Care Without Carbon

Care Without Carbon is an initiative from Sussex Community NHS Trust to make the Trust more financially, environmentally and socially sustainable. Our partners at Neo designed a great-looking pledge platform which allows staff to take ‘Dares’ which will benefit the environment.

We built this as a WordPress site which allows the Care Without Carbon team to easily manage which Dares are available, and reports on how many dares have been taken, in which locations and by which departments. The Care Without Carbon team did not want a full login system which might prove a barrier to staff signing up, so we designed a lightweight system based on cookies but with the functionality to handle staff using different devices.

Since the website going live over 300 staff have pledged their dares, and we’re delighted to say that the site won three awards at the 2015 NHS Sustainability Awards!

How Dare We?

A key concept of Care Without Carbon are the ‘Dares’ – pledges that staff can take to lower their environmental impact. We built a simple interface that allows visitors to pick and choose which dares they wish to take, and hooked this into the WordPress user system so that user data is persisted across sessions. Basic user details including name, location and previous dares are remembered when a user returns to the site.

We also built a page showing how other people have dared, allowing us a good opportunity to create a smooth engaging interface. When the page loads a graph springs into life allowing users to see what others are doing at a glance – which dares they are taking and from which locations.

Challenges

The Trust is a large organisation, and their staff use technology ranging from the latest smartphones to not-so-new desktops. We needed to create a modern, engaging experience for all and we achieved this by using the latest CSS techniques in combination with principles of graceful degradation.