4IP Idea: Easter X

One in my series of 4IP ideas. (This idea is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution licence)

Elevator Pitch

Heard of geocaching? It’s a craze that’s sweeping the nation (and the world) thanks to the rise in cheap, available in-car navigation systems and geo-locating phones.

A ‘geocache’ (geo, as in geography, cache as in ’store’) is a hidden box of ‘treasure’ located somewhere in the world and locatable only via an online database at geocaching.com using latitude and longitude coordinates.

At weekends large numbers of families head out for the day, in search of these geocaches, using their phone or navigation system in combination with cryptic clues about their locations.

All of the geocaches are user-generated, and added to the database by geocachers.

Easter X is a geocaching competition that will happen in Easter 2009. Based on the age-old game of ‘easter egg hunting’, we massively scale up the idea by providing a series of Easter Egg hunts enabled by a network of geocaches, one in each region of the UK.

Held over four weeks on the run up to Easter Sunday, users compete to score points in solving cryptic clues (for the parents), following an engaging storyline (for the whole family). Each week, a prize is given to one person who solves that week’s challenge, with a grand prize for the first person to put an “X marks the spot” where the final geocache is located, thus solving the puzzle and ending the story.

It’s a fun, engaging family event that gets the kids excited during the Easter break.

Needs and Benefits

Kids love easter egg hunts - some of the best memories I have of being a child are of rummaging around in the garden in search of a chocolate egg or two!

But keeping the kids amused during the Easter holidays can be a challenge for any parent. More often than not, kids end up in front of the TV, the games console or online, and it’s up to the parent to find activities for them to do that breaks the norm, taking them out for the day.

Easter X gives parents a great excuse to get the kids out and about for the day in a mentally and physically stimulating way, visit places they might never have gone to, and feel a sense of achievement at being part of something fun and unusual.

It’s free, which is also something to consider in a recession - parents sometimes dread the Easter holidays from a financial point of view.

It’s also an opportunity for something for the kids to do with their friends and their parents, if mum and dad have to work during the Easter break. It’s collaborative for everyone involved, and incorporating a storytelling, mystery solving aspect to the game will generate discussion and link-sharing through “teams” that users can set up on the Easter X site.

Approach

Easter X comprises:

• A prototype project to test the idea on a small scale. We would connect with geocachers in a specific region of the UK and run a test project to assess the idea around the Christmas period.

• A mystery to be solved - a writer would produce a strong story arc that would be revealed in six parts - Teaser, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Finale.

• A story, with a series of fake microsites and blog posts to be found

• A series of prizes to be won - a sponsorship opportunity for brands interested in this group.

• Several networks of geocaches around the UK. This requires careful planning and a team of people in each region to place the caches and negotiate with landowners, councils and the police.

• A social website - production of a Ruby on Rails based community site that enables users to create profiles, groups, follow the story, complete ‘geogoals’ by visiting locations and registering their sucessful visit.

• A mobile website - a way of accessing the social site to perform tasks via standard mobile phone

• An iphone application - a trial of using some of the iPhone SDK to produce location-aware clues and navigation, specifically for iphone users.

We would seek the support of 4IP in developing all of the above with the aim of the project becoming an annual event sponsored by a major brand, and assitance in negotiating that deal.

Competition

During Easter, competition comes from all angles - visitor attractions, TV, video games and family commitments.

We would need to do research into other events planned during that time to ensure that Easter X could fit around those things, and whilst enabling the competition aspect of the project to succeed, allow users to be as flexible as they like in when they do their geocaching.

Geocaching.com is the biggest geocaching community in the UK, and rather than being a competitor, would be one source of users for the project. We would aim to build a partnership with them so that users who become part of Easter X can then move onto the Geocaching site to continue to be involved in geocaching until the next year.

Small geocaching events happen around towns across the UK and often pop up from time to time, yet these are only made available to those that are ‘in the know’ - to really build an instant community over a short space of time requires scale and a story that spans the whole of the UK.

Small Easter egg hunts via geocaching have been done in the past, on an informal basis, but never has there been a large scale hunt done with a prize, storyline and community tools. It would be a first.