The Money Saving Boiler Challenge for Nesta
A quick and easy tool to reduce household emissions and save the nation money
The challenge
Nesta is the UK’s innovation agency for social good. Designed to tackle society’s biggest challenges and to deliver impact at scale. Nowhere is this purpose better demonstrated than in our recent project together, the Money Saving Boiler Challenge, which tackles two of the most pressing issues of our day; the cost of living crisis and climate change. The online tool provides a step by step walkthrough on how users can make a simple change to their boiler setting to reduce their carbon emissions and save money. The target is to reach an ambitious 1 million households and to demonstrate the impact of this collective effort.
The approach
With only 9 weeks to turn around the project, we were excited to pull up our sleeves and get the site ready in time for heating season! Our challenge was to deliver an easy step-by-step guide that would walk users through the process of changing their boiler settings and to encourage them to share the campaign afterwards.
Not everyone is comfortable making changes to their boiler and there was a risk that users could feel overwhelmed and drop off mid-journey. This risk was greater given that the guidance was for different types of boilers and many users wouldn’t know what type they owned. To help give the user some extra support, we designed the walkthrough with visual references that they could click for personalised instructions. We also identified that users were likely to open the website on their phone while standing in front of the boiler, so the website was designed to be mobile led as well as meet high accessibility standards.
Once we were confident about the structure of the guide, we needed to encourage users to start the process. The landing page was intentionally simple and lightweight, using solid colours rather than lots of imagery to draw the user’s attention to this important call to action at key points on the page. The supporting content pages such as Blog, FAQ and Evidence demonstrate the impact of the boiler setting change for the more inquisitive users, before steering them back to the landing page to complete the walkthrough. Once the user has completed the steps and optimised their boiler, they can easily click to share via a button which automatically populates a social post with a link and a message to be shared with their network.
Nesta understood that the campaign was a big ask for users, to make a change to expensive equipment that controls heating in their homes and to share the campaign with others to encourage collective action. In order to keep the audience engaged at every step, we made the financial and environmental benefits clear from the start. To create a collective sense of achievement, we also introduced a live totaliser to the homepage. When users come to the website, they can immediately see how many boilers have been optimised, what the current campaign target is and how they can join the movement for a more cost-effective and environmentally friendly home.
The results
The campaign is working hard to make it easy for households to optimise boiler settings, helping them to save money and reduce their carbon footprint.
Four months after launch and nearly 200,000 people have followed the guide and turned down their boiler. The website was recently recommended by Martin Lewis on primetime television as a way to help save UK households money.
“Working with Pixeled Eggs on our first consumer-facing campaign website was a really collaborative and well-run process. The team are hugely knowledgeable and were able to develop a site that seamlessly takes users through the journey and that has gone on to be really well received and high performing. The team at Pixeled Eggs were responsive, creative and added real value throughout the process.”
Elin Price, Campaigns Manager at Nesta
