The Problem
Australian receive a huge amount of junk mail each year. Over 7.4 Billion catalogues are delivered each year in Australia, of these catalogues 75% are thrown away, to put in other terms that’s over 270,000 tons of rubbish. These numbers don't take into account other forms of junk mail like leaflets, postcards, flyers etc.
There are services out there that give you access to digital versions of these catalogues but they don’t stop you from receiving the physical copies.
Breakdown on Catalogues:
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7.4 Billion catalogues sent out annually in Australia
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75% of these are thrown away which equates to 270,000 tons of rubbish from catalogues alone
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To create the paper for those wasted catalogues over 4.8 million trees must be used.
These stats don’t even take into account the wastage caused during the production of these catalogues. Creating those wasted catalogues produces the same CO2 emissions as 143,732 cars/year, as well wasting 8,000 Olympic sized swimming pools of water.
Our Solution
NoJunk is a platform that aimed at reducing the waste generated from “Junk Mail” whilst also providing a valuable services and insights to local businesses.
We provide both a mobile application to the consumer/mail deliverer and a web application (desktop/mobile/tablet) to business/advertiser/customer/deliverer.
Our target audience:
Consumer/Resident
The consumer/resident receives a huge amount of junk mail each year, the vast majority of which ends up in the rubbish bin. We aim to provide a service which allows a user to control the type of Junk Mail they receive, if any.
Consumers/Residents will be able to:
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Register their current address
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Manage their preferences for junk mail
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Receive only mail relating to a particular category
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Receive no junk mail at all
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Receive personalised incentive rewards through a QR or ID system
Mail Deliverer
Junk mail is currently delivered to most houses, even if residents don’t want it and bin it straight away. For mail deliverers, we aim to provide a mobile application that will alert them during their route as to which house to deliver advertising material to. This will allow for an increase in the efficiency and time of deliveries as well as allowing for a larger area to be covered.
Mail deliverers will be provided with:
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Property location using geofencing with audible “drop” alerts
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Turn by turn navigation for optimal route between houses
Advertiser/Distributor
Advertisers/distributors need to ensure they are reaching/engaging their target demographic.
Advertisers/Distributors will be provided with a Website (desktop/Mobile) that will allow them to:
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View a heatmap of demographic to plan campaign deliveries for
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View analytics on consumer engagement
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Track progress of campaigns (houses delivered/ routes taken)
Business Owner
Business owners want to ensure that they are not overpaying for their advertisement services whilst also ensuring they are reaching any potential new customers.
Business owners will be provided with a Website (desktop/Mobile) that will allow them to:
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Generate QR codes for inclusion on products (tracking user engagement)
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View analytics on consumer engagement
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View Analytics on campaign
Team
Our team is made of two brothers, Dan and Ben who both work in the ICT sector. Using our knowledge and experiences we have aimed to create something that will benefit the community around us, have a positive impact on Australian businesses and help the environment.
Data
It's all about the data!
It all started out with a callout for feedback on the data.gov.au home page. . .
Wow… what could we do if we had every address in Australia?
Fight SPAM in the real world!
No Junk was born out of that single data set...
We then realised that while we had every address, we didn't really have a way to break that down into cities and councils. We thought that if we could get a few Smart City to partner with us and run awareness campaigns, we would have a pretty good shot at building a solid customer base.
In search of boundary data… we found a pretty easy way to link the datasets, Brisbane, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast all have a list of suburbs and streets that we used to help partition our data set.
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Street Names with Suburbs – Brisbane
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Gold Coast Streets and Suburbs
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CSV export from Localities arcgis_rest_services_Boundaries_Boundaries_SCRC_MapServer_4
Now that we had a viable goe-location and address database partitionable by state, region, city, suburb and street we thought we better have a look at what sort of data to capture from the consumer.
We though that capturing the following would be a good starting point, we then came up with some pretty cool and useful use cases:
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Name
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Address (mapped back into our location data set)
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Do you want advertising material
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If so what categories do you want (eg Catalogue [home, tech, sports] or Coupons)
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Preferred deliver frequency
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Would you prefer to receive digital copies
