About

Wanting to help the environment is common. Being given a good way to do it is not.

We run experiments on the moments where that gap shows up, and we publish what we find, including the results we were hoping not to get.

Volunteers carrying bags of tree saplings up a trail to forest planting sites

One method, two programs

Most people want to help. We just need to create the right moment.

Persuading people to care is rarely the hard part. The hard part is what happens next. A traveller who would happily give something is shown a donation box nobody ever tested. A household that spent thousands on solar panels loses output for years, because no independent person ever tells them what the dirt on the glass is costing. The willingness was already there in both cases.

Both programs do the same job. We take information that is technically public and practically useless, and turn it into something a person or a company can act on: airline climate performance out of the disclosures airlines already file, rooftop solar losses out of aerial photographs anyone can download. We publish the method with the result so people can check our arithmetic.

Program 01

Behavioural design in booking flows

Experiments on the moment a traveller decides, run with real money on the line, plus a public ranking of 32 airlines built from their own reporting.

See the airline ranking →

Program 02

SolarSoiled

Software that finds rooftop solar in aerial photographs, measures how big each system is, and works out what dirt costs it per year. It also says whether a cleaning would pay for itself, which in the coastal pilot it does not on any of the 1,865 roofs. Free, no signup.

Explore SolarSoiled →

Our mission

Make acting as easy as caring

Most people say they care about the environment and they mean it. What they rarely get is a well-designed moment to do something about it. We study those moments, from checkout pages to policy defaults, and we publish what works.

Why BBF exists

There is more passion than evidence

Environmental campaigning runs on a lot of conviction and surprisingly few controlled experiments. We were founded to add some. Where it matters, we test with real money at stake: in our airline studies participants kept or gave up bonus earnings that were genuinely theirs. Where a study was hypothetical, we label it hypothetical. Data goes on the Open Science Framework as our partner agreements allow, so anyone can check the arithmetic.

The team

Who's behind the work

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Samantha Vroomen, J.D.

Cofounder & Legal Counsel

Samantha cofounded Better Behavior Foundation and leads its governance, partnerships, and legal work. She handles the contracts and compliance that let a tested change move out of a study and into a company's real checkout and payment systems, which is usually where good research stalls.

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Craig Fellers, Ph.D.

Cofounder & Research Lead

Craig cofounded Better Behavior Foundation and runs its research. He was principal investigator on the studies of voluntary giving at flight checkout, and he is the reason our experiments put real money at stake and our methods and data go out in public where other people can pick holes in them.

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Stefan Omelchenco, Ph.D.

Researcher & Climate Scientist

Stefan is the climate scientist on the team. When a study shows more people giving, or a solar array producing more, he is the one who works out what that is actually worth in the environment rather than on a slide.

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Hunter Delaney

Behavioral Data & Experimentation Analyst

Hunter handles the data behind our giving experiments, turning thousands of raw survey responses into the opt-in rates and comparisons the team acts on. He studied data science and systems in UC Santa Cruz's Technology & Information Management program.

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Joshua Ramirez

Researcher & Tools Developer

Joshua, a Technology & Information Management graduate, built the SolarSoiled calculator that works out whether a cleaning pays for itself. He is also writing the white paper that pulls the methods and results from both programs into one document other researchers can review.

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Cameron Gordon

Engineering & Product Lead

Cameron is the foundation's engineer. He built SolarSoiled, the software that finds rooftop solar in aerial photographs and works out what dirt is costing each array, along with the public map and this website. He also helped analyse the data behind the airline donation studies. Most of what you can click on here, he built.

Governance & independence

Who we answer to

Better Behavior Foundation is an independent climate research nonprofit. Our parent organisation is Ecologistics, a 501(c)(3) public charity that acts as our fiscal sponsor. Grants are awarded to Ecologistics rather than to us, and they hold the budget and keep a small percentage for administering it. This is a normal arrangement for a project our size, and it puts our money inside an established charity's accounts and reporting.

No partner, sponsor, or client has a say in what we conclude. The airlines and companies we study do not pay for the research. We publish results whether or not they flatter the change we tested, including the studies that found nothing, and we say what each study's limits are. Data is shared openly as our partner agreements allow.

In our incentive-compatible studies the stakes were real. Participants kept or gave up actual bonus earnings, and every dollar a participant chose to donate was transferred to the named charity.

Curious what behavioral science can do for your mission?

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