You want the change the world, right? Well, that usually involves (it actually always involves) motivating people to do a thing.

It can be very difficult to get people motivated to support your cause. But it doesn't have to be. When we learn about the drivers of human behavior, we can use some simple techniques that hack into the motivational core of the human animal.

One really simple tool you can use to enhance motivation is a leaderboard. Leaderboards are a classic gamification tool. They are used in pretty much every sport and point-based game.

A leaderboard is simply a list of the members of your group, ranked in order from top performing to bottom. You can jazz up your leaderboard by assigning star ratings, awards, progress bars, up-and-down arrows, or points. The great thing about gamification is that you can easily combine several gamification techniques like this to enhance the others.

There are many studies showing the power of leaderboards and social competition. A leaderboard added to an online learning experiment found that students given leaderboards interacted with their project an average of 30 times more often than others. (1)

Several of the studies I’ve read on leaderboards reveal an interesting theme. They show that it is not necessarily the social competition between players that drives the change, but it is the transparency of information, progress and goal-setting that leads to other social developments that inevitably lead to the change in results. With this understanding, we can view gamification as a data-driven informational indicator, rather than a competitive ‘game’.

Leaderboards require measurement

Behind the leaderboard are some bigger principles that you'll need to address.

The first one is measurement. You need to have a data point to start with in order to rank your players in ascending or descending order.  It might seem pretty obvious to measure what you are trying to change in the world, but you'd be surprised how rarely it is done. Many people spend a great deal of time working on campaigns and projects without having any idea whatsoever what the data says about their cause, or if they are having any effect on it at all.

Who are your players?

The second thing you'll need is to identify is who your players are. Again, this might be something you have not yet considered. Players can be individual people in a group, or they can be teams. Your players might be whole cities, suburbs, schools, colleges, corporations, or apartment buildings.

A leaderboard for vegan cities

For example, if you are passionate about getting more people to go vegan, you might decide that your players are cities. You could then make a leaderboard of all the cities in your country ranked by their meat intake measured in calories. Your leaderboard would show the “veggie-est” cities at the top and the “death-liest" cities at the bottom.

You'd be surprised just how motivating city ranking can be on whole communities to lift their score. Just check out this TED talk on "Oklahoma City's 1 million pounds campaign". I've never seen a leaderboard of the meatiest cities, but I think if we made one, and appropriately publicised it, it would kick plenty of people into eating more plants and less animals - and make some serious change happen.

A tiny leaderboard might push you in a big way

While a leaderboard is a simple tool, finding the data you need to rank your players in the context of achieving social and environmental change might be quite a big deal. It's possible that don't know what these numbers are, and that you'll have to implement some reasonable effort to get these numbers.

Measuring waste in schools

For example, if you are involved with a school, you might want to implement a "zero waste schools" program. You decide on making a leaderboard for the fourteen schools in your city. In order to find out the numbers you'd need in order to rank your schools from best to worst, you'd need to know how much waste each school is making. That means weighing all the trash that each school makes, Not impossible, but not an easy hour's work either.

This is why there is massive scope to implement simple gamification tools such as leaderboards for environmental and social gains, because getting a leaderboard up like this, can be a real challenge. But I promise you, the rewards are there.

Leaderboards are so powerful for a few reasons:

1. They leverage the power of disclosure

2. They get our data out and into the open for everyone to see

3. They pull on our innate drive to be seen as good in the eyes of others

4. They inspire continual improvement for players to keep reaching for a better placement on the leaderboard.

5. They assist us with goal setting

6. We are powerfully motivated to avoid the shame of a low score

7. By looking at their numbers, each player is forced to take an active and rational approach to improving their score, causing them to avoid projects that are emotionally driven (like an art projects or a movie night) but don't affect the numbers, and focus on whatever strategy makes change (like replacing soda vending machines with a cup refill station).