problems back to the councils. So I bought civicdollars.com back then with an idea to tokenize or reward people for doing that. But I was still working at that stage and I didn't have the time, the money or the will to do another app. So just decided, like the 50 other domains I've bought over the years, I've decided to park it. And didn't do anything with it until probably the end of 2018, start of 2019, where Belfast wanted to become a smart city. So they put out smart city challenges around smart transport, smart buildings, smart recycling and active health. And I thought, God, maybe we could use civic dollars to do that.
The big push was to get people, particularly who were inactive, active, so they wanted something that would give them that encouragement or that nudge to do it. So back then, we'd done a scoping study looking at how to digitize community currencies and how to actually engage with users and get people outdoors more. And again, that was just a paper document and we were very lucky to get to be working with PWC, had their innovation team based out of Belfast and we got in touch with the director and he's been a great help and has still been one of my main mentors over the last lot of years.
And also we worked with Queen's University in Belfast, so they have a centre of excellence for public health. and the lady that runs that, Dr. Ruth Hunter, her research has been phenomenal and she was very, very great working with us and giving us all the insights that they were working with on. the PAL projects, which is physical activity and loyalty schemes, and when people will do something for a reward, and particularly looking at when they're going to do something for a reward, and then when they start to cheat for that reward. So trying to look at that sweet spot in the middle, a lot of it was psychological, which I never thought I'd be delving into.
But yeah, just as the scoping study was finished, Belfast launched their second smart city challenge called Amazing Spaces, where the remit was to get people outdoors into parks and open spaces more, and also to reduce the barriers to people visiting the parks, of which the main ones were anti-social behaviour, dog poo and litter. So everything sort of goes back to dog poo and litter for me with this tech.
So what we've done, we were lucky enough to win phase one of that project, and we lifted a bit of the engine out of report all, put it into civic dollars so people could report problems while they're in the park. And then we looked at how to actually, how are we going to get them in there, how are we going to encourage them to spend more time and to do it in the most inclusive way possible. Because of course, doing the research, we looked at the other solutions that were out there and how can we differ from them. And a lot of them were very activity based, that you had to do your 10,000 steps a day, do a couch to 5K, you had to cycle or swim to get those rewards on those systems. And then looked at the financial side as well, that if you could pay for, if you had the money to pay for health, private health insurance, that you could get your free coffees and discounts of cinema tickets and all those perks. But you had to be able to afford that in the start.
And my feeling, and I get not upset but frustrated when looking at that, because it was just increasing not only the health inequalities, but wealth inequalities as well. that if you're a fit, you could get the rewards. If you're wealthy, you could get the rewards. So we wanted something that would be approachable and usable by all. And that's where civic dollars came into it, that we wanted people just to spend time outdoors and earn one civic dollar for every 30 minutes that they spent in those parks and zones that we created. And we've done that by creating geo-fences. So we just drew a circle or a polygon around the park and assigned that as an earn zone. So you would earn one civic dollar for every 30 minutes you spent there with limitations built in so that nobody tried to abuse a system, of course. So most of them are limited to five per day. You can earn more if you go to a different park, but you can't do that on just sit in one park all day and fill your wallet.
And looking at the tech side of it, we initially looked at using IOT beacons and fobs that you would carry with you and it would check you in every time that you went into the park and every 25, 30 meters it would ping off another beacon. But it wasn't a scalable solution, especially with people losing fobs or the potential to actually set them under a tree and just leave them there and earn. earn their coin that way. So we decided against that and went purely mobile only and worked off GPS. And of course, doing like all the good tech companies at that stage, GDPR was absolutely massive. So it was built with that in mind with the privacy policies and terms and conditions and everything else.
But one of the main things we'd done was the ability that civic dollars would work, the app would work, but you weren't able to check in unless you walked into that geofence. And then the light went green and you could press the button and it had to be a user initiated check in that it didn't automatically check you in. You had to press that button to say I want to earn civic dollars and that gave us permission to ping the GPS, make sure they were in there. And then as they left the park, if they forgot to hit the stop button, they were being automatically checked out. So there's no active tracking outside of that zone.
But while they were in there, we had a very rich data source of entry and exit points and what direction they were going around and heat maps and congestion zones. Particularly, this was after COVID. So they were trying to, yes, encourage people to get outdoors more, but avoid the crowded areas. So we built a traffic light system into it as well. So what users could do with their civic dollars is redeem it for public transport, vouchers for swims and gym sessions at the local leisure centres or discounts from local coffee shops and restaurants. And that initial project, we were very, we only had one park active to test that out as our MVP. And fortunately enough, we got good data off that and we got pushed through to phase two, which allowed us to build the full production version of Civic Dollars. And we actually built that over the lockdown and then released it in 2021 with Belfast. I think we ended up with I think 22 or 23 different parks in the city, and it was very early stages. And of course, we had a lot of ideas of how much more we wanted to add to the system, but didn't have the funds to do it as we were just completely bootstrapped. We were just working off whatever funding and competition wins that we could find in grants. So that led us to winning the projects with the Smart Dublin team and then with further Connected Places Catapult and Innovate UK projects that we had won as well allowed us to build the additional functionality to create communities within the app as well. So that's where we ran the healthy aging projects. We were able to tag the older people in one of the most deprived areas in the UK up in West Belfast and work with the older people and the communities and social enterprises in that area. where the older people spent 18,500 hours outdoors, earning civic dollars and redeemed over 1,500 healthy rewards that they could access through that with great research behind it as well, looking at the impact that it had. We've also done that with unpaid caregivers and also with people suffering from mental health with stress, anxiety or PTSD as well. So it's been sort of scaling since that. We did an initial six-month pilot with Donegal County Council in Ireland and we won a two-year contract after that with the results that we got. And that allowed us to use, again, the evidence from all those projects, allowed us to go live with Copenhagen last year. And we also just launched our first project in the States in the city of Myrtle Beach there at the start of the year. which has been amazing to get a foothold there. And the guys are anxious for us to scale across South Carolina as well, which is great.
Ben
Incredible. A hell of a journey in a few years and going global as well, Stephen. Let's go back to it, because I didn't realise that you had FOPS originally for Civic Dollars. So it'd be great to talk through kind of how you started there and what was your journey to going mobile. And you've talked about how you've then added in communities. What has your approach been to the product development within Civic Dollars? And also, how did you get to 30 minutes being the magic number to get to 1 Civic Dollar?
Stephen
Yeah, it was a bit of trial and error. And again, looking at a lot of the research from the guys in Queens and I suppose from the tech perspective, from me working in IT and IT hardware for 25, 26 years, it's my understanding of it was was simple. I got it. And we were doing a lot of work with IOT back then. I think Northern Ireland was one of the IOT test beds for the UK government. And we had a full cloud of IOT right over the country. But it was slow and expensive to run it particularly. as I said, not very scalable. If you wanted to put beacons every 25 metres, you'd have to put them into trees or into the existing infrastructure. You'd have to get power to them as well, which is a huge problem, especially whenever we're trying to deal with parks. And then with not only the cost of the beacons, but the cost of the fobs as well, with people losing them or breaking them. And I suppose one of the One of the lessons that we took was the Beat the Street project that was in a lot of the cities and where the kids got a fob and they had to ding the lampposts, which was a great way to get them outside and compete against each other again, driving that whole gamification. But of course, the problem in Belfast was the kids get very smart and put all the fobs into one backpack. So they were running and dinging 50 fobs in each lamppost every every evening. So only one of them was going outside, which I thought was pretty clever and probably be like something I would have done back in the day as well. So it was, yeah, we looked at that and probably spent too long looking at it and seeing the functionality behind it. And then whenever we were chatting to the developers, they were going, look, why don't we just go mobile only? We'll geofence off it. They can spend their civic dollars in the local cafes, restaurants, leisure centres. public transport, or they can donate them to local community groups and charities. And that's been the key driver for us as well. As you said, the community aspect of it has been critical for not only onboarding users, but for getting buy-in as well and trust from users to do it. So the users can donate their civic dollars to local charities, community groups, schools, sports clubs. And the benefit for them then was that we built a separate reward system from them from the larger corporates. So whenever they logged into our portal, they could get access to skills and services that they normally couldn't either. purchase or get access to. So they got tech support, marketing help, they get financial and legal advice from the expertise from those larger corporates who normally give volunteer days anyway. And rather than giving cash to the community groups, they were given time off their employees, which was far more beneficial whenever they got down to it that they needed tech support, they needed their computers fixed, they needed marketing help for new campaigns. And of course, whenever you get it from that low level, that is such a greater reach that if a community, we find anyway that from doing a lot of focus groups and initial user engagement or potential user engagement, if the city or if the council had told people to get outdoors into the parks, everybody had sort of become very anti-authoritarian and they would have said, how dare you tell us to get out into the parks? But whenever it's coming from a local charity or community group saying, get your butts into the park, earn some civic dollars because we need our computers fixed. It has such a far greater reach coming from that low level, that peer level. And you say, yeah, no problem at all, we'll go and do that and donate them back to you. And even to this day, it's still sitting around 43, 44% of all civic dollars have been donated to the local charities and community groups in the areas. So it's great to see that feeling of giving back as well.
Ben
I think Pete was about to ask what proportion And has that proportion changed over time, Stephen, in terms of the percentage that goes into donations as opposed to being self-rewarded?
Stephen
At the start, I suppose there was a big disparity between the initial Belfast project and say the Dublin one. The Dublin one was sitting at 45 at a stage where the Belfast one was at 19%. And that, maybe it tells its own's tale, but whenever we created more groups and added more rewards, then you've seen the change of it, that the rewards were more appealing to the users as opposed to the donations. But then whenever you add the rewards for the groups and get them more engaged, then you see it tweaking again and changing those stats and the donation levels and the reward levels. So again, it was from a lot of feedback, a lot of focus groups to see why various groups didn't take part and why some of them did and trying to look at maybe access to various parks. And again, as you were asking there, why we've done it on time is purely because of health and mobility. Like the people we were targeting maybe had health or mobility issues and couldn't walk around the parks, they couldn't do their 10,000 steps a day or couldn't do a swim or a cycle. but they could walk to a park bench. So we, our tagline has always been, we don't care whether you walk, run, cycle or just sit at a park bench. You can still earn a civic dollar for every 30 minutes you're there. But what you're actually doing is driving incidental activity that at least they've walked to that park bench from their car, work or house or home. So it's nice to look at that sort of activity by stealth. And then even the public transport rewards, As one of the guys from the Department of Infrastructure that we met, he had coined a phrase to me and it never clicked to me before that every bus journey starts and ends with a walk. So that really hit home that trying to drive that incidental activity that people are being more active without realising it.
Ben
I didn't even think about that, but yeah, of course it does. And I'm still amazed by the altruistic kind of donation percentage as well. Because I think that's really interesting as deep a motivator to go out and be somewhere like a park or an outdoor space and whatever mode of transport they're getting there. But the other motivator of I'm giving back to my community as well as I'm doing something for myself and something really deep in the psychology behind what Civic Dollars is achieving.
Stephen
Yeah, definitely. And particularly with the Healthy Ageing Project that we ran with Innovate UK. And again, we looked at it After the first couple of months, we noticed there was a lot of ladies had signed up and not many men, and we're trying to wonder why that was. And of course, we have all these assumptions at the start of, yes, this will get people out, or no, we need to add these groups and that will get people out. No, it's not until you start working on the project. And then you run the surveys, you do the focus groups and you find out. Like we went to the men's sheds and said, why aren't you taking part in this project? And they said, none of the rewards really entice us to do it. We're like, well, tell us what you want. And it was a great conversation because it ended up the council had built polytunnels for these men's sheds, but they hadn't tools or seeds to actually utilize them properly. So we said, no problem at all. I'll tell you what, you get your members out into the parks, you get 150 civic dollars donated to your group, which we add into the system, and we'll give you a card for the local DIY shops. You're driving footfall into the local stores as well. And they said, right, no problem at all. And they may as well hit them with a stick, said, get out into that park, because we need We need our seeds and tools, and it was unbelievable to see that change then of activity from those guys. They went out, earned Civic dollars, donated it back, they hit their target very quickly, and they got their they got their voucher for the local DIY store. And then, unfortunately, it was it dragged on a bit that the project was just closing as we'd as they'd actually started growing all the stuff. Of course, nothing happens very quickly in this business. But their idea was that with the fruit and veg that they were growing in the polytunnels, that they would accept civic dollars from the local community to trade for that. So you're driving that circular economy, the healthy eating side of it. was one of the best projects I've worked on. The impact that it had on an older population was absolutely amazing because it was very group-based, both earning and spending. So they had to have at least 15 people had bought a yoga class or a Pilates class or a cooking class before they could run it. So they were all getting together, all going and earning the civic dollars. Some of them maybe had done one lap, some of them had just sat on a bench, some of them had done three or four laps around it. We didn't care. They were in that park, so they were still earning the civic dollars. And then, like especially the likes of the dance lessons, so they could They get 5 weeks of dance lessons and then a tea dance at the end of it so they could go and show off their skills. And that cumulated last Christmas with the Jingle Bell Rock where it was 170 of them spent 15 civic dollars to go and have a big Christmas tea dance where they had their sandwiches and cup of tea and then showed off their new skills after that as well. We had a videographer capture it all. It's on YouTube and Every time I watch it, I nearly tear up the impact that it had with them. It was just phenomenal.
Ben
What's really interesting there for me is we've had, we've interviewed a lot of gamification organizations and researchers and quite often the incentive or reward is just a currency, $1, a euro, whatever it is. And what you've been able to achieve is actually look at what are the most motivating incentives and rewards for each specific demographic or population. And clearly, for that project you've just explained, the motivation was polytunnels, seeds and tools. And it wouldn't have mattered if it was 10 pounds or 50 pounds. That wasn't the motivator. The motivator was it was going to enable us as a group to have the equipment to go and do what we enjoy. How do you do that? Do you replicate that level of localised population incentives wherever you are in Civic Dollars?
Stephen
Yeah, we try to. And even with the project in Copenhagen that we're doing in partnership with Novo Nordisk, it's a real cool one that they're regenerating a part of Copenhagen, the railway district. And they've got a huge, the first thing they built was a huge community centre called the Sport 10 or Sport T community hub. And in there, they've got a skate park, parkour equipment. They've got Taekwondo boxing, everything down to art and craft for the kids and a restaurant as well where you can get meals. So whenever we engaged with them, they want their idea for that whole district was that they want people to build, they want to build a community first as they're building this new district in the area and they're completely regenerating it. So they want people from the outlying communities to come in, use a facility, see what's there and want to stay and particularly with the families and kids that will be growing up with this regeneration, to have them engaged in that area and bring them in, see the benefits to it and get them to stay there and either purchase the housing or get involved with the social housing in that area. So they've got everyone from the outlying communities coming in So it's usually 5 to 10 civic dollars to get free access to those classes. We have 32 parks in Copenhagen where you can earn the civic dollars. And then they come in and they get their free meals. They get the kids get to try out the boxing, the taekwondo, the parkour, the skate park as well. So it's a amazing, amazing project to work on. And now they've engaged with the schools. So they're having a competition between the age groups and the schools where once they hit a certain threshold level, the kids are earning civic dollars and donating it to the specific groups that we have in there. And when that group hits a threshold level, they get in for a full sports day in the sporty community hub. So it's again, driving driving that activity out, not activity outdoors, but spending time outdoors to earn it, plus getting that those activities. And it's been a phenomenal project to work with the guys over there. And again, it's not, they're not earning Euros or Kroner in Copenhagen. And again, that's why we didn't link it to any fiat currency. that we let the businesses set, say if somebody's giving a, if it's a coffee shop, giving a two for one discount or two for one coffee or a two for one hot drink or a 10% of sporting goods, we let them set their value of what that's worth in civic dollars. And then that drives a little bit of competition between them as well to see who can offer the most attractive reward or the most amount of, least amount of civic dollars for that specific reward as well. So it's It's always changing, which is the cool bit behind it, but there's no, it's a closed loop, so there's no way they can't get any cash value out of it, which is a nice thing, I think, anyway, that it doesn't rely on how rich you are, it just relies on that either the giving bit or the spending time outdoors.
Ben
So is there no cash benefit to the organisations that the civic dollars are being spent at?
Stephen
No, we give them access to a social impact dashboard so that lets them hit the button for their social value measurements and CSR at the end of the year that they can see how many hours or how many groups that they've helped, how many hours of their employees' time was spent volunteering in those groups. and how many hours people have spent outdoors earning the civic dollars to donate or to get those rewards for that group through their involvement with the project. Of course, in my initial document, and it is my long-term goal that we can offer these organisations, I think it's in my initial document that I'd done about civic dollars, that we'd love them to be able to get a discount off their rates or tax bill or water bill once they hit a certain threshold. of civic dollars accepted from groups, so to try and drive that. But what they can do with the accumulated civic dollars, both from a community organisation and from a corporate, is that they can reward their either employees or volunteers for doing specific tasks. So if they do a litter pick, you can, whatever civic dollars you have in your wallet, and if you've joined that group, they can reward you for doing that. And we do that already. or have done that already with the likes of the Healthy Ageing Project, where if they filled out their survey, the Health and Wellbeing Survey, so we've done three throughout it, one at the start, middle and end. And if you fill that out, you got 5 civic dollars for doing that because everybody hates filling out surveys. So we give them that little kick to go. And again, they could donate that back or they could go and get a reward for themselves.
Ben
What else I want to ask is kind of, you've been doing this in multiple cities, multiple countries. What's the impact you're seeing? Kind of what changes are having on people's activity levels, on their health and wellbeing?
Stephen
Yeah, I suppose the one that was, we're in the middle of two of them, but the one that finished up the Healthy Ageing Project, we were lucky enough to get that academic research team to look at the impact that it had on particularly the older people that were taking part in that project. And again, through the health and well-being surveys, it was self-completed. So probably, I don't know if that can be used as as full research, but it was their own feeling of health and well-being through the questionnaire that was designed through that for that by the academic team and the focus groups that we that we've seen. And through the surveys, it showed a 12.8% increase in their feeling of health and well-being. But the most important thing for me was the focus groups that we ran and the feedback that we that we got from it. And there's two examples I always go back to because it really hit home with me. was that one of them was an elderly lady. Her son had passed away the year before and she was more or less housebound. And it wasn't until her friend started doing Civic Dollars project and going to the park that they knocked on her door and said, come on, we're all going to the park. Very, as I said, very group based. So she eventually got out of the house and she sat at the park bench while the rest of them done laps around it and stopped and talked to her whenever they came round at a game. great because they didn't have to do any activity, she could sit there if she wanted. But as the time went on, she moved to the next park bench and the next park bench until eventually she'd done one loop and then sat down again and enjoyed the conversation and creating that social bond again. And then in the focus group, she said, if it wasn't for this project, I'd be still stuck in the house. And that hit home. And the other one was a guy who's estranged from his son and he said he couldn't really afford much. for him, but he was able to buy the public transport vouchers through the Civic Dollars programme and was able to take his son to the zoo and give him one of the power banks that he got through the app as well. And he said it wasn't much, but it was, to him it was, being able to take him on the bus, give him the power bank, take him to the zoo. And that was, yeah, those two are definitely the high points for me and something I reference all the time.
Ben
I think it's a great example how digital gamification can resulting in real life social connections interaction. And I think that there's many organisations or research projects that we've ever had on Health Points that has achieved that transition from digital to in real life connections. Absolutely brilliant, Stephen. There's been a lot of news at the moment around your programme in Copenhagen with Nord and Nordisk. It'd be great to learn a little bit more about that and how the project's been going.
Stephen
Yeah, it's been a great, great experience working with those guys, working with a company of that size. It's just mind-blowing, it really is. It's unbelievable. Their approach, the Cities for Better Health programme is live in 60 cities across the world. So yes, everybody knows Novo Nordisk initially from insulin and for type 1 and type 2 diabetes, but then their impact on trying to reduce obesity as well, which is brought out with the Ozempic and Wegovy and the weight loss jabs. But they're the only one of the big pharma companies that are looking at non-pharmacological ways to try and tackle obesity as well. And that's where the Cities for Better Health programme has come out of. So they're working with kids with obesity in Brazil or in South Africa. I think the project in Brazil is to get girls into soccer more, into football. And just the projects that are on their website is so impactful in trying to tackle that. And it's not just healthy ageing, it's longevity. It's right through from the kids right through to the older people and impact on obesity and the NCDs that are caused by that as a knock-on effect. So even to look at the work they're doing and have some small part in it, has been amazing. And to look at the projects I've been over twice with those guys and that sporty hub, they had a huge sporty sporting festival the last time I was over. And just to see the local communities that are involved with it coming in, the kids trying all those various activities that they can do in the community hub is it really would do your heart good to see it. And hopefully it's something that we can replicate in other areas as well, because they're, yes, they're a huge corporate, but they have such local impact. And to do it in their own backyard in Copenhagen has been nearly nearly better that rather than working in, yes, it'd be great to do the project in the UK or Ireland as well, but to be working with them over there, proving the point, and then The idea will be to be added to their toolkit of cities for better health programmes that any of the other cities can take on civic dollars and run just a copy and paste job that they can run the same sort of projects in their areas. But we've now brought on, look, it's in partnership with Novo Nordisk, with NREP, which are doing the urban development, with Mitty Carver, who are the social housing outfits, and with Steino Diabetes Centre. So they're doing the research and looking at the impact that the project has. So yeah, it's bigger than I ever could have imagined. But yeah, we're rolling with it. It's a fantastic project and hopefully long may it last.
Ben
No, it's brilliant. And I can see how civic dollars align so well to Northern Norvic's Cities programme and how what you've created through Civic Dollars, which is genuinely rubber stamp blueprintable that you can scale out to different cities and then looking at those local rewards for local populations in each city. But actually the technology is the same regardless. You mentioned earlier about you use fobs and tags and that didn't work. Are there any other things you've learned through the last few years that also just didn't get traction, wasn't a good feature or function that you thought would work?
Stephen
Yeah, probably the, like the rewards is ever changing. And of course, I obviously went off my own assumptions. And so we say assumptions versus reality that we thought, oh yes, they'll definitely want to do even some of the free coffees that we have in places, people didn't want the coffees they wanted to give back to the organisations. So the rewards is a complete minefield and it's not until you start a project until you realise that. But then it's, I suppose, one of the benefits of being a startup and being agile that we can quickly change it. We don't have to go through three different boards to make that decision, that we're able to jump on it quickly, make the call, make the change and impact on it quickly. Trying to think of anything else that we've built in.
Ben
Do you think there's like a minimum number of or variety of rewards that are needed to motivate as many people as possible?
Stephen
Yeah, I think that choice is huge, that the more ways to earn and the more ways to spend is critical to stop it being stagnant. So bringing on more groups that you can donate to, bringing on more reward partners and I suppose looking at that from a local economy point of view as well, that if we're trying to drive people into the local shops and stores and cafes, that we have to keep it fresh and It's seasonal as well. So with the project in Belfast, we switched it probably around the autumn time that we'd done LED dog collars and umbrellas, of course, that there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad choice of clothing. So here's an umbrella, get your **** into the parks. You can still do it now. So things have got there that it has to keep it fresh. From the user's perspective, that there's only so many coffees they can have before they get bored with it. So try and change it. Like in Donegal, we have two for one surf lessons. We've disconnected to the sports stores. There's a cuddle, cuddle a cow option from a local farm. It's a social enterprise with trying to help people with mental health conditions to go and there's equine petting and cuddle, cuddle a cow one, which is pretty cool. So you can go up, go up there. And I suppose we're changing it a lot. The project in Myrtle Beach, yes, it's health orientated, but they're also looking at it from a tourism point of view that people go in there. Their issue was people were coming in one of any of the 92 golf courses around the city that they were coming in golf and going home. So now we're giving them the option to earn civic dollars while they're on the golf course, while they're outdoors on the golf course, and then they have to come into the city to spend them. So you're doing that tourism dispersal or getting tourists to stay longer and spend more in the city that they can earn the civic dollars, come into Myrtle Beach, either get a discount or support any of the local good causes in the area as well. So it's just another, yes, we're looking at health, well-being, community, local economy and now tourism as well. So yeah, just something else to worry about. But one of the nice ideas we have in Donegal and we're working with the Forestry Service that Tourists could have a tree planted in their name for civic dollars. So they spend 7 1/2, 10 hours outdoors and they can get a tree planted in their name. But the idea is that, especially Americans, they'll come back and see, they'll have their little bit of Ireland planted here. So they'll come back and see it all the time. So drive that return visitors.
Ben
The different strands to civic dollars in terms of what it does for a city or a community, I didn't realise there were so many, Stephen, but even down to tourism as well. It'd be great to know, just to close out, kind of, have you seen any other examples of health gamification that you really like or anything that you want to venture into with Pacific Dollars next?
Stephen
Yeah, well, the roadmap's always growing and one of the things we'd like to work with and we've been dealing a lot, we've got proposals with eight cities in the US at the moment and looking at the various issues that they have and how we can affect that. And one of the big ones is, I suppose, two of the things is dealing with veterans and homelessness in the States. So of how to be able to signpost them. And we've done work with, or done the research, we looked at the research from Bernardo's way back at the start. And even back then, they were saying that people would rather have a phone than a home, that they, as long as they were connected, they were happy, not happy, but they needed to have that connectivity with them. So we know they have the technology, but it's been able to access them and signpost them to services, be that dental, medical, some safe place to shelter as well. So yeah, I would really like to start looking into that a bit more, how we support the various communities because And we can tailor rewards for those communities. And that's what we built in initially for the Healthy Ageing Project. We could tag the older people, we could tag people with mental health conditions, we could tag the unpaid caregivers and put rewards in there that'll help with their conditions. And only they see that. So that's a nice functionality to build into it. And that's something we want to hit on next. And probably from a, it's not really a gamification. technique or anything's out there, but probably the engagement side of it is the hardest. And not only engaging customers for me, which is the cities and the authorities, but engaging with the users as well. So it's a very different set of people that were between our users and our customers. So, and some of the stuff that's been in, it's only out, what, a couple of weeks or a couple of months, but those AI generated videos of the Bigfoot and the Yeti. And it was all at the minute that's on TikTok. And oh my God, the engagement and the watch rate that they're getting is absolutely phenomenal. And now you're seeing it change. Initially, it was just the funny ones that they're putting out. And now they're putting out the commercials and the adverts to try and point people to various websites or anything else. And they seem to be able to get away with a lot more the advertising side of things that because it's not a human advertising something, they seem to be able to get away with a lot more. But I think to engage it, and I'd love to get a marketing agency involved and do a few of the AI videos of the civic dollars while you're out in the forest. But that, again, I think everything else, it could be dead in a month and a half that they'll no longer be out there. But there's something definitely around that AI-generated video content that seems to be very engaging at the minute.
Ben
Stephen, we are kind of coming to the end of time and thank you so much for joining us to talk about your journey that started with working to solve problems facing cities in promoting health and wellbeing, which led to the idea for Civic Dollars to incentivise activity in outdoor spaces. The learning of the importance of creating the right incentives for each demographic, it's local rewards for local people and these rewards also need to be seasonal too. and with the opportunity to lean into altruism, creating deeper motivations for players through donating their civic dollars to local communities. And where civic dollars is a great example of how a digital gamification intervention can create real life social activities, creating new social connections and overcoming loneliness. Stephen, it's been fantastic to have you on the show today.
Pete
Thanks so much, Stephen. I found this not only fascinating and learned a lot from what you're doing, But I did find myself going, right, how am I going to help him implement this in Jersey, right?
Stephen
Thanks for watching, guys. It's been a pleasure. And yeah, keep up the good work.