United Way ALICE Poverty Simulator
CHANGING THE WORLD ONE STORY AT A TIME
In order to demonstrate how real life decisions affect 35 percent of Connecticut’s residents daily, it’s critical to focus on the realities of housing, childcare, healthcare, work and transportation for the growing number of individuals and families who work, but are unable to afford these basic necessities.
The United Way, a human services organization focused on bringing together community leaders, nonprofit organizations, volunteers and businesses to focus on the most pressing needs in our community, has partnered with Rebel Interactive Group. Together, they have developed an online simulation/application that demonstrates how practical decisions directly affect low income residents.
The simulation is an interactive, engaging and easy-to-use, mobile-responsive, online experience that focuses on the population referred to as ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed). The object of the game is to successfully end the month, supporting your family without using all of the allotted funds.
Rebel has created a single page microsite that users navigate through “a month in the life of,” as they advance through a series of questions. Users chronologically progress through questions to complete each level, and cannot proceed to the next module without completing the previous one.
Rebel has supported the United Way for over 10 years. They have partnered with individual United Way chapters for the opportunity to create custom-branded, hyper-localized versions of this engaging online simulation to raise donor awareness of the decision-making situations others in their community may face on a daily basis.
Benefits of the online game include:
- Illustrating the plight of the less fortunate to prospective donor bases
- Amplifying education for direct donor engagement
- Closing the gap in the donation funnel by allowing chapters the delivery of relevant, timely and valuable information
- Centralizing information for versioning control of content among fundraisers
- User-friendly interface that elicits easy engagement
- Ease of operation: no IT integration necessary
- Fully customizable if needed, but available for use as a standard version
- Multimedia and video content capabilities
Bringing awareness of the sizable population of working families in Connecticut that struggle to achieve and sustain basic life necessities — including housing, childcare, healthcare, work, and transportation — is critical.
The United Way has partnered with Rebel Interactive Group to illustrate how practical decisions directly affect low-income residents in a number of different mediums. Check out an example of our video work: