We have been making great strides on the Green Events Front over the past year and are excited to be founding members of the Northern California Chapter of the Green Meetings Industry Council.
Oracle is clearly a thought leader in this arena as is evidenced through their work over the past several years in greening Oracle Open World, a massive event which takes over the streets of San Francisco every October, drawing tens of thousands of attendees. I toured the event yesterday courtesy of the Oracle Team and witnessed first hand the great work they are doing: 30% less signage, the use recycled materials, serving local food and beverage, eliminating bottled water, compostable materials and MUCH more. Most importantly, they have approached this effort with rigor and strategy: sharing their goals and initiatives with their partners, stakeholders, exhibitors, suppliers, and attendees from the start. While random acts of greenness may be an added bonus, it’s clearly not the heart of their work and ultimately it’s their strategy that will deliver the results they hope to achieve – to create an event with the lowest possible environmental impact and to divert 100 tons of waste from landfill. WOW! 100 tons of of waste! Congratulations to the Oracle team.
Wilsonwest and Green Consultants have partnered to create an educational session for event producers on how to develop a road map and strategy to green their events and organizations. This process requires an investment of time up front and will ultimately strengthen your efforts and connect your green and sustainable activities to your company’s mission, vision, and values. If you would like to learn more about how to build and strengthen your green activities, please contact us.
For details on Oracle OpenWorld 2009 green activities and programs, results from 2008, and more, visit the link.
admin Green Events events, green
One of my favorite thinkers, bloggers, authors, marketers, and…well…just plain brilliant people is Seth Godin. A recent post inspired me to dream a little bigger. Go ahead, click on the link. Take a moment to read it.
Thanks for the inspiration Seth. Ever since, I’ve been musing on ideas for the next great spectacle. What might it be and where will it take place? What do you think? What are your thoughts?
Here’s one of mine: the largest gathering of green-minded people doing something green and good together. We could call it: I Stand for Goodness.
PS – Oh, and, by the way, always remember to celebrate your birthday like a spectacle!
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Green is everywhere these days, especially on this coast. When we started down the path of greening our events, we were quickly overwhelmed by the amount of information and no clear, trusted path to “green-ness.” We decided early-on that our commitment would be to learn as much as possible, mine the information for substance, and share it with others in the event world.
That was the impetus for our recent Green Event Summit hosted in tandem with Green Consultants and the W Hotel San Francisco. When it comes to Green, these guys are the shade of Deep Loden, unlike our Budding Leaf status. “Deep Loden?” you may ask. Well, an interesting roundtable exercise we conducted was to ask all of the participants to rank themselves on a “Green Spectrum” of our own design (we had to have a little bit of the Wilsonwest creative flair in there). The range of responses really helped illustrate that this is a burgeoning aspect of our industry and further fueled our excitement to be involved on the ground level.
We had a great turnout for the event and were impressed by the industry leaders from Oracle, The Gap, and Cisco who shared stories about the successes and challenges in greening their events. One of the takeaways was a lengthy list of online resources that we are all using to help wrap our arms around this important topic. Here’s a great example of one such resource. Check it out and see what the carbon footprint is for your most recent event. The success of this forum has encouraged us to make this a regular part of our partner outreach. If you would like to attend the next one or are interested in more specific information, please send us an email.
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