A couple of us from the HY-brid team attended the Tuesday February 9th GreenBiz.com State of Green Business Forum in Chicago. Though the weather was busy dumping more than a foot of snow on the area, it didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of the nearly 400 people in attendance.

The Forum included some great presentations, panel discussions and opportunities to meet some of the leading experts in sustainability from companies like IBM, Johnson Controls, UPS, EBay, and the list goes on. The obvious topic of interest for HY-brid was the session titled Green Marketing in the Age of Transparency, a panel presentation that was certainly was worth its weight. We heard from the panelists (in short) that consumers are interested in green products, they are willing to pay more and they take comfort in knowing they are buying from a company who is looking out for their health and the health of the environment.

So what exactly does that mean for you? HY-brid has always counseled clients that ‘going green,’ or engaging in sustainability efforts is good business. No matter if it is about the bottom line (a huge driver by the way,) or if it’s good for the environment or both, green is ultimately a great business decision. Think about it—who from your stakeholder set would disagree with a better bottom line? A better process? A better product? I think you get the picture.

The part of the equation that seems to be missing in all of this is how the green efforts get communicated to those same stakeholders. How an organization is telling its sustainability story (or even if it is telling its story) should be addressed as part of the overall communications strategy. HY-brid addresses this in our EcoMap process, something we create with our clients to help them deliver the right sustainability messages to each stakeholder audience in their own ‘speak,’ i.e. what makes sense to them. This approach allows an organization to ensure the internal and external audiences are getting the right messages about the products and services reseach shows they are most interested in.

For more information on the EcoMap process, the questions to ask before you take your message to market or, if you simply want to learn more about HY-brid, send us a message, we would like to hear from you.

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I don’t typically write about our client work, but a new web tool we have created is in my opinion, pretty darn cool. As you’ve seen on HY-brid’s home page, we have a client, Focus on Energy, that Hoffman York has helped market for more than 8 years. As Wisconsin’s statewide energy efficiency and renewable energy resource, Focus works to educate residents and businesses about the benefits of using less energy and being smarter when they’re using it.

A really exciting new tool we’ve just launched with Focus is a website for the new Live Efficiently with Focus home assessment tool. It‘s meant to help homeowners interested in energy efficiency, but don’t know where to start. It’s also designed for those who’ve made a few changes, but aren’t sure what to do next. In our time working with Focus, both of our organizations have come to realize many Wisconsinites (and this of course extends to homeowners everywhere) think their home is energy efficient, but aren’t exactly sure how efficiently they’re living. This tool might help them determine where small or large improvements can be made.

Live Efficiently with Focus takes you through a series of questions about your home, the products in it, your energy supply and how you are using energy within your home. All the while the tool is keeping tabs on your answers. The result is an assessment of your home and your energy lifestyle. Pretty cool stuff.

After questions are answered, there are results and reporting features that help to get the user started. Tips and solutions are offered along the way. A user can even choose to create an account and or email their report to a consultant if they want to take the next step.

In the end, this is a residential tool but remember the bigger story here is that becoming more energy efficient is a lifestyle change. HY-brid helps businesses communicate their sustainability efforts but no matter how many hours are put in at the office, we all go home and use our TV’s, appliances and other household energy users. My hope is you take a walk through the site (for those not in Wisconsin, when you get to the county and city section, enter Milwaukee for both) and learn a bit about yourself and how you are consuming energy within your home. What you learn may surprise you. Take what you learn back to the office. Who knows, it may just spark some more efficiency practices in your building.

If you want to find out how you can assess your sustainability practices, or, if you simply want to learn more about Hoffman York and HY-brid, send us a message, we would like to hear from you.

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Hoffman York and HY-brid would like to wish everyone a very happy holiday. We believe the most precious gift we can give one another is a brighter future. And we can all do that, simply by living and working a little greener. Here are 10 simple ways we can all be more environmentally friendly, during the holidays, and all year round.

1. Decorate with ENERGY STAR^® qualified LED light strings. They use up to 90% percent less energy than standard mini-lights and up to 99% less than the larger C-7 holiday lights.

2. Make your own wrapping paper. Most mainstream wrapping paper isn’t recyclable. If each home wrapped just three gifts with an old map, the newspaper or children’s artwork, we’d save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.

3. Gifting electronics this season? Donate or recycle old electronics responsibly. They contain mercury and other toxins we shouldn’t put into landfills. Some sites will even pay you to recycle old electronics. For example, www.gazelle.com.

4. Replace the five most used light bulbs in your home with ENERGY STAR^® qualified compact fluorescent light bulbs and save about $150 in energy costs.

5. Use a programmable thermostat. It automatically turns down the heat when you’re asleep or away, saving up to $100 a year in heating and cooling costs.

6. Computer shopping? Choose a laptop over a desktop computer—it uses up to 90% less energy.

7. Take the stairs, not the elevator. This exercise is good for you—and it saves energy.

8. Drink tap water. You’ll save the materials and energy resources it takes to bottle and transport water. Plus, you’ll keep another plastic bottle from ending up in a landfill.

9. Fight “phantom load.” Electronics like computers, DVD players, stereos and TVs draw power, even when turned off.  Plug them into a power strip and switch it off when they aren’t in use. This combats phantom load and cuts annual energy costs.

10. Fix just one leaky faucet. You’ll save one gallon of water each day, and nearly 350 gallons of water each year.

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I was recently in Las Vegas. Even though it was technically vacation, I couldn’t help but view the city through my “green microscopic” goggles. As I walked from casino to casino in the city of excess, I noticed that there were no recycling bins. I was shocked!

However, when I returned home, I did my due diligence and researched recycling within the hospitality industry in Las Vegas and was surprised at what I found out.

According to the Nevada Environmental Protection Agency, the hotel recycling happens internally, behind the scenes without patrons even being aware. Many hospitality organizations are contracting with waste management companies to sort and recycle on a daily basis.

In my research, I also discovered that Planet Hollywood, located in the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace, has one of the most comprehensive restaurant recycling programs in Las Vegas. And it has been in place since 1994!

Planet Hollywood began recycling because food was over 84 percent of the its overall waste. To address the situation, management installed a separate garbage compactor on the restaurant’s receiving dock. The ability to separately control and monitor its own garbage has been integral to the success of Planet Hollywood’s recycling program.

After feeling better about recycling in the Las Vegas hospitality industry, I looked at the overall recycling of Las Vegas and according to a news report from Fox 5 Vegas on August 24, 2009, as a whole the city is ranked second to last.

However, looking at the glass half full and a 2008 study done by SustainLane, Las Vegas is ranked seventh in the nation for Energy and Climate Change policy. So clearly measures are being taken on behalf of the city and state of Nevada after all.

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It’s not always about how you market your business. It’s just as important to look at why you should be marketing it. And the issue of marketing your sustainability platform is a great example. Every organization is facing new energy challenges as the world shifts toward a more eco-conscious means of doing business, and the questions about your stance on the environment are being heard from all stakeholder levels. The increased political and societal pressure to curb carbon emissions and produce a meaningful message is inevitable. At this point, it would be detrimental for a company not to have a message created for how it plans to address the environment.

But how is the stance a business takes on the environment marketable? Should it be marketable? That depends on how it is approached. Never has there been more pressure for companies of all sizes to address sustainability. But doing so can’t happen without first understanding the “green” aspects of the business. A shotgun approach could lead to unnecessary expenditures and ultimately a “greenwashing” tag.

In previous posts and in those to follow, we have and will address how a business must look at what it has done to reduce its environmental impact. There are a number of ways organizations can collect that data- an energy audit is just one example. Once that information has been gathered, HY-brid works to help understand what makes sense from a communications standpoint for each of the stakeholders. The EcoMap (as we call it) process builds a message map for businesses to tie their environmental message into the overall corporate mission.

Once this map has been assembled, the sustainability message can be written. It is also at this point a company can determine exactly how much it wants to market what it has done. From the mapping process, a company can also learn how far it has to go to get to a sustainability message it wants to disseminate.

For more information on the EcoMap process, the questions to ask before you take your message to market or, if you simply want to learn more about HY-brid, send us a message, we would like to hear from you

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Cap and trade, energy efficiency, LEED buildings and renewable energy for business. All terms your audiences or customers are hearing and becoming very familiar with. With all the buzz around “green,” how you address your position on the environment is increasingly important. Your sustainability platform must project your environmental message across all audiences, internal and external. One segment taking increasing notice of green is the stakeholder- a somewhat loose term that envelops those from among others, the dealer/retailer audience to the supply chain, to those who own stock in a company.

A key reason for putting your sustainability platform in front of stakeholders is to keep them informed of how the company is addressing the rising number of environmental issues facing businesses of all types. With such a wide audience range, what makes sense from a sustainability perspective to one must also be pertinent to each of the others. That’s not to say that what you are saying to each gets communicated the same. What I do mean is that your platform remains the same but the terms and messages need to be communicated in a way that the audience sees the “what’s in it for me” has been met.

For instance, you may have three green certifications that make your product or service more sellable. To the dealer/retailer the certifications make sense in helping how they package that product and where in their store it is positioned. It also gives them an opportunity to promote their business as eco-friendly. That’s what’s in it for them.

To a stockholder, the fact you have three green certifications means something very different. An immediate question might be– are those labels going to help the price of the stock rise? The answer is maybe, but at the end of the day, what matters to this audience is a more global approach to your sustainability platform. The fact you have one may be enough to make them want to invest in you. If stock prices rise, that investor does better. That’s what’s in it for them.

Clearly there are many within your stakeholder audiences that are looking to work with and purchase stock in organizations with a solid environmental platform. This is another subset of your audience set and it too needs a message that makes sense. We will address this in a follow up post.

All of these examples are addressed in what HY-brid calls an EcoMap^sm. If you’ve been following me you know I have blogged about it before. It’s our way of helping clients understand how to put their environmental platform together—what audiences they have, what messages make sense to each of those audiences and how the platform ladders up to the overall corporate mission.

Have stakeholders asking what you are doing to address the environment? Have an environmental message and just don’t know how to put all the pieces together? The EcoMap is one way HY-brid can help. Questions on what your next steps are in navigating this issue? Let us know, it’s why we’re here.

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After my last blog titled One Green Message, Many Green Voices, I received a great comment from Keith P. His comment is:

Good starting points to take under consideration for establishing the green message within the proper conversations. The only thing I might challenge is how you reply within the social settings of facebook, twitter, tumblr, linkedin, myspace and brighkite when you are not the company spokesperson. Do you empower your employees to talk openly about how they view your green initiatives? Do you allow your employees to express their opinions and how they are helping the company be green? And do you engage people that discuss your company’s attempts at being green?

If the company has answered yes to this then you are a social business going green, if not your a company with a veil of secrecy of your green efforts and that is where you need help encouraging the conversation, because most likely you have bigger cultural issues.

Now if yes how can the EcoMap process help give the employees the framework of communication without sounding like they are talking points? How does the EcoMap process address when your Vendors and Consumers talk about your company? (Personal opinion on the last one–if you are embracing your Vendors and Consumers in a social context the conversation is more constructive, collborative, and innovative, which helps everyone in process make a difference.)

Looking forward to answers to these questions and follow-up blog posts on the process.

Thanks for the feedback Keith. HY-brid works with our clients to establish their environmental (green) platform and it’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach. To that end, it is much more than the green conversation(s) we address in our EcoMap process. We take into consideration such things as type of business, audience set(s), and messages that are not only pertinent to, but resonate with those audiences. This holistic approach to defining green for clients ladders up to the overall business goals and objectives and thus acts as an extension of the corporate mission.

In your comment you reference many of the social outlets being used today. We certainly address these in our communications planning, but it is again very different by client. One important thing to keep in mind is that not all businesses are marching to the same beat on social. We’ve found social marketing and social media are very new to a number of businesses, no matter their size and standing within their industry, and in fact we have visited with some very large corporations whose marketing teams are blocked from social sites. While we certainly encourage our clients to be as transparent as possible on their environmental stance, if they do not have the social tools in their arsenal (yet) we can only counsel them to use the tools they do have to promote their efforts.

But in our overall approach to social for those clients who have access to it, we look at it as a means of brand building. It is an extension of what can be done through traditional ads and PR but puts the brand building experience in the hands of the customer. That’s where being truly transparent plays a key role in how a business uses social in its integrated communications planning. The EcoMap process determines the audiences and messages for each, and from the Map, the tactics that make the most sense for those messages to be disseminated are determined. Social is a key ingredient in that tactical mix.

To answer your question about how we help manage messages when the people in the social space are not the spokespersons, we do give message points with hopes those socially communicating stay to them, but we also counsel our clients to develop social guidelines for employees to adhere to.

Thanks again for the great comment Keith.

Do you have questions about your environmental platform? Have comments on our process or HY-brid’s vision of green messaging and marketing? Let us know– it’s why we’re here.

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Yes, with a capital Y. A recent report from Johnson Controls in which more than 1,400 CEO’s, GM’s and VP’s were surveyed suggests a trend in energy efficiency that only a downturn in the economy could drive. The 2009 Energy Efficiency Indicator Report reveals a clear line between interest in green and action being taken.

The reason for the distinction? Capital, or lack thereof. Of those surveyed in 2009, 46 percent indicated they expected to make efficiency improvements financed with capital expenditures. Admittedly, this is a nice number—until you compare it to last year’s 56 percent who said they would make the improvements. In addition, the number one barrier (42 percent of respondents) to energy efficiency measures being implemented is limited capital availability. The 10 percent drop, coupled with the fact the report even had to introduce the barrier statistic (it wasn’t in 2008’s) shows just how much the economic situation has worked against the push toward environmental responsibility and stewardship.

There is no doubt that business leaders need to do what they can to keep people employed. The fact that green initiatives are taking a back seat is totally understandable, but they should not be cast aside for good. Corporate America seems to agree–according to the study, 45 percent of those surveyed still see building efficiency projects as their top carbon reduction strategy. So we know the want for getting these measures in place is there. The hope of course is that the economy turns around and the number of projects implemented increases with it.

So what side of this issue are you on? It’s a question you should be asking yourself and one that we would like to help you answer and eventually communicate to your audiences. Questions on what your next steps are in navigating this issue? Let us know, it’s why we’re here.

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I’ve been writing about energy efficiency and renewable energy for years now. It’s something I truly believe in and it makes me feel good to write about it. Why? Because I feel like, in some small way, I’m doing my part to help save the world. I’m telling people how to be more energy efficient and I’m propelling products that will help them do that. By using less energy, they’ll create less pollution, which will collectively contribute to the health of our planet. How often can an advertising copywriter really say, “I’m saving the world?!” Exactly.

But just because I believe in green, doesn’t mean I’m made of it. Like most people, when it comes to personal energy efficiency and eco-awareness, I do what I can. I turn off lights at home, and to the frustration of some co-workers, around the office. I use compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). I have a low-flow showerhead. I use a SmartStrip for my entertainment center electronics to reduce phantom load and have ENERGY STAR^® qualified appliances. I have a programmable thermostat. There’s more, but you get the point. Add it all up and I’m probably more energy efficient than the average bear, but there’s always room for improvement. No pun intended.

Something that’s been on my to-do list for quite a while is a home energy audit. Well, many, many home improvement projects later (the home is quite the fixer-upper) I finally made it happen on Earth Day ’09.

I have a 60-year-old Cape Cod. So when it came to my home’s efficiency challenges, I wanted to know—and I didn’t want to know.

I found my consultant through Focus on Energy, Wisconsin’s energy efficiency and renewable energy initiative. Tom from 5 Star Energy walked around the inside and outside of my house to get the lay of the land, and then began to set up for the test. If you’re not familiar with a home energy audit, here’s what happens:

Testing the combustion safety.

Combustion safety test – Using a continuous sampling instrument, the consultant measures CO parts per million (ppm) in the flue gases of your furnace and water heater. This makes sure your water heater and furnace are drafting properly. It they’re not, you could have dangerous levels of carbon monoxide in your home. While testing the combustion safety, your consultant will also measure the efficiency of your heating equipment.

Blower door testing equipment.

Building Air Tightness – The consultant sets up a blower door. This tool lowers the air pressure inside your home. Because the air pressure outside is now higher, air is drawn into your home through all unsealed openings. Sometimes, the consultant will use a smoke pencil to show you the leaks, but often you can actually FEEL the air rushing in or see cobwebs moving. The blower door equipment will measure your air leakage in cubic feet per minute (cfm). A home’s air leakage number should be about equal to its square footage.

Ventilation – Using a balometer, the consultant measures the volumetric flow of your kitchen and bath fans in cubic feet per minute (cfm). This ensures that they’re powerful enough to remove moisture from your home and for your room sizes.

Infrared camera showing insulation in my home's sidewalls.

Insulation – The consultant will examine the box sills in your basement and your walls and attic to determine the presence and level of existing insulation. To determine the presence and level of insulation in exterior walls, the consultant may use either an infrared camera or drill holes and use a wall probe. If necessary, you’ll receive recommendations for increasing insulation levels.

My consultant's initial notes. This is NOT the report.

After the inspection and all tests are complete, you’ll receive a detailed report of your home’s performance. The report will pinpoint exactly where your home is inefficient, and explain exactly how to fix the issues. It will also include a list of recommended contractors. These contractors have gone through training on Home Performance with ENERGY STAR^® and know the program standards; so you know the work will be done correctly.

Now that I have my home’s efficiency report, I actually feel empowered. I know my home inside and out and I have a surprisingly short list of projects to tackle. If I decide to involve contractors, I know EXACTLY what to ask for, so I won’t get talked into anything I don’t need. Plus, I’ll know they’re reputable, because my consultant has recommended them.

I can’t think of a better way to spend an Earth Day.

Energy audits can be conducted on homes and businesses. Obviously, the opportunity for savings is even greater in the commercial arena. Visit these pages within energystar.gov to find more information on having your home or business energy audited.

Oh, before you click away, I suppose you might be curious as to how my home did on the energy efficiency test. Well…

The good news is that I actually have insulation in ALL of my sidewalls; my heating equipment is drafting properly with a very safe CO ppm that’s remarkably low for the age of the equipment and state of my chimney; my windows are surprisingly tight, for being older; my attic is fairly well insulated, with just a couple of areas that need attention; and my water heater is operating at .59 energy factor—.64 is the recommendation.

The (not so) bad news is that my home’s air leakage is three times what it should be. It should match my square footage (1,200 s.f.), but it’s at 2,983. This is easily fixed—and I can do a lot of it myself.  Also, my furnace is operating at less than 80% Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency (AFUE). It’s should be 90+ AFUE. No surprise. It’s 13 years old. Like anyone, I’ll replace it when I need to. 

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