An interesting one here from Orange, which asks "if you have five minutes to spare, could you do some good?" Their latest application, "Do Some Good" does the asking and lets you fill in surveys, helping out charities in your local area, sharing ideas and generally being a jolly good person and helping out others in the world.

There's little doubt that there is a lot of charity work you can do online, and thankfully this app is more than the "click on this ad and we'll give a cup of grain to a food relief effort". From talking about sustainable cycling around Edinburgh to locating a safe outdoor play area on a map so a UK wide map of places to play can be built up, Do Some Good has a wide range of tasks that you can do.

The app tracks what you get up to and adds a game mechanic to the whole thing, by allowing you to earn "medals" for completing the four genres of tasks (research, look-out, skills and reach out) in different areas such as Health, Global Issues, Culture, Environment, and Community. It also keeps a note of how long you have spent volunteering - reach four hours and you are awarded with some musical rewards from the Orange RockCorps, which includes concert tickets, backstage passes and more. You get more details when you hit the four hour mark in the application.

The addition of short and long term rewards makes Do Some Good far more sticky than being presented with a list of things to do, and Orange are to be commended for this approach. Even though they'll get some nice PR out of all the hours that users have donated to charity, there's going to be a huge amount of good work done because of this application.

As with their Glastonbury and Orange Wednesdays applications, this app isn't limited to Orange subscribers. And just like those applications, Do Some Good looks wonderful, has the same clean UI of their other applications, and is very robust. The same thought on the game mechanics side of the application has also been put to work making sure the tasks are fun and varied, all of which keeps the user engagement high and means that more projects will, in time, become part of the project.

There's the start of a very fulfilling circle here, with network tools in place, projects in place, and a strong proposition to get users in place. I'm going to tuck Do Some Good into the bottom of my apps list and keep an eye on the progress it makes (as it keeps an eye on mine). It's a good way to spend five minutes or so at the bus stop doing more than playing a game on your smartphone, and it deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. And then we'll see if that's enough to sustain it.

-- Ewan Spence, July 2011.