Today, the Sierra Club launched AddUp, a one-stop shop website for effective environmental activism -- at home or on-the-go, online or in communities across the country. Fueled by the Sierra Club’s robust grassroots campaigns, AddUp offers a diverse suite of local, state and national environmental issues through online petitions and in person events for people to take action on and attend.
The average American adult spends 11 hours a day online. Whether it's in front of a computer or a smartphone, 11 hours is a significant amount of time. AddUp meets people where they are -- online, making it easy to support environmental causes and campaigns, recruit friends, and attend events -- all with just a click. Being the millennial that I am, this sounded like an incredibly cool tool, and I couldn’t wait to try it out.
The homepage of the site shows petitions to sign, social media actions to take, events to attend and ways to recruit your friends. AddUp has hundreds of environmental campaigns to choose from, and all on a single but still simple website. And AddUp isn’t just engaging for those on the site. By integrating Facebook Connect and Twitter, AddUp lets users share their support of the environment with not just their social media friends but also with specific friends who share similar interests (who are likely to take action themselves).
By providing real-time updates on the campaigns an individual has supported, AddUp makes it easy to see how individual actions together with that of millions across the country are literally “adding up” to create real-world impacts to protect our communities and our planet. Unlike a paper petition or an action taken from an email alert, with AddUp I can see the difference that my action makes. After I signed a petition urging President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, I saw the number of signers rise, and the number of signatures needed fall. I could see the tangible impact I had in protecting our environment.
And AddUp is more than just a petition site. With both online actions and events to attend, AddUp provides me with the tools to protect the environment both online and off. And with social media integration, I can recruit my friends to attend too.
But my favorite part of AddUp is how smart it is. AddUp recognizes what actions you’ve taken and events you’ve attended and recommends new actions to take based on your interests. After signing a petition to urge the president to reject the Keystone pipeline, I’m directed to both recruit my friends through Twitter and Facebook, and to a new petition that needs signing -- in this case, to seize the grid, to transition campuses and communities to 100% clean energy. It’s like Netflix, except instead of suggesting I watch The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt after a binge watching session of Parks and Rec, it’s helping me create real lasting change to protect our environment.
AddUp knows that many of us, me included, live our lives online glued to our laptops and smartphones and that we spend too much time scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, and Buzzfeed posts. It uses this information to recruit activists -- to help others help the planet. With AddUp, my newsfeed will be a little less cute baby animals and a lot more environmental activism. And while I love pugs, that is something I’m more than ok with.