Ecomonkey started lending on Kiva a couple of years ago as Ecomonkey. We always lent out $25 amounts to reduce the risk of losing the principal, as you don’t get any interest back on your (for we are helping build up human capital too!) and there is also some risk associated with exchange rate fluctuations (wow!). We started this from our own pockets at first, just a few hundred dollars, and then proceeded to use the unclaimed commissions received from participating retailers on the Ecomonkey shopping programme.

Whilst this made us feel good, the EM programme wasn’t working. Once we had established that the extrinsic rewards programme wasn’t really working (the extrinsic incentives were insufficient a motivator to use our programme) we decided that all user commissions would be given to Kiva. We possibly didn’t do this early enough or publicise this off-site as much as we could have done, but the fund grew from a few hundred dollars to a $1000 before stalling. It was topped up by the fairly trivial revenues arising from Google Adsense (it didn’t pay for the server Ed.).

Because our loan fund is a revolving one (the loans are not donations) it has now supported over 150 individuals, and therefore funded close to $4000 of loans. Our fund gets dipped into to encourage more people to join (we send the $25 to invest) and from time to time we top it up.

With the gradual decline of user patronage on Ecomonkey we have created a new Kiva Team via Ourlocality.org, a very local community publishing platform created by the people behind Ecomonkey.

We’d like to grow the membership of that team, when we have a moment to spare.

People like to search for things before they do anything else. They don’t know the url can be placed in the url bar cutting out a few steps. Oh and whats going on here? Where has the url bar gone? So how do you get to places then? Have you heard of a search engine? It is almost universal now that the search engine is used to find even the most familiar website, which any half decent browser will remember. People would rather type in a complicated search query into google than type one letter to return a familiar website.

Turning to the question of using a search engine to find greener products, what is the point of serving of millions of results to users if:

• most people only scroll through at most the first few pages?
• the results are frequently cluttered with indistinct or inappropriate results (regionally remote)?
• people have different search strategies which the search engines may not be able to cope with?
• content in search engines isn’t structured according to the criterion in question (organic socks might work, but green socks?)

So our thought was for a ‘curated’ or ‘managed’ list of the the UK green shopping channels, suitably chunked into familiar overlapping categories. An Amazon of green stuff if you like, but with simplicity of Google and only the very basic categories (Tesco style.) We didn’t have the know how to do this from scratch ourselves, but in five minutes we had the basics sorted using Google Co-op, in 1 hour we were having fun with xml contexts or facets (one or the other).

The pure green shops were few in number, but would obviously grow. Even so we are still really saying there are only shades of green, so the ‘editing of consumer choices’ seemed legitimate (a supermarket does this you know!). OK this wasn’t an entirely new idea, Green Maven was doing a directory style thing in the US, also using the co-op approach – but this was an old fashioned directory model which was rapidly going out of date.

There seemed to be a gap over here in the UK and Europe for a cute green search engine that wasn’t run by a PR company (I don’t know if the company I am thinking about s still in business, so won’t say anything too disparaging), but an open and transparent and perhaps collaborative project.

Did we get any collaborators, you ask? Did we get any users, we reply. Enough users to pay for the odd stamp for the odd thing that still required a postie (Google adverts were used to generate the revenue). This was part of our learning: that people are often not as green as they say they are and are creatures of habit. We couldn’t find people we knew really well and that were were pretty green – yup the hairshirted, Guardian reading, tofu-munching sort (whats wrong with any of those? Ed.) that used it more than once or twice.

Their excuse? Oh we don’t shop that much and we buy everything locally; we don’t watch TV – we run a community theatre; we don’t listen to music – we make our own; we don’t restore and modernise our homes – we dig clay out of the earth with our bare hands and chop down trees with adzes; we don’t buy clothes or go on holiday, or have children, no not now that we know better. None of which is quite true, of course, but it was interesting to understand how green people perceive themselves as basically ‘non-consumerist’. We knew they consumed quite a bit more than they would let on, but perhaps agonised a bit more than most. The chief difference was that they were not ostentatious about their consumption, slightly embarrassed would be a closer description.

Maybe because it took us less than a day to get our heads around developing the basics it was only natural we would get attention for less than a few nanoseconds … Was this a prelude to the age of apps? Are people’s concentration spans so diminished now that only a new app will turn them on, but again only transiently?

What did I say about people not going beyond a few pages of Google results?  Reality is closer to the first 3 results, which are probably just adverts. And herein lies a problem. It is not so much a lack of persistence, energy and drive (this is a problem actually, if we stop thinking), but a complete and unwarranted trust in the veracity of Google’s results (and ignoring as irrelevant the millions of other results which could be better, cheaper, greener, whatever).

We kind of knew all that, but thought we might be able leverage that last bit (the unwarranted trust – and we were after all getting a thousand visitors daily on EM). But I guess dozens of other’s thought they could do this too, with dozens of mutant Google engines masquerading as doing good engines (famously the black google was going to save some energy).

We learnt very quickly that trust just has to be built incrementally and over time, the hard way. Otherwise it is only 5 nanoseconds of fame.  Only a few can be overnight sensations like Instagram, and hey our CTO couldn’t program for toffee.

Were there any high points? Not really. We did deploy a couple of other co-op engines. The http://search.ecomonkey.co.uk was never quite as up to the minute as we wanted, so we never abandoned our very own built in search tools for the main Ecomonkey site, which our CTO did reprogram rather cleverly.

We also made our own ‘corporate research’ tool that allowed us to do very rapid research on companies’ ethical and social responsibility, using our favourite repertoire of sites http://greenspy.co.uk. This probably saved us a bit of time, more than anything else. We liked it so much we built it into the company profile pages at e.g. http://ecomonkey.co.uk/retailer/evans-cycles. It obviously worked better with larger corporates, which were more likely to have public / press scrutiny of their CSR.

In some respects even a modicum of advertising on an affiliate based site seems cannibalistic. Anyway, it seems that eBay, Amazon and a few others do play adverts next to their content. As a user I find that irritating, especially when they almost seamless in design and on a site which didn’t rely entirely on organic search. One cannot help feeling that accidental clicks must amount for a lot of the costs of CPC advertising.

So did we make money out of Adsense? Sure we did. But barely enough to pay for the dedicated server EM was running on. We eventually moved back to Virtual machine, waiting for a panda to arrive and take away the remaining passers by. Panda didn’t kill EM, it was already in intensive care.

In no particular order:

• lack of consumer goodwill,
• insufficient +ve press,
• lack of a patient sponsor,
• no big fat marketing budget

have all conspired to make the project fall far short of expectations. We’ll keep it running for demonstration purposes.

The website was built to provide rewards for greener shopping, and could have heralded a new era in green shopping, like Tesco Clubcard greenpoints, but greener and better ;) We had a ragbag of other great ideas that could have been built in, all at the time that everyone was thinking more about using incentives to change behaviour.

This was never a green shopping channel in the strict sense, but a bigger market in which all products, brands and retailers were rated by their greeness; this governed how much reward a consumer would get if purchased, with the highest reward reserved for the greenest choices. This chimed with some research that said that a nudge, incentive (or bribe) can encourage positive behaviours.

And since we cannot be green all of the time, a lesser but still competitive rate of reward would be given to lower ranked products.

At its peak we had 250,000 products in the database, possibly more, with many thousands of brands and over 50 participating retailers.

The upside is that we built a robust system with small capital invested, which withstood the challenges technically, which is no small achievement. We were very very pleased with those that helped make this happen, a little bit later than we had hoped, but otherwise on budget.

All suppliers have been and continue to be paid (except the ones that failed or could not deliver.) We lost money, a lot of money. But this was our own money, not the banks, not unsuspecting investors.

A word about all those that didn’t help or obstructed, confused or simply failed to deliver. We’d like to name them (and there were quite a few more than I expected), but they know who they are. Perhaps the less said the better.

Entrepreneurs should always be aware that there are greedy people out there whose enthusiasm to work with you is exceeded only by their appetite to drain you of your hard earned cash.

Lastly Kiva and several hundred small businesses in the developing world have benefited to the tune of around $3000 invested or reinvested. This is a revolving fund and has helped around 150 small enterprises get off the ground. It continues to get topped up and sometimes donated (to spread help the word), and gets reinvested at the rate of $100 every few months. This is nowhere as much as we would have liked, but it makes us happy.

Sometimes it helps to start at the end, so that is what I am going to do.