Profile
Since becoming CEO of We Are What We Do in early 2009, Nick has transformed the organisation, growing the company from a tiny start-up to an international team, defining our strategic direction, establishing the partnerships that have allowed our products and services to reach large scale and financial sustainability, as well as being actively involved in the development of all our products and services.
Nick has shaped our approach to behaviour change. He draws on a range of influences from behavioural economics and social psychology to user-centred design processes, as well as his own experience working as a teacher, youth worker and campaigner. He holds a BA Hons in History from Oxford University.
Nick was named one of Britain’s 50 New Radicals by The Observer and NESTA in 2012, his paper ‘The Incidental Effect: New Methods in Behaviour Change’ has been met with great acclaim and he has given talks all over the world, including at TEDx, Columbia University, the British Council, Google and the Royal Institute.
Nick has two awesome dogs called Elvis and Scout.
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@nickstanhope
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5 Lessons in Developing Social Tech Ventures
Digital technology plays a powerful role in the response to social problems. Its doesn’t provide the answers to everything and, by …
The Question That Tech-for-Good Funding Should Care Most About
Grant funding has a vital role to play in social technology innovation. It can support the higher costs and …
Can Consumer Product Design Really Drive Systemic Social Change?
A recent Forbes piece by Ashoka’s Michael Zakaras takes product design to task as a source of transformational social change. To provide an antidote to the fashionable fascination with “things” as the answer to all our social ills, the article uses examples like Toms Shoes‘ one-for-one model and the distribution of mosquito nets as evidence that products normally fail to engage with the roots of complex social problems.
A brand new version of our digital inclusion product, Buttons
We’re really excited to be relaunching our digital inclusion product, Buttons, this week, which represents a big step in the …
The Next Frontier for Social Impact Investment
Social Impact Investment is explored by Nick Stanhope.
Successful commercial entrepreneurs have to prioritise building two types of value within their ventures: user value and financial value. The job of creating value for users is hard. It relies on a profound understanding of the intrinsic motivations of the target audience. It requires the time, investment and experience…
Shift’s development process for social ventures
Nick and Tori explain the process that shapes and structures Shift’s work designing social ventures. As part of our three year partnership with the Nominet Trust, we have intended to codify and share this process more explicitly, both for our own benefit and in the hope that other mission-driven designers and social entrepreneurs find it useful.
Why Social Entrepreneurs Need to Be Better Than Their Commercial Counterparts
Successful commercial entrepreneurs have to prioritise building two types of value within their ventures: user value and financial value, but social entrepreneurs need all three.
From We Are What We Do to Shift: a new name for a different approach
Our work in behaviour change started 10 years ago, as a social movement that inspired people to use their everyday …
Most Mindfulness Products Miss Those That Need Them
You can’t call yourself a forward thinking company these days without some reference to mindfulness in your organisational strategy…
Why the world needs video games for good mental health
Over the last 18 months, with support from the Nominet Trust, we’ve been researching and developing the first version of …
The 3 strands of value vital to social tech ventures
This article has been written by Nick Stanhope, CEO of We Are What We Do, and Dan Sutch, Head of …
Three values
On the surface, the language and practices of Silicon Valley and other tech investors have brought the social sector a greater focus on ventures, accelerators, fast-growth innovations, of startups, incubators and investment…
A closer look at NT100 2013 project, Historypin
Historypin was launched in 2011, after two years of R&D and beta testing, with a mission to help bring people together, from across different generations and cultures, to share and explore the history of their communities…
Video games + behaviour change
Video games don’t normally get a good rap when it comes to the health of young people. Instinctively, replacing hours …
Street Food for social change: why gourmet hipsters are just part of the story
If you walk a few hundred metres west from Old Street roundabout, the new hub of London’s tech start up …
‘The simple habits and reciprocities of everyday life.’
This is how David Halpern describes the focus of work that examines and values the role of social capital in our communities. …
A healthy obsession with social capital
This is how David Halpern describes the focus of work that examines and values the role of social capital in our communities…
Box Chicken Launch
Hadrian Garrard from Create London and Nick Stanhope discuss the need for practical interventions to tackle poor diets at the launch of Box Chicken, a pilot of a healthy fast food outlet.
Progress still battles prejudice when it comes to mental health
In April this year, as part of our three-year partnership with the Nominet Trust, we set out on 12 months of …
Launching three years of innovation in behaviour change
April 2013 marked the start of a very exciting three-year partnership between Nominet Trust and We Are What We Do, that will see us create a series of new behaviour change products capable of delivering measurable social impact at scale…
Our obsession with chicken shops
Earlier this year, I wrote about our early obesity research, through which we started looking at the way that the …
Historypin share their top tips
Historypin is a suite of online tools designed to help museums, libraries and community groups share their collections of archived materials (e.g. historic photos) with as wide an audience as possible…
5 reasons why business models suit behaviour change
Business models don’t suit every social mission. As Dan Pallotta says in his March 2013 TED Talk, “social business needs …
Prompting, nudging and facilitating less food waste
Every year in the UK, we throw away almost 20% of the food we buy, which contributes to the even …
Real corporate responsibility is about making less money
2012 wasn’t a good year for corporate responsibility. write my paper As society continued to reel from the effects of …
Citizen historians and social change
Over the last 18 months, We Are What We Do, through our Historypin project, has been working with Nominet Trust to harness the social power of digital citizen history…
He Has Done a Lot for Charity
Last week’s Livestrong 15th Anniversary event in Austin, Texas, looked like an odd occasion. Everyone there seemed pretty sure that …
Overweight by default
We’ve spent a good chunk of the last year looking at how our approach to behaviour change can play a …
I’m Still a Plastic Bag
Our 2007 I’m Not a Plastic Bag project with Anya Hindmarch was, at the time, hugely successful. We applied our product-centric …
Before it’s too late
There is always someone in the family that knows everything, who recognises every face in every old picture, who could tell you where they were taken and what the occasion was, who could narrate an old family film to within an inch of its life…
The end of volunteering
People supporting their communities and making meaningful contributions to society without being paid is something that we all want loads …
The Participatory Museum
When real change comes, it doesn’t come from any one place. It emerges, gradually, from many different places all at once…
Historypin: Libraries, Archives & Museums Sharing Content
Nick talking at Stanford University on Historypin: Libraries, Archives & Museums Sharing Content.
Us and the Other Us
As part of our ongoing research on the Incidental Effect, we’re working our way through another huge array of books, …
Enjoyable things for local communities to do together
The After the Riots report from the Riots Communities and Victims Panel was a really good example of how to emerge …
Digital inclusion is ideal for an incidental approach
In the middle of three new launches of our Internet Buttons project into Ireland, Poland and Holland, we’ve been struck, again, …
The response to ‘Kony 2012’ has been amazing, but it’s not an example to follow
When the Kony 2012 video first popped up on my Facebook wall and I started to watch it, I only got …
The nudge potential of mobile payments
Starbucks Corp CEO, Howard Schultz, described the arrival of mobile payments as part of a “seismic change” in consumer behaviour. For …
Too important to make lots of money from
I’ve had lots of e-mails, tweets and a few calls from journalists asking for a bit more explanation on something …
A bit of new radicalism
It has been great for We Are What We Do to be included in the Britain’s New Radicals list, launched …
Facebook “built to accomplish a social mission”
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent letter to shareholders illustrated once again that, while the world is obsessed with the wealth generated by …
Playing social change
Despite being interested from a distance for some time, we have only just started to explore the potential of gaming …
Customer service can change the world
We’ve just started working with Sky on some internal leadership events that they run each year and, once again, my …
‘Tis the season for serious guilt
It’s this time of year that our TVs are overrun with unmissable deals on three piece suites and all inclusive …
The Paralympics: positive or negative incidental effects on inclusion?
Sally Richards is the mother of Jackson West, a young, Canberra-based entrepreneur with a disability, and I was lucky enough …
The Incidental Effect
Hello. This first one is going to be very short, because what it refers to is quite long and I …
Mapping in the 4th dimension TEDxNHH
Nick talks at TEDx NHH, hosted by the Norwegian School of Economics, in Bergen.
Funding Historypin
Since the launch of Historypin in New York in July this year, we’ve been blown away by people’s response to it…
@Shift_org
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Coverage
Nick Stanhope: Nesta New Radical 2012
The Observer, 2012
Q and A with Nick Stanhope, Creator of Historypin
Smithsonian Magazine, 10th August 2011