Idea challenge for public good - #SustainHack case study
Responsible Business Forum are the organizers of the 7th CSR Marketplace, and this year they’ve partnered with BGŻ BNP Paribas bank and Kompania Piwowarska to hold an idea challenge on the ChallengeRocket.com platform. The online event was given a name #SustainHack and focused on sustainable development in Polish society.
Responsible Business Forum is the largest NGO in Poland that operates since 2000. Their mission is to promote corporate social responsibility, help businesses grow in a way that benefits the society, and minimizes negative impact of business activities. BGŻ BNP Paribas is one of the biggest banks present in Poland with over 450 facilities across the country. They offer individual clients savings, loans, investments products, and a multitude of services and solutions for businesses. Kompania Piwowarska is one of the biggest brewing groups in Poland, owns three of the most popular beer brands in Poland.
Challenge in numbers
Number of projects: 64
Number of participants: 242
Duration: 2 months
Prizes: 2x 10.000 PLN
Projects
There were, in fact, two separate challenges one could take part in, first being by the BGŻ BNP Paribas bank, which aimed at fighting the social exclusion with ideas. More specifically, the bank sought solutions to help elderly, and impaired people with access to online banking, contactless payments, and everything related to financial matters in the electronic reality that we live in.
1st place - Easily - Safely - Online
This project is an internet banking app designed with the elderly, as well as hearing and visually impaired people in mind. In one visit at the bank the app’s layout can be adjusted to best suit the needs of the user, with UI being composed of big, distinctive elements containing predefined shortcuts. Facial and voice recognition functionality can detect users’ frustration and suggest immediate support chat to help resolve an issue. For visually impaired users NFC tags labeled using Braille can be utilized to perform predefined money transfers and other operations.
Honorable mention - ParrotOne
Project developed by a disabled person for disabled people, with deep knowledge on the subject. The submission is a typing assist system, similar to autocorrect in your smartphone, but designed to work with both touchscreen and physical keyboards, with special care being taken to account for disabled people suffering from weaker muscles or trembling hands.
Honorable mention - Online banking for seniors
Online banking service is presented in a form of a game/simulation with different levels of difficulty. Such system is meant to help elderly people improve their understanding of how electronic payments work, step by step.
The second challenge in the event was set by Kompania Piwowarska, which sought ways of raising awareness of responsible alcohol consumption, preventing pregnant women from drinking, and stopping intoxicated people from driving.
1st place - Kompan Chatbot
Kompan Chatbot, according to its creators, is not meant to scare or moralize its users, but rather to educate and help consume alcohol responsibly. It’s a Facebook Messenger chatbot available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and to assist its users it asks a set of questions to gather essential information on the person and give them instructions and suggestions how to plan their partying time so that they can spend it safely and enjoy themselves.
2nd place - AlkoSTOP
This project suggests to cleverly repurpose beer bottle labels, changing the name of a beverage to a short slogan promoting responsible alcohol consumption. The solution is very easy and inexpensive to introduce, yet can directly impact and positively influence the target group. In addition, the inside of the bottle cap is suggested to be a place for short alcohol-related facts that serve educational purpose.
3rd place - FaceRecognition – Radicalzz
Who said buying a bottle of your favorite beer can’t be made more fun? Authors of this project decided to give it a shot. A face recognition system is meant to determine the age of person attempting to buy alcohol in a shop. If the age is determined to be below the legal one to be allowed to make the purchase, the clerk has the leverage to deny. If, however, such prediction is incorrect, and the person is, in fact, allowed to buy their drink, the shop gives it out for free. It might be a fun lottery kind of challenge, which will surely help identify underage people better and deny selling alcohol to them.
Purpose
The world is moving forward faster than ever before, technological breakthroughs happen on a daily basis, comfort and standard of our lives is improving by the minute. You can work from your home, get paid via money transfer to your bank account, order a pizza online, and pay for it using a contactless card. It’s all clear, you do that every week, nothing out of ordinary, right? For you, sure, but let’s not forget elderly, and disabled people are also a part of our society, and their abilities to operate in the electronically-oriented world aren’t on par with yours. They are excluded from the wonders of moderns technology, the purpose of #SustainHack was to help change that situation.
Alcoholic beverages are a part of almost every house party and consuming them responsibly will lead to great times with friends, but like with everything in life, moderation is the key. It’s not unusual to see the news about intoxicated driver causing loss of lives of innocent people. Some pregnant women, be it due to stress, difficult social background, or other factors might happen to drink alcohol, harming their unborn children in the process. While a glass of wine or a bottle of beer can be a perfect complement to the meal, or just an enjoyable beverage, some people misuse those causing themselves and people around them to suffer. Kompania Piwowarska set out a goal to raise awareness of responsible alcohol consumption in our society with belief that creative minds will be best stimulated to create solutions when faced with an inspiring idea challenge.
What we have learned
#SustainHack was designed by, and for Polish people, targeting issues that are well known in our society, and with that, we expected the participants to be very engaged in solving the problems they may have been affected by, directly or indirectly. Project submitted to the challenge were nothing short of impressive. The whole initiative has shown that people from many age groups deeply care about both disabled and elderly members of our society, and that helping is natural. We’re glad to have seen the engagement as high as this, especially among students, which shows how even the younger generations want to be involved in shaping up the world around them.
Every hackathon we organize at ChallengeRocket.com is an extremely valuable lesson, and we cherish each and every one of those. In case of #SustainHack we went outside of the regular set of tasks related to promotion, which, by now, we believe to have perfected. Along with heads of Responsible Business Forum, BGŻ BNP Paribas and Kompania Piwowarska we’ve held a livestream on our Facebook page to answer all of the questions participants had, be it about the process of registration, types of projects, rules, and anything in between.
As a platform for challenges like this one, it has been an honor to help organize #SustainHack. Working with Responsible Business Forum, as well as its partners, BGŻ BNP Paribas bank and Kompania Piwowarska, we couldn’t have imagined a better way to serve our society and hope for more occasions to collaborate in the future.
Our doors are always open, we are eager to work on yet another challenge, and help your business grow, reach new audiences, and expand its scope of activities. We’ve worked with companies like NVIDIA, Microsoft, Oracle, or IBM. Let us join you on your next adventure! Take a look at our offer, when ideas start rushing in get in touch with us, we’ll be more than happy to work with you, explain everything and make sure for your challenge to be as successful as every event we’ve been involved in in the past!
