Mobile app AOK spurs users to be kind

The game, co-founded by Adrian Grenier, inspires users to both perform and observe acts of kindness

If you’ve ever played around with the DoGood app, which challenges users to perform a different act of kindness each day, you’ll know that sometimes the daily challenges can lean on the unsavory side. Last Christmas, my 20-year-old sister decided to accept the DoGood challenge, which was (apropos for Christmas) to spend some time with your family. She took on the challenge, and 15 minutes later she couldn’t do it anymore and went back to her room.

The idea for DoGood is cool—everybody wants to be kind, right? No one wants to admit to being the jerk that leaves his empty Starbucks cup in the parking lot for someone else to have to pick up and throw away (note: I’ve done that). But a newly-launched mobile app, AOK, takes a different approach: Why not let users perform and record spontaneous acts of kindness? And for that matter, why not let users observe and report on other peoples’ acts of kindness?

AOK (Acts and Observations of Kindness) is a pretty simple points-based game in which users perform and observe acts of kindness in whatever form (the app categorizes acts and observations according to whether they were for a person, an animal, or the environment) and earn points that translate directly into Cause Currency—real money that can be donated to the cause of the moment. Last month, the major cause focus was Red Cross relief in Japan, for which the company raised $160, just among its initial cohort of alpha testers. This month, the focus is on tornado relief efforts in Joplin, MO.

So how exactly do you make kindness fun? The app uses geo-tracking to allow users to post AOKs to a map and get notifications of other nearby AOKs in real-time, so you can post an AOK in your neck of the woods and also see what your neighbors are doing, or you can find out what AOKers are doing in other parts of the world. Players can also challenge each other, and brands can alert players of nearby sponsored challenges, which come with real rewards such as discounts, merchandise, and donations to causes.

And the company has some big names behind it. The game (the mobile app and the corresponding website, which will launch later this month) was the brainchild of both co-founders Ira and Lynn Liss, as well as actor Adrian Grenier, star of the hit HBO show Entourage. Grenier previously co-founded the eco-conscious curation website SHFT.com, winner of two Webby awards, with Peter Glatzer, so he’s already an established player in the field. 

Of course, these days, a lot of brands are trying to capitalize on the “do-good” movement, which is more about marketing and PR than truly making a positive difference in the world. Take the eco-chic movement, for example. Lots of brands are honing in on the words “green” and “organic” because they ring certain bells for consumers. So how do AOK users know that they’re actually doing something good and not just getting sucked into a ploy to improve someone’s brand image?

“Our game developers, Natron Baxter, are well aware of theories of gaming that started off as great ways to engage people to do more, but later became an afterthought for gamification,” CEO Ira Liss told me. “At the core level, we’re not putting ads up on the site. Our biggest priority is to provide people with a fun way to be rewarded for the small gestures of kindness they’re either already doing, or are prompted to do by playing AOK.  We’ll definitely be partnering with sponsors to reward and grow our community, but with the same mission in mind, to increase mindfulness in the world around us.”

AOK has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from an angel investor in the micro-philanthropy space, with whom Ira and Lynn Liss worked for another one of their “do-good” projects: The Golden Opportunity.

Image source: Apple.com