CTD project description – Social Business Creation

UN goals:

Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

Empowering young people who strive for building a sustainable present and future by providing the environment and means to connect every actor and enabling them to put their willpower, time and skills at service and coordinate efforts to make impactful change while creating a growing ecosystem of collaborative social innovation.

Social challenge

According to the Sustainable Development Goals Report of 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused devastating effects to the progress of the SDG, affecting to a greater extent people and communities in vulnerable situations. That is why the complexity of the challenges we face as humanity increases, and why cross-cutting and integral initiatives are required to promote action and involvement of a greater number of actors and resources, as is required the necessity to promote coordinated actions to maximize the impact on communities. In this new scenario, information and communication technologies, targeted towards newer generations, are key to contribute in a positive way to the achievement of the sustainable goals proposed by the UN. We are motivated to develop a project so that every person and every actor acknowledges themselves as part of the problem and part of the solution, with the purpose to join forces and collaborate on the generation of the change that we need to build a sustainable present and future.

Solution idea

Our business idea, Connect the Dots (CTD), is a platform that unites actors with the initiative to live more sustainably. It connects businesses and institutions with the resources needed to carry out sustainable projects. It connects NGOs, experts and activists with the knowledge and culture to make sure the projects are sustainable for specific issues and communities. It connects volunteers with a wish to help build a better world. And it connects marginalized, vulnerable communities who want help with these key actors to carry out “sustainable challenges”, that are specific and UN goals oriented. Moreover, CTD connects users and helps people become long-term volunteers, encouraged by gamification elements integrated in the user experience. Once a challenge is completed, you can level up in CTD, thus becoming an actor of change in your local community, and in the digital, international community as well. CTD helps develop sustainable relationships between actors, and works as a “sustainable portfolio”, as all completed challenges come with CTD-verified certifications, for volunteers and businesses too. In this way, CTD works as a facilitator to build these relationships that help fix local, specific problems, with specific actors. The platform unites everyone on a digital environment first and works on a tangible territory with real issues later. By combining engineering, business management, technology, with design and experiences, we can achieve activism and real, sustainable impact outside a digital environment, where we talk with those we are helping. We learn their stories and help build new ones. We believe there is no sustainability without collaboration, and strong, durable relationships promote collaboration. That is why we develop CTD, to be actors of change that help build new, long-lasting habits and networks that encourage sustainable development among all.

PROJECT

Social media platform that connects actors through socially-impactful actions and validates social reputation for users.

Connect The Dots is a platform that works as a management system that facilitates CSR for companies and universities through the creation and sponsorship of challenges aligned to UN goals. Challenges seek the creation of bonds and common good for mutual value creation, while also providing sustainable actions to sponsor in exchange for reports with accreditation and compilation data to measure companies’ CSR performance and provide visibility on their socio-sustainability actions.

Due to CTD’s solution design based on collaboration and its community-based business model, CTD is unique and difficult to copy as dedicated communities cannot be stolen or replicated.