What We Do

We Are What We Do is a not-for-profit behaviour change company with nine years experience in shifting the everyday behaviours of individuals and tackling a series of major social and environmental issues.

We create mainstream products and services, which are useful or desirable in their own right and facilitate positive behaviours, meaning they can have a major, sustainable impact on the issues we address.

We are based in London, with an office in San Francisco, and work on projects locally and all over the world.

We Are What We Do consists of a UK registered Community Interest Company (05241856) and Charitable Foundation (1134546).

Our approach

We have a unique and innovative approach based on five principles:

Implicit

We create products and services which are attractive to large, mainstream audiences and are useful or desirable for their own sake, without being marketed as being socially positive. We work with cultural norms, not against them, allowing us to reach audiences with no pre-existing appetite for positive change. We employ the highest standards of design so our outputs sit comfortably alongside our for-profit competitors.

Facilitative

We create practical solutions that facilitate new, positive behaviours and embed habits. These enable action, reducing the drop-off between awareness and tangible, sustained changes in behaviour. This approach draws on our own experience and learning from research in behavioural economics and social psychology.

Research led

Our creative solutions are born out of in-depth understanding of an issue, frequently using methods such as ethnography and behavioural analysis that generate new insights and undermine common assumptions. We scope, test, iterate and improve our solutions on the ground in communities, often collaborating with local organisations. We aim to continuously measure and maximise the solutions’ benefits, as well as ensuring they work in real people’s lives.

High impact

Profound, sustained, measurable impact on social issues is the reason we exist. Rigorous evaluation assesses our success purely on the basis of this, not on false indicators, such as raised awareness of an issue.

Sustainable

We always look to create solutions that can become independent social enterprises with financially sustainable business models. This allows them to have scale and sustainability, becoming embedded in mainstream culture through their own brands.

Our history and what we’ve learnt

This approach to behaviour change has been developed and evolved since our conception in 2004.

We started as a social movement encouraging people to do small positive things everyday via a range of communications campaigns. These included the books ‘Change the World for a Fiver’, Change the World 9-5, Teach Your Granny To Text and Other Ways to Change the World, and campaigns in schools, businesses and communities involving educational materials, videos and exhibitions.

Whilst these reached relatively large numbers (Change the World for a Fiver sold over 1.5 million copies world wide), evaluation showed an increase in awareness in users, but limited actual behaviour change. Equally, as explicitly socially positive messages, they had a nominal or negative appeal to the majority of the people who have no existing appetite for social and environmental participation.

At the same time, advances in behavioural economics and psychology have shown that everyday human decision making is more profoundly influenced by context, peer behaviour and emotional reactions than by the logical processes which tell us something is ‘the right thing to do’.

As a result, implicitness and facilitation have become crucial principles behind our work since around 2007. Read more about this in Nick’s paper ‘The Incidental Effect.’

Our social innovation process

Over the last five years through our experience in researching and developing behaviour change products and services, we have developed our own social innovation process. Whether we are commissioned by an external organisation, government department or company to work on a specific social issue, or identify one ourselves as new area of our work, we follow this process, which adds a structure and rigour to our thinking.

Ways of working with us

There are currently three main ways of working with us:

1. Get involved with our existing projects

From Historypin to Box Chicken, our existing portfolio of projects offers a range of opportunities for partnerships.

2. Partner with us on the issues we are currently exploring

We are currently working on the following issues:

• The intergenerational divide
• Youth obesity
• Digital inclusion
• Domestic food waste
• Domestic energy usage
• Mental health, young people and video games

If you are working in any of these areas and are interested in our approach, please get in touch.

3. Learn more about our approach

We do talks and run workshops opening up our approach to interested audiences. Find out more.

Contact

For all partnership and speaking inquiries, contact [email protected]