The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday announced its relaunched Pick 5 campaign – an innovative use of the Web and social media to get citizens to do environmentally friendly things. While it launched for the first time last Earth Day, it has now reinvented itself on an international level – asking people around the globe to pick and commit to doing five things to help the environment. From the site:

“Being an environmentalist means different things in different places. By choosing five or more of these actions and sharing your stories, you CAN make a positive difference for the environment. Join with others around the world today to take the small actions that will add up to make the biggest difference. Are you ready?”

The new campaign is a vast improvement over where it was a year ago – offering more actions, greater immersion with the social web, and a more compelling user experience. I had the opportunity to study Pick 5 as part of an assignment for my E-Government 2.0 course this semester, in which we had to examine a “failed e-government project.” You can download my report “Pick 5 Analysis” and view some PowerPoint slides highlighting my research below. The report explores how Pick 5 fell short of its public engagement goals but utilized a method of “failing fast” to identify areas of improvement and build off of them (as this relaunch demonstrates).

Many thanks to EPA’s Web manager Jeffrey Levy and the State Department’s Lovisa Williams for the time in this project.

E-government, Government 2.0, report, social media