Gamification Case Study: Neat Streets Campaign

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Today I want to talk to you about a gamified campaign that aims to change the way people think about public space. An organisation in the UK called Hubbub is trying to motivate people to stop littering the streets of London by giving them small gamified projects spread across the streets of London.

We have talked about public gamification before and we have talked about green gamification before, where people are motivated to protect the environment through gamification, and we think this is a great combination of the two.

First comes the cigarette voting box.

What this is, is a way to motivate people not to throw their cigarettes on the street. You have a box where people can vote who is the best player in the world. To do that they stub their cigarette out and throw the butt in one of the two holes depending on who they want to vote for, Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi.

Using a bit of competition, designers motivate people to not throw their cigarettes on the street and they try to change behaviour of smokers.

Then we have the stick your gum boards, where citizens are motivated to not throw their gums on the street.

Boards have been put up where people can stick their gum and reveal various images like how much it costs to clean gum from the streets of London every year. Designers here use curiosity as a tool to motivate people to read the signs and understand how big the problem really is. After all it’s the citizens that pay for cleaning the gums with their taxes.

Our favourite stick your gum board was the one below where people have the chance to win a prize! After they stick enough gum on the board they will reveal the face of a famous Londoner they can text his surname and enter a lottery to win a prize. That board introduces the element of luck through the lottery which always fascinates a lot of people.

I really believe that this is a campaign using gamification in a great way. They use just enough game mechanics to engage and motivate people without turning the whole experience into something very complicated but still exciting.

We have been saying that repeatedly, gamification does not need to be big or expensive, it needs to be just enough. It’s not using as many game mechanics as possible but about using enough to achieve the project’s goals.

You can follow the Neat Street campaign on social media using the hashtag #NeatStreets

About the author 

Pete Baikins

Pete Baikins is an international authority on gamification, a lifelong gamer, successful entrepreneur and a lecturer. As CEO of Gamification+ Ltd he mentors and trains companies world-wide on the use of gamification to solve business challenges. Gamification+ won the Board of Trade Award from the UK's Department of International Trade in January 2019.

Pete is co-host of the health gamification podcast Health Points and is also Chair of Gamification Europe, the annual conference for Gamification practitioners.

Pete is an Honorary Ambassador for GamFed (International Gamification Confederation), having previously been the Chair from 2014 to February 2019, whose aim is to spread best practices within and support the gamification industry.

After 15 years as a Lecturer on gamification and entrepreneurship at the University of Brighton he now guest lectures on Gamification at King’s College London and at ESCP Europe at post-graduate and under-graduate levels.

Over the past 20 years Pete has built and sold two businesses. One was in security software and the more recent one was a telecoms and internet connectivity business. He is also an Ambassador for Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce in the UK.

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