Invest 1% to do good

A Service Design Principle for doing good without much effort


I've noticed lately a few initiatives where companies do good with every interaction. Each tiny good action isn't big, but when you add all the tiny actions, it makes a pretty good impact.

For example, 1% for the Planet is a network of companies that have decided to invest 1% of their profit towards positive projects for the planet. Many companies also plant a tree for a purchase you make.

There are even services like Stripe Climate that help businesses of any size do this automatically. Stripe is a tool that offers a payment service so users can pay with a credit card online. With Stripe Climate, 1% of the sales goes automatically for climate change projects. What I find especially interesting is that if you are already using Stripe, it's just a click of a button to make this automatic. 

For a few months now, that's something I've also installed for the Swiss Innovation Academy.

But this isn't limited to companies. If you buy a burger in a Mcdonald's restaurant in Switzerland, the vending machine asks you if you want to round up the price of your meal to give a few cents to charity. A few cents isn't much, but when you serve thousands of customers, it has a lot of impacts. Especially if you set this kind of stuff as "per default".

So my question here is:

How can we help the people and companies we serve to do good without effort and maybe even automatically?



Daniele's notes

  • This is a first quick draft of this Service Design Principle

  • Feel free to share other examples that follow this same idea to improve this principle