Hey team! We’ve been waiting on info from all the organizers who put on events on Oct 24th, and now we can finally post a recap for you! As you know, Carrotmob recently partnered with 350.org as part of their International Day of Climate Action held on October 24th. 350.org’s mission for 10/24 was to mobilize people all over the world for a global day of action in preparation for the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The goal of this epic day was to show the leaders of the world how much we as world citizens care about getting the CO2 in our atmosphere below 350 parts per million! (Here’s an explanation of the importance of the number 350.) Eight Carrotmobs were held around the world as part of this day of action. Let’s see how we did!

The results:

Bonn, Germany

The Bonn turnout was great- approximately 300 carrotmobbers spent 2,269 Euros in only 3 hours. Bioladen “Biokultur” in Kessenich promised to donate 20% of their revenue from the day to energy efficiency improvements, making for a total impact of 453 Euros! You can view pictures of the event on Flickr.

Durango, CO

The business mobbed in Durango was a small sub shop called Stonehouse Subs. Stonehouse promised to contribute 35% of their revenue to energy-efficiency changes (as determined by an outside consultant). The results were outstanding: $3500 in profits, nearly nine times a typical Saturday’s revenue for the business. ~350 (a fitting number) mobbers were in attendance. The event was sponsored by Annadel Business Solutions and Eco Consulting. Very impressive results for the smallest town to ever hold a Carrotmob! This should give confidence to any of you small towners who are thinking of planning an event. They also got coverage in two local news outlets: Durango Telegraph & Durango Herald

Minneapolis, MN

Minneapolis Carrotmobbers descended on Guse Hardware for a fun-filled day of entertainment and hardware shopping. Esther pulled together a live band, a DJ, and a raffle. Guse Hardware promised 100% of its gross revenue from the day to go towards energy efficiency changes!

San Francisco, CA

The SF carrotmob at Shotwells, a bar in the Mission, was a hopping (like rabbits, who like carrots) good time. In three hours (6pm-9pm) the bar already earned 63% of the total average earnings from an entire Saturday. The bar owners, Dave and Tom, were so excited about the event and about promoting positive change at their bar that they extended the mob until 2am, thus earning 140% in comparison to a regular Saturday night. The event was also filmed by a German tv crew filming a documentary.

San Luis Obispo, CA

SLO mobbers at Quick Stop Market spent $3.356.23 in three hours (seven times the normal revenue for that time!). There were 214 transactions made and 90 lbs of food collected for the local food bank. Quick Stop promised 40% of its revenue from the day to go toward energy efficiency upgrades, for a total of $1,342.49 to be reinvested into the store for eco-improvements. Energy Efficiency Solutions prepared and donated a professional energy audit report of the store, which will be revealed shortly What a fantastic turn-out!

Sydney, Australia

The 10/24 Sydney Carrotmob made history as the first ever Carrotmob held in the southern hemisphere! Way to go! Our good friends down under mobbed the Surry Hills MFC Supermarket. The market pledged 20% of its profits from the day to go toward energy efficiency improvements. About 150- 200 people came to the event, and this impressive group of mobbers spent a lot at the store! The market earned roughly ½ of what they earn in total for a busy Saturday day trading, all in the space of 3 hours. Considering that the store stays open until midnight, this was quite a feat! While Sydney organizers admitted it was a challenge putting on the first ever Carrtomob in Australia, they’re already getting psyched about planning their next Carrotmob. There was also a lot of great publicity surrounding the event! Check out Carrotmob Sydney in the news here: Mind Food, Pyrmont Village, & Frankie.

Victoria, BC, Canada

Victoria on Vancouver Island in Canada planned a very successful Carrotmob at Discovery Coffee. Discovery pledged 100% of their revenue from their downtown location to go towards green improvements. On a normal day Discovery Coffee makes approximately $1250; on the Carrotmob day, Discovery Coffee took in $2100. And it gets better: Discovery was so pleased with the event that they added on revenues from their second location which effectively resulted in 200% revenues from the day (over $3000). That’s awesome. The super work of the Victoria organizers, the terrific response and turnout from the community (~200 people!), and the great commitment of Discovery Coffee has made the Victoria event a success, and, apparently, has inspired others in Victoria to start their own carrotmobs. The event was organized by SmallFeet Inc. Check out coverage of the Victoria event on the local news station: CHTV

Berlin, Germany

We’re pretty sure something cool happened in Berlin, but we don’t speak german. It’s possible that this explains what happened:

Ergebnis: Mit 2.334,34 EUR haben wir die bisherige Rekordmarke des Imbiss mehr als verdoppelt! + 45% davon für die Umwelt.

Anyway, we’d like to say a big thank you to all the Carrotmob organizers and mobbers who participated in the Carrotmob/350.org day! Thanks also to Amanda, Jon, and the rest of the 350 crew for pulling off an inspiring and impressive feat. You can see amazing pictures from other 350 events at 350.org! Now we’ve already got other events coming up in Isla Vista and Brussels, so stay tuned!

We are happy to announce that the next SF Carrotmob event is imminent!

>>> click here for more information <<<

Hey, check it out! We’re used to being in news reports, but now we’re in a book! Like, a paper one! We haven’t read it yet, but “Bag Green Guilt” seems like our kinda book, because it’s all about action! The book describes things we can actually DO to save the planet, you know, like organizing (or even attending) a Carrotmob, or buying solar panels the easy way through One Block Off The Grid…

The purpose of Carrotmob is to change the business world, but if, at the same time, we are able to help people work through their guilt issues with action, that’s probably a good thing too….

When we think about what the role of our Carrotmob organization is going to be in the future, it makes sense for us to manage and support the network of people around the world who are interested in this type of activism. It also makes sense for us to spearhead some of the big global campaigns we want to create. But it doesn’t make sense for us to try to become experts on every issue, every industry, every community. We suspect that part of our destiny is to create partnerships with all sorts of established organizations so that we can help them achieve the goals they’re already working on and they can help us advance this type of activism. So we’re happy to be taking a step towards that future by partnering up with 350.org! This great organization is mobilizing people all over the world for a global day of action on October 24th, before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The goal is to show the leaders of the world how much we care about getting the CO2 in our atmosphere below 350 parts per million! Here’s an explanation of the importance of the number 350.

If our governments don’t hurry up and hit that 350 number then catastrophes will start happening left and right. Famine! Civil War! Economic collapse! Florida will disappear underwater except for a few dozen lucky survivors sitting on top of the Epcot Center, fishing for all the delicious sea creatures recently liberated from SeaWorld Orlando. Is this what will happen? We don’t know, but we do know that we want to help 350.org spread their message far and wide. Furthermore, we want to use this day to create a direct and measurable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. So if you want to help a business reduce their carbon footprint by having them compete in and win a Carrotmob, hit us up, or check out this map to find an event that’s already happening in your part of the world. If you’ve been waiting to organize a Carrotmob, October 24th is the day:

We’ve put up a new page about this partnership and we hope you’ll help us make some noise on October 24th!

And the winner is…Epicenter Café!!!  Hoorah!  The votes have been tallied, and the mob has chosen to reward Epicenter for its greenness and to encourage the café to continue in its efforts.  Either that, or people were terrified by their threat to go Styrofoam! We are stoked for Epicenter, and we will be having the next Carrotmob at their place some time in mid to late August!  Get ready for your Carrotmob coffee and bagels folks!!

A huge shout-out and thank you to our two other participants–Café Madeleine and Sausalito Espresso–for participating in the bidding. We hope this experience has helped them to understand the value consumers place on being environmentally conscious and sustainable. A million thanks to all of you as well for watching the videos, casting your votes, and taking part in this grand experiment.

Check back here, or better yet–subscribe to our feed for more details on the voting results and the upcoming Carrotmob event with Epicenter Café!

As we send you all over to vote for who will win the SOMA cafe Carrotmob we thought we should explain how our voting system works, for those unfamiliar with it. We’ve built our own voting system using the model of Instant-Runoff Voting (also known as “Ranked Choice Voting”). We see this as a better system for voting than most traditional methods. For example, this method of voting allows voters to vote for whoever they would actually want to win, without having to compromise their true opinion in order to “pick a winner”. In other words, this method gets rid of the “spoiler” dynamic, or the idea of “wasted” votes. No voting system is perfect, but we think this method is superior to most. Here’s how it works: (more…)

If you live in SF you’ve been dreaming of local Carrotmob event #2 for awhile. Despite the fact that Carrotmob and Virgance are based here in SF, we’ve had event #2 on the backburner while we’ve been working mainly on supporting other events in other places. After all, we can have a greater impact by spreading this movement far and wide than by planning more small campaigns internally. But we want to keep experimenting with Carrotmob, and so today we’re launching event #2, which we have concocted as a grand experiment to see what else we can learn. You should expect that after this event, future SF events will be planned by other organizers (ie: YOU) who don’t work in the main office every day. But we wanted to do one more to explore the following research questions:

1. What happens when you allow the public to vote for the winner of a Carrotmob?

Will they vote based on the maximum positive impact an event can have? Will they vote on personality? What if you let everyone in the world vote? If people vote who don’t live in the community and won’t be attending the event, will they change the results? Will people get really crazy and try to hack our voting system? Will people care? Will people understand the Instant-Runoff Voting system we’ve built? How many other organizers will want to use this public voting model for their next campaigns? (if you are an editor of a blog at http://yourcity.carrotmob.org we will soon make this app available to you!)

2. What happens when you use qualitative value judgments to decide who wins a Carrotmob event instead of simple quantitative measures?

If you use quantitative measures such as I did in the first ever event (ie: what percentage of revenue do you commit….) there’s no reason to have a vote. The winner is simply the business with the best bid. But a qualitative approach allows different businesses to make different types of offers, depending on what is most appropriate for them. It may be more difficult to determine which action will have the greatest impact, but this is also an acknowledgment that there are many approaches to making a business more socially responsible, and the debate about what’s most effective is a valuable debate to have. The qualitative approach makes it possible for a number of other secondary factors (ie: emotion, context, “lobbying”, popularity, preferred location, etc) to influence the result of the competition. Depending on your perspective this is either a downside or an upside. But it is nice that this will make the whole process of selecting a winner a more inclusive process.

3. Is a campaign necessarily weakened when the mob spends relatively smaller amounts of money?

In the first ever event, many people had good reason to spend a lot of money. After all, they had to stock up their liquor cabinets anyway, so why not spend $100? In this campaign, we are focusing on coffee shops. You can only reasonably spend like $5 in a coffee shop. We know some of you are crazy unreasonable, and capable of making it rain enough money in a coffee shop to fill your little red wagon with chocolate croissants, but honestly, even if more people come to this event than the last, if they only spend $5, that’s still much less spending than what was spent at a small grocery store. So will this event still be a success?

4. How does reputation compare to cash in terms of importance for a coffee shop?

Is it possible that even if a coffee shop doesn’t get huge revenues on one day, that a campaign will be extremely profitable for them in the long-term because of their improved reputation? This may be an interesting factor. You see, people came from all over the Bay Area to support K & D Market. But I don’t expect someone who lives in Oakland to go all the way to K & D every time they want to buy a handle of Jack. They call them “convenience stores” for a reason. K & D was in it for the one day payoff. But coffee shops in SOMA are nearby lots of offices filled with lots of people who drink coffee every day. Those people have multiple options for where they get their coffee. Does a Carrotmob have the power to change the preferred coffee shop of enough people in a neighborhood to give them a long-term advantage over all their less-responsible competitors? Will this result in mini-Carrotmobs by “the usuals” every day from now on? Or will people only show up on one day and then never again support? We will have to wait awhile and then ask the winning coffee shop what sort of sustained boost they have experienced.

5. How does a campaign on a weekday with no afterparty compare to a campaign on a Sunday followed by a free concert in Dolores Park?

We know Carrotmob can work as a party destination for your day, but what does it look like when people just want to swing by for 5 minutes on their way to work? Will the mob want to stick around and hang out, or just efficiently spend their money for the cause and go? Can we keep the line short and efficient this time?

6. Will people vote for those businesses who have not made change, or those who have already made change?

This is quite possibly the most important question that we will answer with this event. Every campaign is different, but we’re definitely at a bit of a fork in the road here. This vote is going to be a referendum on the question of what Carrotmob’s primary purpose should be: Should we focus on creating the most change directly, or on rewarding the most responsible businesses whether or not we are causing change? We don’t want to interfere with your own decision-making, so you may wish to watch the videos for yourself before reading the next sentence. Most observers who have previewed the videos feel that Epicenter Cafe is the most environmentally-friendly coffee shop in the competition, but they also feel like Carrotmob could have a stronger impact by rewarding one of the other two cafes. What to do? There is no right answer to this question yet, people. This week we need to come up with our first answer.

So it’s time for a few shout outs. First off, Kirstin Henninger and the Green Cafe Network helped us out by consulting with the cafes about what changes they could make. Our expertise is in coordinating the mob, so it’s great to work with experts and non-profit partners who are able to achieve their goals by partnering to plan a Carrotmob! We hope that the winning cafe will choose to join the GCN as well. A lot of people have contributed to getting this event off the ground, including Curtis, Natasha, Brad, Jacob, Susanna… oh and a huge shout out to Aaron and Grant for coding up a voting app that is beautiful on the outside and has a beautiful algorithm on the inside as well. And thanks in advance to you, mob, for making this possible.

The time has now come for you to head on over to our Carrotmob voting page and make your choice! Be sure to subscribe to the blog or follow us on Twitter for updates on this campaign….

UPDATE: We hired 2 summer interns so we are no longer looking…Thanks!

Today we decided that we have a spot for a summer intern to work on Carrotmob! Pretty late notice, we know, but surely this will be perfect timing for some of you. We need support in several areas. For example, we have a million people emailing us every day. Some are organizers who are asking for support or advice. Some are producers of national news shows. Some are people who want to know how their business can somehow win a campaign. Some are people with random questions. We need help responding to all these emails. Also, responding to these emails isn’t robot work. We constantly get fascinating, complicated questions, and we need someone who can help answer tricky questions. But besides email there’s much more to do as well….

- Make phone calls to local organizers around the world in order to vet them, train them, and support them however you can.
- Use our Wordpress backend to create new Carrotmob subdomain blogs (ie: http://tampabay.carrotmob.org) for new organizers who pop up.
- Write blog posts like this, and maintain all parts of the Carrotmob website.
- Maintain records of what the status of various campaigns is, and followup to maintain productive relationships with organizers around the world.
- You will help plan the next SF-based Carrotmob event.
- You will help develop an online library of resources for Carrotmob organizers.
- You may help manage the Carrotmob presence on various social media sites.

That’s the big stuff. There will also be a ton of other possible projects which we won’t get in to. What you do might depend on what sort of expertise you have. Are you a software engineer? A community organizer? Your other experience might determine what sort of project you end up on. Here are some other things about this position:

- You work directly with Brent Schulkin (Founder of Carrotmob, Co-Founder of Virgance).
- You won’t get paid any cash or equity. If you’re in school and need school credit, no problem.
- It’s always possible that there will be future employment opening down the line that a successful intern would be well-positioned to apply for, but that is not an expectation we are setting for this position. We really don’t know whether/when a position like that would exist.
- We need someone full-time (or close to it), at the Virgance office in San Francisco.
- Virgance is a “teaching startup”, so just by being here you will learn an incredible amount about how to launch your own startup. This position will be mainly focused on helping to maintain and scale what we’re doing with Carrotmob, but you will learn more than that. You will be on the front-lines of exciting explorations into new types of business, community organizing, economic activity, and so on…

Here are some things that we are looking for:

- The thought of helping to define and grow a revolutionary new movement of activism makes you giddy with excitement.
- You are good at emailing (ie: you write well, you have an appealing style/voice, you have great attention to detail, you write back to people promptly and efficiently, but also with authenticity)
- You have experience with community organizing or different types of activism, and you are able to speak intelligently about environmental issues which most organizers are interested in.
- You can bring in your own laptop.
- You have the technical aptitude to instantly be a pro at Wordpress.
- When people talk to you they get more excited, not less excited.
- You have already read and internalized the About and FAQ pages on the Carrotmob site.
- You don’t need a whole ton of direction…you can just get to work and make stuff happen.

Here are some other bonus things that would be cool but not required:

- You are a talented video producer/editor.
- You are a coder who can create a Wordpress plugin or other small project in no time.
- You are good at public speaking in case you need to do some press interviews for Carrotmob.
- You don’t mind being on video in case we want to make some videos.

That’s enough of a description for now. Let’s get busy. If you’re interested, send a resume to jobs@virgance.com with “Carrotmob internship” in the subject…

Have you heard of this site called “Garfield Minus Garfield“? If you haven’t seen it, here’s a blurb about it:

Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.

Hilarious. Tibet is one of our engineers here at Virgance and he brought the following image to our attention. I think it says a lot about the neglect and undernourishment that the Carrotmob blog has been feeling lately…

So yes, here is a hasty update… We just updated our list of Carrotmob blogs and google map to reflect some new Carrotmobs that are in the works! Now we need to get onto the rest of the continents. Also you should know about two events coming up soon! This Saturday, June 13th, is the first Carrotmob in Berlin, and June 21st is the first Carrotmob in Portland, OR. We’re still dragging our heels on doing the next SF campaign because we can use the same time to make way more campaigns happen around the world…but don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten, it’ll happen…. Also if you didn’t see it, there was a big article about us in Time, online and in print. Also, be sure to spread the word about our solar program, 1BOG, if you know anyone in the market for solar. Another post coming soon…

Check out this video by Current TV of the Carrotmob event in Brooklyn spearheaded by local organizer Megan Dietz: