Want to cut costs across your portfolio while improving environmental conditions for future generations? Of course you do. You can achieve both when you turn sustainability initiatives into games that get residents and tenants involved. The basic tools below can help you get started today. Gamification: Undercover Education (and Self-Help) Meetings, lectures, and classes on saving energy rarely alter our habits. Feedback, seeing the results of our actions often in real-time, has proven to help to change habits. That’s where gamification fits into your energy-saving strategy. What is gamification? In short, it’s implementing game design elements in non-game contexts. It’s making something that tends to be unexciting and intangible more exciting and interactive. Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development in the Netherlands published research on the gamification of energy savings. Researchers concluded that solely issuing smart meters in buildings did not result in optimal energy savings. It was also necessary to change residents’ energy usage behavior. Games proved to be an effective way to heighten awareness and alter user habits. Historically, residents and tenants are slow to change comfortable behaviors even if we know that we can save money. That’s because changing our behaviors takes effort, such as closing blinds before we leave the building to minimize radiant heat or using an app to turn off lights and outlets. None of those tasks takes much effort. But any task is yet another thing to do in a world where we already feel too busy! Gamification helps to take the effort out of changing our comfortable behaviors and makes conserving resources more entertaining. Copernicus Institute details the following components for effective gamification of energy savings. What Makes Gamification Successful? Gamification can be simplified for both commercial and multifamily properties. The American Council for an Energy Efficient...

Can you remember back to your middle school days? Perhaps it’s a different visual for everyone, but mine is a crystal clear picture with smell-o-vision. You know that “this classroom of preteens is barely discovering deodorant” smell? I remember it well. I also remember the antagonistic nature of boys versus girls in raucous gameplay. Nothing else could whip my classmates into a competitive frenzy then when my fourth grade teacher would split us up into gender-based teams and break out the trivia cards. Oh, the exhilaration of walking up to the white board to triumphantly strike a line through four slashes to make a total of five points. This practice continued well into the sixth grade, where our history teacher allowed our class to finally pick our own teammates and compete in the ultimate quiz game where the answer was provided…you just had to phrase the question properly. “What is, Jeopardy!?” Each team would compete fiercely to rack up the most points, unknowingly learning and retaining information for a final exam. Ah, the thrill of victory. The rules of gamification Gaming techniques like these, incorporating elements like points and leaderboards, are far from new. The concept is rooted in the deeper mechanics of game creation, which has a rich history in both the competition and education realms. Dr. Karl Kapp, assistant director of Bloomsburg University’s Institute for Interactive Technologies, writes: “A well designed game is a system in which players engage in an abstract challenge, defined by rules, interactivity and feedback that result in a quantifiable outcome often eliciting an emotional reaction.” This emotional reaction, when applied to learning, can translate into a sense of confidence, achievement and success. This is why many human resource professionals are now constructing employee development and retention programs...