Recruiting the best and the brightest is an ongoing competition among the big four global professional services firms. Perks and salary aside, top accounting majors often look for distinctions in corporate culture before deciding which offer to accept.
PricewaterhouseCoopers has an advantage in this space—its ongoing “green intiatives.” We helped the firm understand how to leverage that distinction in a relevant way within Facebook, by creating a personal carbon calculator specifically tuned for college students.
To help promote and expand on this story, we collaborated with the firm to create a personal carbon calculator Facebook application called “Carbon Bigfoot by PwC.” (You’ll need to be logged into your FB account to view the app.)
The carbon calculator space is messy. Despite the flurry of data, most calculators are designed to help homeowners, just once—and induce enough guilt to solicit a carbon offset donation. And if you input the same data across 30 different calculators, you’ll get 30 different results.
We took a different approach.
Carbon Bigfoot is architected and designed for college students, who generally don’t own their own homes, and often live in more than one location over the course of a year and probably have a lot of electrical devices. Instead of focusing on a singular, annual measurement, we decided to engineer a system that asks students to participate monthly—like a gym membership.
The other key difference is visual. Most calculators are entirely devoted to intense data entry. We developed a system of ten characters that visually demonstrate your impact as your carbon footprint grows—which you can share and promote via Facebook tools. And we peppered the experience with insights to help participants gain useful insights as they evolve from a starting point of zero impact through Global Human, EuroFoot, Leadfoot and several other stages up to Maxifoot.
Carbon Bigfoot by PwC is meant to be played with, to encourage ongoing conversation among students and help them see how even small efforts can build a positive result over time, much like the ongoing conversations and carbon impact-reduction happening inside PwC.
