Digital Community Engagement For The Renewable Energy Sector.

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Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£250,000

March 31, 2022

March 31, 2023

Savannah de Savary is the Founder and CEO of Built-ID, a leading social impact startup in the PropTech space. After graduating from university she started out her career in real-estate development. She grew frustrated with the lengthy and bureaucratic inefficiencies that limited access to critical data for developing real estate projects to who you know rather than what you know. She felt there was a real need to democratise the planning process. And so Built-ID was born!

Since founding Built-ID, Savannah has developed an award winning community engagement platform - Give My View which engages diverse demographics and hard to reach groups who wouldn't typically engage with decision-makers & empowers them to become a core part of the change-making process. Thanks to employees at renewable energy companies enjoying engaging with property projects using her platform, she had the opportunity to trial Give My View on two proposed offshore wind developments.

_"The resulting impact was unprecedented with the two hyper-localised projects engaging over 13,600 local community members and revealing the untapped potential of the previously silent majority to become environmental changemakers. Unlike the vocal minority who dominate traditional engagement channels, our platform primarily engaged people who're passionate about carbon reduction, with only 4% who engaged not wanting their local area doing more to generate clean energy. In terms of our impact on the many demographics who're traditionally alienated, despite only 28% of the locals we successfully engaged being unaware of the proposed wind farm, 94% disclosed that they hadn't engaged via the traditional consultation channels."_

These insights gained from the trial project inspired Savannah's idea to develop a product tailor-made for renewable energy projects which would have an even greater social and environmental impact empowering thousands of local people who're passionate about climate action to become changemakers in their community.

Savannah's vision is to create accessible engagement software that dynamically facilitates learning and engagement between renewable energy project decision-makers and diverse community demographics. Innovative community activation tools and game mechanics will be used to incentivise people who're passionate about sustainability but don't typically engage and to trigger community changemaking that protects and conserves the environment.

This aim is to address the urgent need to reduce the UK's carbon footprint and to empower diverse community groups to more proactively protect their environment.