Sometimes the best insights come from being wrong.
At Aspiration, we launched Plant Your Change, a program that rounded up debit card purchases to the nearest dollar to plant trees. Each swipe planted a tree - it was that simple. We also offered extra incentives for gas purchases: double cash back plus additional trees to offset the carbon footprint.
Finding Signal in the Noise
The early adoption numbers felt off. Leadership assumed our core audience would be environmentally conscious consumers - Tesla drivers, Prius enthusiasts, etc. The logic was simple: people invested in reducing their carbon footprint would be eager to do more.
My hypothesis was the opposite. I suspected our most engaged users would be those with larger carbon footprints seeking to reduce their impact, as they chose to open a mission-based CMA account. We were working with Faraday, a B2B consumer prediction platform that helps companies understand and engage their customers through AI. Their platform provided insights into customer behavior through our first-party data combined with theirs.
During a discovery session, I learned they could match against DMV records as part of their consumer intelligence dataset. By segmenting our audience based on vehicle type, we could see who was most responsive to our carbon offset messaging.
Data Meets Reality
The data was surprising. Customers eager to offset their carbon footprint weren’t driving electric vehicles. They were driving trucks and SUVs.
This wasn’t a statistical quirk. These customers weren’t environmental skeptics - quite the opposite. They knew their carbon footprint. But unlike electric vehicle owners, they faced constraints: family size, work requirements, geographic necessities. They couldn’t easily reduce their impact through vehicle choice. So when we offered a way to offset it through everyday purchases, they took advantage of the opportunity.
Evolving Our Approach
The discovery forced us to rethink. We stopped targeting based on perceived environmental consciousness and focused on impact opportunity. Instead of preaching to the converted, we acknowledged real-world constraints while empowering meaningful action.
Engagement soared by meeting customers where they were rather than where we assumed.
Beyond Carbon Offsets
The insight went beyond carbon offsets or banking. We stumbled onto something fundamental about environmental action - the gap between aspiration and reality. Most people want to make environmentally conscious choices, but life gets in the way. The key isn’t to judge these constraints but to build solutions around them.
The future of sustainable finance isn’t about serving those who can make the perfect environmental choice. It’s about creating solutions for millions who want to make a difference but face practical constraints.
We were building for the environmentally conscious elite, but we were wrong in the best way.