From Fortune 500 companies to nonprofits and city governments, gamification is one of the hottest trends to encourage employee engagement, build brand loyalty, and drive social change. BC3's "Gaming for Good" event explored the use of gaming techniques in non-game environments to promote fun, engage participants, and encourage the adoption of sustainable behaviors. 

On March 4, BC3 members, SF Green Film Festival, SAP, SF Department of Emergency Management, and Badgeville  joined together to discuss the future of gamification and how this exciting tool can be used to advance sustainability goals. The panel investigated the ways that businesses, government, and nonprofits have used gaming techniques to achieve their sustainability goals through community activities such as contests and reward systems, including how:

• Badgeville’s 100+ clients employ gaming to encourage engagement, promote awareness and drive initiatives, including how they helped Recylebank’s 3 million users earn points for taking everyday “green actions” and redeem them for great awards;
  
• Software giant SAP saved over €170 million implementing sustainability initiatives and the role that games like Vampire Hunters (a scavenger hunt to identify energy ) or Seeds (a mobile application to reward citizens for good environmental deeds), or SAP carbon exploration (a Facebook app that allows users to profile their lifestyle around their carbon emissions), have played in meeting their targets; 
  
• San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management’s new app SF Heroes is ensuring that San Francisco residents are prepared for disasters. How your organization can use gaming to promote awareness, engage employees and customers, and achieve its triple bottom line.

Mario Herger is senior innovation strategist at SAP Labs in Palo Alto and global head of the gamification initiative at SAP. Mario has worked as developer, development manager, architect, product manager on a series of new SAP products and topics at SAP, like visual composer, business process experts, mobile, and gamification.  As head of the gamification initiative, Mario has encountered and supported gamification efforts in the enterprise from multiple levels and departments, like sustainability, on demand, mobile, HR, training & education, and simulation. He has driven the awareness around gamification inside and outside SAP by organizing and leading innovation events around this topic, working with gamification platform and service providers and incorporating gamification into SAP's strategy.  Mario recently played through all levels of the iPad game Air Attack and currently works with his four year old son on reaching the final level of Angry Birds. 

Adena DeMonte is director of marketing at Badgeville. Since earning her BFA in theatre, journalism and sociology, Adena has lead a diverse professional career across Silicon Valley - first as a technology reporter covering venture capital, cleantech, and social media - and then as a community manager, customer advocate, and marketer in companies large and small. Her most recent role as a B2B marketer for an industry-changing B2C social software technology is one of her favorite yet, as she gets to help hundreds of customers across retail, media, health, education and the enterprise infuse their web and mobile sites with a new revolutionary social experience. Adena closely follows modern marketing and social business, focusing on interactive advertising, user experience, social CRM, tech/life convergence, and predictive social analytics.  

Kristin Hogan is a communications specialist with 14 years of experience in strategic planning and communications. Kristin's focus is the commingling of emergency management and strategic communications to provide emergency managers with collaboratively developed communication strategies that lead to long-term programmatic results.  She has worked with a variety of local, state, and federal agencies, departments, and organizations including the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management, the San Francisco Department of Public Health-Office of Health Preparedness, the California Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Kristin currently serves as the CirclePoint project manager for the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management Emergency Preparedness Strategic Communications, Public Information and Crisis Communications Project. She has been influential in the development and launch of SF Heroes, an iPhone app that is used as a tool to mobilize the community around emergency preparedness .