Friends who save money together, stay together!
SAVE! is a community and challenge based platform where people create or accept savings-related challenges.
Researches show that friends who go to the gym together are more likely to stick to the active habit.
Our idea is to build a community that would encourage people to save more by conquering the challenges together with their friends.
In the article “What Three Things Motivate Community Members?”, the author pointed out that the motivations can stem from three buckets: rewards (the right rewards), frequency and the importance of building a community of people whose opinion we care about.
What?
SAVE! is a community and challenge based platform where people create or accept savings-related challenges.
Who?
Target young adults who: like to conquer challenges, enjoy new activities and have the needs to prove themselves. They would use their already existed social network accounts to join the community.
If we are to think of this under the Fogg model, considering the small scale of the challenges, these targeted users have enough “ability” and the community could give them the “trigger” and “motivation” to start saving money.
How does it work?
People could create the challenges related to savings and invite others to join their challenges.
For example, the UI for the initial feed would look something like this:
1) There’s an initial feed that will allow people to see what other people are doing. This will play into the “social” part of the app. It will have notifications urging you to join challenges your friends are currently participating in, how much you have saved this month for your Savings account, etc.
2) A main screen where you can start challenges, join existing ones, etc:
For the money saving challenges with specific quantity, the system would make sure that people actually save money by using a Venmo-like system where people would put in money and could only take out once per month to their Savings account. This helps user have a monthly saving habit.
There are also physical rewards from coupons offered by the sponsors. For example, those who actually conquer the challenges could receive a coupons like 10% off Starbucks coffee, $5 off on Amazon, etc. This is a win-win where SAVE! has rewards for winners and the brands get themselves advertised.
People could post on social network their interesting self-created challenges or those that they have conquered.
The motivation of the community revolves around the three main principles of building an attractive community.
1) Rewards:
Beyond the material awards listed above (such as coupons by the sponsors for the pre-curated challenges), recognition itself is a reward: Social acceptance is a strong motivator for community participation. For example, when using Quora, people would ask whether people agree their post was helpful and see them as an expert.
People could post on social network their interesting self-created challenges or those that they have conquered.
2) Frequency Builds Habits:
The user browse and accept new and interesting challenges everyday. It would be a part of their active and dynamic life.
Furthermore, friends naturally want to share good and fun experience together. Therefore, they would find this community as an opportunity to find activities to do together. For example, what would they if they accept the challenge to use public transportation instead of Uber or Lyft, they could go take the T together.
Eventually, saving can become a habit and turn into fun activity to do.
3) A Community of Respected Peers
Here, “respected peers” are those whose own actions or whose evaluation on others’ actions matter.
This is both an organic reason and a strategy to attract people to the community.
For the organic reason, if the respectable peers in their friends list are doing some challenges in the community and share them on social network, there is a high chance that people would want to do the challenges, too.
Otherwise, they could conquer the challenges to impress their respectable peers. For instance, if a guy has a crush on someone, he could show how brave and economical he is by “randomly” share his challenge on his homepage.
For the strategy, the marketing strategy could include invited celebrities to participate in some challenges and get articles published about how they act out in real life.
Sources:
http://blog.higherlogic.com/what-three-things-motivate-community-members
https://www.runtastic.com/blog/en/sports-fitness/training-with-friends/
