Designed to make activism approachable, Chilli empowers people to take meaningful environmental actions. Whether through a campaign to stop offshore drilling or to protect lakes from forever chemicals, the app turns low-effort advocacy into collective pressure for structural change.

Before launching the app, the team spent three years interviewing organisers and activists about the best strategies for engaging people at scale. We spoke with co-founder Xavier Durand about how that research shaped the app’s design.

The team’s research led to a streamlined interface built around super-simple actions, such as signing petitions, emailing companies and contacting lawmakers. The app even prepares emails you can personalise to add a human touch.

“The goal was to make activism feel less like a civic duty and more like something you’d actually do between meetings,” Durand says. “We obsessed over removing every possible reason to hesitate. Every action in the app takes under two minutes.”

“Vague pressure rarely works – precise pressure does,” Durand says. Although conflicted about AI’s impact on the environment, the team opted to leverage the technology to generate a unique email for each user, tailored to their values.

“Every email that lands in a decision-maker’s inbox is different because our models adapt the message to the person sending it,” Durand says. “The emails that perform best are addressed to a specific person, reference something that person is publicly on record for and make a concrete ask with a deadline.”

Taking action one time is powerful – taking it consistently is transformative. The app’s gamification elements – such as streaks, digital coins and rewards – encourage people to keep coming back, while push notifications highlight when campaigns are gaining traction in the real world.

The one-to-one connection the app facilitates is another huge motivator. “That’s the ‘wow’ effect,” Durand says. “You’ll get an answer from the person you emailed directly, in your personal inbox. The app helps people see exactly where their effort lands.”

What began as a curated list of campaigns built by the Chilli team has grown exponentially. Today users can join initiatives started by other activists – or launch campaigns of their own.

“The community wanted to put up their own fights,” Durand says. To date, Chilli users have completed more than 600,000 actions across campaigns created by more than 1,000 activists.