How the Climate Fresk helps over one million people understand climate change
👋 Hey, it’s Jaime. Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share how thriving open source projects grow their communities:
Here’s what you have missed from past newsletters:
How a Serbian activists created a Revolution, and what we can learn from it to change things
How a group of Berkeley researchers took over the chip industry
How Vitalik Buterin kickstarted the hottest cryptocurrency movement
Subscribe to get access to these posts, and all future posts.
In this week’s newsletter, we’ll cover how the Climate Fresk became one of the fastest-growing non-profits and communities in the world and has helped over a million people understand the complex stakes behind climate change.
I originally published a Twitter thread of this essay in March 2022. Since then, I’ve expanded the post. Here’s the story.
Read time: 11 minutes
In 2018, the Climate Fresk launched a workshop that spread like wildfire.
This workshop has been translated into 45 languages and has helped over 1.2 million people in 157 countries understand the mechanisms of climate change and take action. And they’ve done this with the help of over 70.000 volunteers and a team of 35 people.
By February 2024, the Climate Fresk’s non-profit reached over 1.5 million people, and it grew its revenues by 328% annually, from 62K € in 2019 to over 4.8M € in 2022 .
In 2018, Cedric Ringenbach started a participatory workshop called the Climate Fresk, an accessible workshop format to help understand how climate change works to all kinds of people in 3 hours.
How does it work?
Seven participants play around a table with 42 cards representing climate change components. They have to find which elements are the causes and which ones are the effects.
This exercise helps people understand all the cause-and-effect links between climate dynamics.
By the end, as you might imagine, it's a bit depressing to see it all laid out, so there is a one-hour debrief to explore together why it's not too late to act and what the solutions are.
So how did Cedric Ringenbach and the Climate Fresk team deploy a community of educators so massively with almost no resources?
There are 8 key ingredients:
1/ First create a tool that works, then one that scales
2/ Engage people through a bold mission
3/ Sharing to optimise impact vs optimising profit
4/ A business model that builds reciprocity
5/ A clear journey personalised to each user
6/ Do-ocracy
7/ Understanding exponentials to plan ahead
8/ Embracing other Fresks to go faster
1/ First Create a Tool That Works, Then One That Scales
As Cedric was teaching at universities, he came across the IPCC report.
And to wrap his head around Climate Change, he drew diagrams, circles, and arrows on a piece of paper to visualise the carbon and energy flows.
Applying what worked on himself
One day, he tried this method that worked on him. As he was giving a class, with A4 cards with graphics from the IPCC reports, he left the students to their own devices.
When he listened to their discussions, he understood that what they were experiencing was very close to his epiphanies.
That's when he realised that this could work. He'd re-use this workshop for each of his classes. So the Fresk started as a personal tool for Cedric to give class.
But the V1 workshop was still very top-down, where he'd give a lecture after every segment of cards. So he had to create a board game anyone could play at home and where he wouldn't be there anymore to lecture.
To do that, he wrote his notes at the back of the cards.
He tested this board game format but discarded it as people found this still too hard to play independently.
But this taught him a lot for the next iteration.
He regularly lent the game to friends to do the workshop in their own circles, and people raved about it.
The real breakthrough came in 2018 when he got 900 university students to play on the same day. In 2 weeks, he had recruited 30 facilitators that were trained for a few hours. Each of the facilitators had 30 students.
It worked, and at the end of the day, everyone was happy, but most importantly, the facilitators and the students loved it.
This was the Proof of Concept that showed the project could scale.
And it was the turning point that convinced him they could train a million people.
The Climate Fresk cards are almost self-explanatory, making it easy to teach facilitators in 3 hours who can then teach 30 times more people in 3 hours.
The collective nature of a collective workshop or game has three extra benefits:
By debating with others, it's easier to learn.
Working together takes away the pressure of looking like a lone climate nut.
And having to invite others is great to help spread the workshop.
Today there are more than 70.000 facilitators. These people played the Fresk, found it interesting, and then became facilitators themselves.
2/ Engage People Through a Bold Mission
Seeing how well the game was scaling, they put down the intention to touch one million people.
This was also a way to show people that they had to continue after the workshops, that the game had an immense potential to scale, and that they had a role to play.
The urgency of the climate challenge, and the lack of tools, is critical to explain what made people engage with the Fresk's ambitious mission.
As Cedric Ringenbach puts it, “If we want things to happen in the next 5 years, most citizens need to be aware of what's at stake, and we're not there yet.”
3/ Sharing to Optimise Impact vs Optimising Profit
As creators, it can feel scary to share our ideas and having others take advantage of us.
In fact, Cedric Ringenbach could have said, "This is my tool, the one I use to give my classes, and that's it.". Or he could have made people who want to learn pay a 1.000 € license.
But he didn't choose these options because he knew that would have optimised his revenues, but not the chances the planet would make it.
So he shared the workshop's tools with a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence to allow for a large and open use of the game. But there are clever nuances to the licence that allow to make the whole project financially sustainable as we’ll see below.
4/ A Business Model That Builds Reciprocity
As a former software project manager, Ringenbach knew how the revenues in open-source software model came by selling education or high-quality services.
And he knew this model could translate very easily to the Climate Fresk.
By giving his tools, he knew that professionally and financially, he would make a comfortable income because he got significant demand from companies.
For example, EDF (French Electricity Company), wanted its 165,000 employees to go through the Climate Fresk in 2 years.
And the beauty of this is that EDF's teams spread the tool internally and teach other employees how to facilitate it, multiplying the Fresk’s impact even more.
But what I found fascinating about their business model is how they have found clever way to use its license to get those who have no resources to spread the Fresk, and those who have a lot of means, to fund the project.
To summarise, it there are three possible uses of the workshop:
Free: You pay nothing if you organise a workshop in a non-commercial and non-professional context.
Commercial: You sell your workshop based on the Climate Fresk or your training to deliver the workshop. In this case, you are expected to pay 10% of your workshop’s income to the non-profit.
Internal: If you want to do the workshop in your company and train other employees with no external facilitator, you are expected to pay 3€ per participant.
And there is even different pricing for those who want to learn how to facilitate the Fresk.
In 2022, this represented 1.2 million euros, or 25% of its revenue.
The other main ways they make money is by organising custom workshops in public, private or non-profit organisations, by selling training to those who want to become facilitators.
5/ A Clear Journey Personalised to Each User
As with most large communities, the Fresk follows the 1/9/90 rule:
1% of the people create most of the content.
9% of the people casually participate.
90% of people just observe.
In 2022, the Climate Fresk claims to have 40-ish employees, 65 “trainer trainers," 85 national referents, 155 local referents, 400 trainer facilitators, 600 professional facilitators, 35,000 volunteer facilitators, and reached 1.5 million participants worldwide.
And it’s not always easy to create a simple user journey for that many people, but the Climate Fresk has found ways to make it fairly simple to engage at every level.
As you can see below, it has a logical path depending on your level of engagement. You can start as a user, attending a first workshop. If you want to take it up a notch, you can attend a training to become a facilitator, and if you are a bigger organisation ready to commit some budget to train your teams, you can participate in a generic workshop, request a dedicated one, or get training to deploy it internally.
There are very clear benefits to becoming a contributor:
And if you are an organisation, you are further segmented depending on your status, the potential uses (and, of course, the means and resources) you have:
6/ Do-ocracy
Cedric Ringenbach was also inspired by how the Pirate Party had "organised" and scaled a mass social movement by a small group of people.
Do-ocracy is a method by which those who step forward to do a given task can decide how to do it. Nobody gets to tell anybody else what to do.
So each time an international person was asking if the Fresk was available in their language, the Fresk team invited them to do the translation themselves.
Very quickly, the Fresk was translated into a few languages. First it was Chinese, then English. Today, it's translated in over 30 languages only by volunteers, making the Fresk available to even more people around the globe.
7/ Understanding Exponentials To Plan Ahead
The Fresk's journey has been pretty vertiginous so far.
Going from one facilitator to tens of thousands and millions of participants is pretty wild. So Cedric and his team needed a way to manage the speed of an exponential curve: “The key is understanding how long it takes for a community to double (the facilitators, the users, the team, the budget...)”
In 2021, they doubled every 5 months.
This insight has helped them plan the team and structure the teaching materials ahead of the the size they expect to reach in 6 months.
8/ Embracing Other Fresks To Go Faster
The sucess of the Climate Fresk has inspired many other people to create Fresk on other specific topics affected by climate change, like biodiversity, digital services, cities, waste, mobility or the ocean.
You can find a full list in the Climate Fresk’s wiki.
These alternatives allow the Climate Fresk to create awareness faster to a larger audience, and expand its impact to continue the journey beyond their work, and tackle different topics for different audiences they hadn’t thought about.
It indirectly also enables its facilitators to expand their offerings and adapt it to other needs their customers might have, making it more likely they can make a living from spreading this work and become full-time facilitators.
To recap
Here's how you can replicate some of the ways the Climate Fresk scaled its community:
First create a tool that works, then one that scales
Engage people through a bold and ambitious mission that attracts others to contribute
Sharing will optimise your impact, not your profit, but if you have something that has enough demand, you will live very comfortably
Build a business model that builds reciprocity by giving free access to those who use it for free, and charging those who make commercial or professional use of your tool.
Design a clear journey personalised to each user, create simple touchpoints for each of your users depending on their journey
Do-ocracy: Enable those who step forward to do a given task and decide how to do it. For example, if someone wants to translate or organise an event, make it as easy for them to contribute.
Understand exponentials to plan ahead: Observe how fast you’re growing, and plan 6 months ahead before you have to face a demand you can’t respond to anymore.
Embrace your “competition” to go faster: When trying to turn a small market into a big one, collaborate with anyone who is pushing for a similar goal, they will help you create awareness for the problem you solve much faster.
If you, your colleagues or your close ones haven't already tried it, you should definitely check it out and give it a try: climatefresk.org or fresqueduclimat.org
I hope you enjoyed it and got some inspiration out of it.
Sources: