Where: Istanbul, Turkey
Area of Solutions: Education and advocacy, Reduction in pollution, Climate technology
Habitat Association's Digital Transformation program prepared a project that will mark the digital age: digital cleaning. For this, they formed a team with digital office volunteers from different backgrounds. Based on their own digital lives, they’ve put forward a project to create digital cleaning awareness. At first, they looked at different materials related to digital cleaning. The project was created with multiple perspectives; social, technical and practical. The aim of the project was not only to reach different segments of society, but also to involve big companies and especially large telecommunication companies.
People that the project reached were in different social groups and ages who use the internet actively. Instagram posts reached 5,384 accounts and 28% of them did not follow Habitat Association before. Tweets about the project and its website reached 5,951 twitter accounts. The Habitat Association Facebook page contains middle aged and senior groups. Posts on Facebook reached 374 accounts. The target group on Facebook was reached as expected.
Habitat Association has created guidelines to educate and make people aware of digital cleaning. Their guidelines consist of suggestions and facts to encourage people to generate less digital waste. The guidelines were aimed to reach individuals and corporate entities. In addition to the guidelines, Habitat Association has developed a website to highlight the impact of digital cleaning by calculating the amount of digital waste that was avoided. Eventually, the team working on this project and main stakeholders started to send smaller amounts of emails to prevent generating digital waste. Some governmental agencies and corporate entities have shown interest in the project and have decided to become a partner in the project.
Working online was an obstacle for digital cleaning. Habitat Associations team overcame the issue with collaborative online work. They didn’t download materials and e-mailing and texting have been reduced.
Another struggle was the diversity of the target group. Habitat Association wants to attract all age groups, social groups, and organizations. They managed to deliver their project in a specific and inclusive way. Also, the guidelines were produced with the aim of less waste. They didn’t want to cause digital waste to announce the project so they created only one website to reach all people digitally.
Photo provided by Habitat Association
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