youdo tokens
One of my favourite topics of conversation / things to think about is where youdo tokens will go.
When George and I first started talking about tokens, we were thinking about them in similar terms to loyalty points, e.g. air miles or a supermarket club card. Virgin Pulse was something we looked at closely. Their offering worked around employees of VP’s customers earning points for activity which could then be redeemed against a catalogue of cool ‘stuff’ like Apple Watches.
We wanted to use tokens to incentivise usage of youdo at both customer and employee level. Lots of companies offered ways for people to do something for themselves. We wanted tokens to have an altruistic or philanthropic feel to them and linking activity to impact was born.
At their simplest, tokens do two things;
They keep score. Whoever has the most tokens has done the most
They measure impact. The more tokens you and your company earn, the greater the impact you make
Our initial thinking about where to ‘spend’ youdo tokens was based around a ‘youdo projects portfolio’. We find cool projects doing great work and bring them into our portfolio so we could act as an additional source of fund-raising for them by raising awareness within our customer group. We’ve retained this concept (check out Graine de Vie, Blue Marine Foundation and Suicide&co) but we’ve also extended it to include organisations chosen by our customers. The reasons for this are practical; a) our customers have long standing relationships that they want to maintain and b) researching impact projects is a full time job in itself so our portfolio wasn’t growing as fast as we wanted it to!
Our CTO Gulliver and I have been looking to the future of tokens and it’s exciting. We’re exploring expanding the number of ‘checkout options’ for tokens when a company decides they want to redeem them. Obviously we’ll continue to support donations to good causes (direct or via youdo) but we’re also exploring the following;
Supporting digital currency transactions via stablecoins like USDC or Tether
Converting tokens to carbon credits and retiring / burning them at checkout
Minting NFTs that certify the number of tokens earned
We’re excited about what we can we achieve with youdo tokens. If you have any ideas about other ways we can use them, we’d love to hear from you!
