
Upcycling by Crowdsourcing: Leveraging Pro-Environmental Behavior as Corporate Strategy
This report provides a critique of Company X's strategy of reliance on vol-
unteer organizations and makes recommendations to support and improve
its collection operations. We used focus-group interviews and a national
email survey of volunteer leaders to determine the motivating factors for
joining and participating in the program. Our results show that 68% of
collection sites are located in schools and that schools are the most pro-
ductive sites. Most non-school collection sites are primarily female. There
are two leading motivational factors for sites: nancial rewards and con-
cern for the environment, and site o cials would like to be able to share
best practices with each other. Anecdotally, collection site o cials are
frustrated by Company X's customer service and by the long waitlists for
the more popular waste items. We recommend that Company X focus in
the short-term on increasing its volunteer productivity through improved
customer service, by providing volunteer groups a platform with which
to communicate with one another, and by sharing speci c volunteer de-
mographics with CPG brand partners. In the medium-term, Company
X should focus on enhancing its environmental message and diversifying
volunteer demographics, and in the long-term, should consider how best
to modify its business model in moving forward to nd alternative ways
of financing Squads.
Caldron, Taylor
Hughes, Grant
Lange, Nicholas
Matzen, Elizabeth
Rahbar, Raina
Gladwin, Tom