Climate change is still a contentious issue for many people around the world. The David Suzuki Foundation recognized that influencing people to take action on it started with getting people to have real and productive conversations about it. In collaboration with Karin Tamerius of Smart Politics, they adapted the five-step process from her famous “Angry Uncle Bot” to focus on how to have conversations about climate change that find common ground instead of increasing polarization.

After a participatory chatbot workshop where we introduced members of the Foundation to the potential of chatbots, we collaborated to find an impactful way to quickly launch a truly interactive version of this five-step process using chatbot technology.

Our discovery process started with a workshop focused on who would be using the chatbot. We led key members at the Foundation through activities that produced empathy maps, journey maps, and “how might we...” statements. This enabled us to understand the state of mind people are in when it comes to contentious conversations about climate change, what we hoped the experience we were building would lead to in these moments, and identify what our product goals would be.

Most importantly, the experience had to deliver on its education goal of learning the five-step conversation process, but the goals covered a lot of ground. Internally, the Foundation sought to test out new technologies. Being that they hadn’t utilized chatbots in the wild before, we had to make sure that the platform we used could be launched quickly to a wide variety of people without overinvesting. Ticking these boxes meant we could efficiently generate learnings to drive future initiatives for the Foundation.

With our goals in mind, the team selected the Chatfuel platform. To take full advantage of the platform, we adjusted to incorporate the right interactions, edited for a chat-appropriate length, incorporated other media formats, and more. All of this makes the chatbot feel right at home beside the other conversations in your Messenger app.

Driving real change in how people approach conversations meant going beyond the chatbot. To ensure fluidity between the chatbot experience and other activities of the Foundation, we set up Zapier to capture several data attributes and export them to internal databases and Salesforce. This places the chatbot at the starting point for driving support and furthering engagement around climate change.