Read the full story at Fast Company.
It’s one of 10 strategies that make up a new way of doing business, given the coming realities of a hotter, scarcer, and more transparent world.
Category: Social science
Webinar: Designing Employee Engagement Programs that Impact a Company’s Triple Bottom Line
Designing Employee Engagement Programs that Impact a Company’s Triple Bottom Line
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 1-2 pm CDT
Register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/752485802
This webinar is part of the popular P2Rx Behavior Change Webinar Series to help pollution prevention technical assistance providers initiate, implement, and measure behavioral change resulting from their programs and initiatives.
BAE Systems is a $14.4 billion multinational corporation that reduced its total utility costs by 48% over a three year period with a utility cost takeout (UCT) energy efficiency program. This would not have been possible without first enrolling BAE’s 43,000 employees across the globe in its sustainability plan.
Morgan Rooney, Sustainability Communications Specialist for BAE Systems was responsible for initiating and running the employee engagement program to support BAE Sustainability goals. Morgan will share her strategies and successes for getting employees to buy into a corporate sustainability mandate for the long haul and how this affected and continues to affect BAE’s triple bottom line.
Webinar attendees will learn education tactics, how to set up a task force or green team, employee challenges, and awards and recognition programs that work towards initiating and sustaining behavior change for large communities.
Webinar: Tools for Successfully Deploying and Measuring Behavior Change for the Littering Public
Tuesday, May 13, 2014, 1:30-2:30 pm CDT
Register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/378905274
This webinar is part of the popular P2Rx Behavior Change Webinar Series to help pollution prevention technical assistance providers initiate, implement, and measure behavioral change resulting from their programs and initiatives.
Donna Walden will begin by presenting a step-by-step model on community based social marketing (CBSM) to help P2 programs properly selecting behaviors, establish a baseline, and develop strategies that can successfully measure behavior change.
Then UC Santa Barbara Masters candidates Jessica Midbust, Michael Mori, Paula Richter, and Bill Vosti will present a Master’s group thesis undertaken for the Algalita Marine Research Institute on reducing plastic debris in the Los Angeles and San Gabriel River Watersheds using some CBSM techniques.
Participants will learn some valuable behavior change techniques and hear recommendations made from the graduate students on how to change the behavior of the littering public.
H&M launches first campaign to promote sustainability initiatives
Read the full story in Marketing Week.
H&M is running its first campaign to promote its clothes recycling scheme as the retailer looks to raise awareness of its sustainability efforts and encourage more shoppers to donate unwanted items of clothing.
How to deliver the “whole sustainability package” in 4 steps
In their article for GreenBiz’s P2 Impact column, “How to deliver the “whole sustainability package” in 4 steps,” authors Josephine Fleming and Deidra Cole explain how benchmarks, data tracking, team work and communication are all key to building a sustainability plan that resonates with consumers. Read previous P2 Impact columns at http://www.greenbiz.com/business/engage/enterprise-blogs/p2-pathways.
Consumers may change behavior if delivered the right message
Read the full story in GreenBiz.
If you’ve heard me speak at a conference, you know there’s a point in the presentation where I typically say, “Don’t try to educate your audience into changing their behaviors.” Then I ask the audience to raise their hands if they can think of at least one thing they know they should do on a daily basis to be healthier but that they don’t do. Nearly every hand goes up, and I say, “See, knowing a thing doesn’t mean you’re going to do a thing.”
But I might be wrong.
myActions Platform Turning Engagement with Waste, Wildlife Initiatives Into Action
Read the full post at Sustainable Brands.
Engaging people in sustainability remains one of the cause’s biggest challenges – ensuring their behavior reflects their engagement is another. A number of studies have been devoted to bridging the gap between people’s attitudes and their actions, and it remains a conundrum for many organizations on a mission to promote positive behavior.
Luckily, tools such as myActions are helping companies not only engage certain groups on the merit of more conscious behaviors but motivate them to follow through.
myActions builds and designs online communities and social tools that track the digital sharing of real-world actions. For every action taken, a donation is made to the cause of the user’s choice. The company partners with organizations from municipalities (Ohio Valley) to nonprofits (Net Impact) to brands (EKOCYCLE) that provide the greatest opportunity for impact through their networks.
Tackle your company’s waste and create change from within
Read the full story in The Guardian.
How one Farmer Brothers employee cut the company’s waste and proved that change can come from below the c-suite.
How to create system change that solves sustainability challenges
Read the full story in The Guardian.
Shifting a whole system, such as food, is a big ask. A map that shows the big picture can help companies make each right turn.
3 paths for plugging in to better energy management
Read the full post at GreenBiz.
Following the lead of mayors and governors across the country, last month President Obama announced energy as a priority for the year. By focusing on energy management, organizations are contributing to the transformation of energy use in the country, saving billions in energy costs and cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Retrofit Chicago initiative, aimed at reducing participating buildings energy use in the city by 20 percent within the next five years, is a compelling example of this. For this reason, EDF Climate Corps, an innovative summer fellowship program that places specially trained graduate students in organizations to save energy and related costs, is working to recruit organizations in Chicago this month.
To ramp up energy savings in the area, EDF Climate Corps has already signed on AT&T, McDonald’s Corporation, Shorenstein Properties and Jones Lang LaSalle. Each summer, EDF Climate Corps fellows evaluate organizations for energy savings opportunities, with many uncovering stakeholder engagement as a key savings opportunity.
After 400 EDF Climate Corps engagements, the program has found three key constituencies to tap into for energy management:
Can barcodes make fashion more transparent – and will consumers care?
Read the full story at The Guardian.
A global coalition considers offering sustainability data via QR codes. But it’s unclear whether the system will change habits.
The Big City Bike Parking Negative Feedback Loop
Read the full story in Atlantic Cities.
Everybody knows that parking is a big problem in New York. Sometimes it seems as if there’s no place to secure your vehicle. It can be infuriating searching for a spot. Especially if your vehicle is a bicycle.
Despite the installation of hundreds of new bike racks around the city over the past few years, New York’s boom in bicycling has meant that it’s increasingly difficult to find a safe place to lock up. It’s illegal to lock to trees, and the fine for doing so is $1,000. The rules on street signs are vague, and your bike could theoretically get removed by the cops. Scaffolding is tempting, but if you lock to the wrong part, you might find the bar unbolted and your bike gone when you return. Lots of property owners don’t want you locking to fences and railings, and you always run the risk of being clipped if you do so.
Now that spring is on the way, the bike-parking crunch is only going to get worse, especially since so many perfectly good, legal racks are taken up by the carcasses of bikes that have long been abandoned. Any regular New York cyclist is familiar with the problem. Sometimes the rusted, bent frame of a long-abandoned two-wheeler will sit for months in a prime space, effectively lockblocking regular commuters and occasional visitors to the neighborhood alike.
There’s a new project that aims to clear the city’s racks of this infuriating debris. Dead Pedal NY is encouraging the city’s riders to use Instagram to take pictures of the offending hunks of junk, caption them with the location, and tag them with #deadpedalny. Dead Pedal will then pass the information along to the Department of Sanitation in an attempt to “help (and inspire) them to clean them up faster.”
Americans have no idea how much water we use — or how to conserve it
Read the full post at Grist.
“I consider myself a fairly water-conscious person,” says the average American, sipping on a venti iced coffee while dipping his toes in an Olympic-sized pool, spritzing himself with Evian. “I probably just use a few gallons a day,” he continues, stepping out of a 45-minute shower. “By the way — have I told you about my toilet that flushes automatically every 20 minutes, just to make sure it’s consistently pristine?”
Just kidding — it’s not quite that bad. But, according to a recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the average American consumes twice as much water as she thinks she does. Furthermore, we Americans are not quite sure which practices are the most water-intensive. As it turns out, the Olympic-sized pool isn’t the biggest concern — 70 percent of personal water use occurs within the home, according to a 2005 EPA study. And the biggest culprit under the roof? Toilet-flushing, accounting for 27 percent of all indoor water use.
Listen Now to EPA’s Webcast Series on Communications for Climate and Clean Energy Programs
If you missed our popular December 2013 webcast series on communications strategies for state and local governments, you can listen now to all three online, access presentations, and read audience Qs&As.
The structure of the three webcasts parallels the general phases of program development and implementation: attracting stakeholder support and participation, sustaining change, and gaining momentum from program successes. Participants learned how to design communications strategies to engage and empower stakeholders, use communications methods to instigate and sustain behavior change and foster individual and community solutions, and effectively communicate their programs’ successes and resulting benefits to diverse audiences.
How companies’ community leadership drives political change
Read the full story at GreenBiz.
Small local businesses across the country are realizing that their ecological footprints are as important as their bottom lines. Visionary business leaders are not waiting for an act of Congress or an executive order to take action. They are at the forefront of their communities in creating a vision for a new era of a sustainable economy. They are leading on this issue — but they can do only so much on their own.
Many business owners realize that their internal sustainability actions alone will not solve the problem of a changing climate. Deeply entrenched policies need to be changed, and that change is prevented by powerful, traditional business lobbies.
The answer is to harness the voice of many sustainable businesses, through groups such as the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) and partner organizations, to create the political power needed to maximize collective potential. That means stepping beyond business leadership and into community leadership.
You must be logged in to post a comment.