Global Water's Droplet Recycling Icon is the Foundation of the Educational Campaign

Global Water Resources of Arizona has become an international expert promoting the use and reuse of recycled water. They did it with big thinking, a smart campaign, and tireless efforts with regulators, lawmakers and their customers. Here’s how:

• Stand For Something That’s Bigger Than You Are: Global Water could’ve been just another water and sewer company. Instead, they are “Experts at Scarcity Management.” Being a utility is simply just their vehicle to propel the water industry forward for smarter use of an extremely limited and vulnerable resource. As Trevor Hill, president and CEO of Global Water, says, “We look for people who want to work for a purpose that’s bigger than themselves.”

• Create A Powerful Visual Brand: Superman doesn’t wear a lower-case “S” on his chest. Nor should your company or cause. In Global’s case, we created a logo that celebrated the “G” in Global Water with their own version of a recycling logo. It also suggested water-swirling-down-a-drain (The first step in the water recycling cycle.). Your logo becomes the visual icon of your brand, what you stand for, and will anchor ALL of your future messaging. Make it active, important and powerful.

• Make Your Message Both Familiar And Unique: Our hero visual with the campaign launch was the recycling logo made of water drops. It’s important to use recognizable visual prompts and present them to your audience with a new and interesting perspective. This technique takes your brand from being conceptual to concrete. It also makes your message more familiar so that doing the “green thing” isn’t so alien to those new to environmental causes.

• Your Green Brand Must Be Approachable, Believable & Doable: To be effective with green marketing and promoting sustainability, you need to embrace your cynics, coax in the uncommitted, and give voice to the believers. Replace defensiveness with facts that support your cause. Facts also arm your proponents with the fodder to become powerful word-of-mouth evangelists on your behalf. Demonstrate to the uncommitted how easy it is to get involved by providing specific actions they can take to make a difference.

• Consistency, Consistency, Consistency: To extend the theme of the water-drop recycling visual, ALL of Global’s print ads, educational materials, website and collateral used droplet icons to punctuate the main message of the particular piece. The success of their outreach was due in great part to the impeccable consistency throughout ALL of their campaign. You can view the work here.

• Avoid The Temptation To Pound Your Chest: Customers don’t want to hear how great you are or how wonderful your product is. Rather, they’re more interested in how you can make a real difference in their lives. Education is THE most powerful form of selling. Stop proclaiming and start conversing with your customer. Let them connect the intellectual dots.

• Appeal To The Heart, And The Head Will Follow: Don’t confuse educating with being boring. People buy with emotion, and then justify their purchase with their intellect (It’s a right brain/left brain thing). Global’s management team worked closely with us to insure the campaign was beautiful, warm, engaging, thoughtful, and always on strategy.

• With Market Leadership Comes Responsibility: Sometimes you have to sharpen your sword, or in this case your pen, and take a stand. Given the expanding population throughout the desert southwest, as well as the drought that may or may not be caused by global warming, Global had to communicate the urgency of their mission with greater emphasis. The water-drop theme was executed in a new and more forceful way to raise awareness of the critical need for regulatory action in freeing up the use of recycled water.

• Be First At Something: Heck, be first at lots of things. Global Water has just received the 2009 EPA “Environmental Achievement Award” for its work and commitment to protecting the environment.  They are one of the first private water utilities in America to build a LEEDs facility.  Global’s Water Resource Center in Maricopa, AZ, functions both as a regional operations facility, as well as a community and educational center.

You can download the case study of Global Water’s branding of recycled water here. global-case-study

This post is a follow-up to my story on Monday about not selling sustainability to a reptile. Imagine if Global based their effort on a  fear tactic of running out of water. The reptile in all of us would simply choose to flee the message or fight it. Rather, Global took the higher road to educate the thinking human in all of us to promote recycled water. I doubt they’d be where they are today, consulting around the world on how to double plumb communities and recycle water.

Ralph Nader chatting with Park Howell during the Valley Forward Livability Summit, Phoenix, AZ.

The “New-thinking” leaders with a green agenda MUST do a better job articulating sustainability, so said Ralph Nader yesterday during the Valley Forward Livability Summit in Phoenix, Arizona. I had an opportunity to sit down with Mr. Nader, former presidential candidate for the Green Party, and get his thoughts about the power of communication to help save the planet from pollution, global warming, resource depletion, etc.

Q. What do you mean by being “more articulate”?

Nader: We need to express our views of ecology differently to shift the reality. For instance, most people typically look at a roof and think of it as something that just provides shelter.  But a roof can serve so many more ecological purposes. It can function as a power source, garden, water collector, work of art, and home for recycled and renewable materials. We need to get people to shift the way they view and interact with the world around them if we’re going to be successful curbing global warming and the other ecological atrocities we’re perpetrating on this planet.

Q. How should we use communication to shift that reality?

Nader: We need to use the language of the marketplace. Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins are some the best at this with “Natural Capitalism,” which categorizes natural resources needed for manufacturing as true capital. Help companies understand the impact natural resources have on their bottom line, shareholder value, market value, etc. It’s the only way to get the bean counters’ attention. Again, change their view of reality by attaching the direct cost of their environmental impact to their profitability.

Q. Obama’s campaign demonstrated the power of the web and social media to rally a community. How effective can online media be for green and sustainable causes?

Nader: The web is a nice “rah, rah tool” when you have a stated deadline and singular focus, such as a candidate in an election where there’s a winner and a loser. But it hasn’t proven itself as a “civic motivator” for larger, less-focused causes. Without the focus and deadlines, it just becomes an email campaign to notify people of what’s happening. “How do you use virtual reality to effect reality?” Time will tell.

Q. Which companies or leaders are effectively articulating the greater importance and urgency for sustainable practices?

Nader: In addition to Paul Hawken of Smith & Hawken, and Amory Lovins, you should look at Guss Speth, of the Yale School of Forestry, and read Barry Commoner’s book: Making Peace with the Planet. One should also follow what Ray Anderson of Interface is doing. These are corporate and civic environmental leaders who get it, and are doing a great job sharing their ecological vision.

Mr. Nader singled out a speech given by Ray Anderson in 2005 as one of the most eloquent, simple, and transforming speeches he has heard relative to our human footprint and the responsibility we all carry to preserve our planet.

I have asked myself over and over for nearly 11 years, and I ask you, how would a living planet—the rarest and most precious thing in the universe—lose its biosphere, i.e., its essential livability? We take it for granted and don’t want to believe losing it is even possible. But, think about it, and you know, if Earth, someday in the distant future, has lost its livability—its biosphere—it will have happened insidiously:
One silted or polluted stream at a time;
One polluted river at a time;
One collapsing fish stock at a time;
One dying coral reef at a time;
One acidified or entrophied lake at a time;
One over-fertilized farm at a time, leading to
one algae bloom at a time.
One eroded ton of topsoil at a time;
One developed wetland at a time;
One mansion built on a fragile marsh hammock at a time;
One disrupted animal migration corridor at a time;
One butchered tree at a time;
One corrupt politician at a time;
One new open-pit coal mine in a pristine valley at a time;
One decimated old growth forest at a time;
One lost habitat at a time;
One disappearing acre of rain forest at a time;
One political pay-off at a time, resulting in one regulatory roll-back at a time;
One leaching landfill at a time;
One belching smokestack or exhaust pipe at a time;
One depleted or polluted aquifer at a time;
One desertified farm at a time;
One over-grazed field at a time;
One toxic release at a time;
One oil spill at a time;
One breath of fouled air at a time;
One-tenth of a degree of global warming at a time;
One exotic disease vector at a time;
One new disease at a time;
One invasive species at a time;

One perchlorate contaminated head of lettuce at a time. (Perchlorate is rocket fuel, and it is in the ground water of the San Joaquin Valley of California thanks to Aerojet General.)

One chloro-fluorinated or methyl-brominated molecule of ozone at a time,
creating a deadly hole in the ozone ultra-violet radiation shield;
One poorly designed carpet at a time;
One thoughtlessly designed building or building interior at a time;
One misplaced kilogram of plutonium at a time;
One more ton of spent nuclear fuel at a time, looking for a safe and secure home for 240,000 (!) years;
One advance of urban sprawl at a time;
One insensitive or uninformed architect or interior designer or facility manager or manufacturer at a time;
One songbird at a time;
One PCB-laced Orca, one whale, on dolphin, one trumpeter swan, one mountain gorilla, one polar bear, one leatherneck turtle at a time;
One entire wild species at a time; and
One poverty-stricken, starving, diseased, or exploited human being at a time;
That is how it would have happened, and we know that it is happening already.

Mr. Nader applauded Valley Forward’s efforts and feels that Phoenix is way ahead of most of the large metro areas in country in terms of environmental stewardship. He said, “It’s not a question of direction, but speed.”

When it comes to consumption, humans can either be locusts descending on a helpless farmer’s crop, or a gracefully grazing gazelle on an African plain. My point is that we don’t have to devour everything in sight. Mindful consumerism can actually help to heal the planet. We simply have to be more responsible in how we balance commerce and ecology.

The more green digging I do, the more incredible people, organizations, products and businesses I find who are changing the paradigm. So I will begin to feature them in this year-long series of posts: “How Commerce & Ecology Can Coexist.”

Let’s take a look at my first entry: Greenraising.com, Earth Friendly Fundraising, which donates 25% of each online purchase to your cause.

The organization was started by the parents of elementary school children who watched how their PTA struggled each year to raise money. At the same time, they noticed that their children were coming home with concerns about the environment, pollution, global warming and living conditions in the world, and were feeling helpless to change things. Greenraising was created to help solve both problems: Raise money for schools and give children an opportunity to learn that their actions can change the world.

Greenraising found so much success with their school fundraising model that they have expanded their mission to benefit other non-profit organizations.

Register your nonprofit with Greenraising.com, and they will send you 25% of the proceeds from all eco-friendly products purchased from their site, providing the buyer names your organization as the beneficiary. Greenraising.com will also help you with catalog drives and planning fundraising events.

Plus the site offers interesting insights into how commerce & ecology can and DO coexist; like this little ditty about their Guatemalan Peace Coffee.

To me what Greenraising.com is doing is impressive. It’s a “circle-of-life” mechanism to raise funds for non-profit causes, by selling eco-friendly products, that educate site visitors on Earth-friendly consumption, that helps us all to become better stewards of our planet, by raising awareness and funds for programs important to us.

They are examples of the famous quote by Margaret Mead:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Do you know of a cause or organization that is doing a good job of demonstrating how commerce and ecology can coexist? If so, let us know.

The second annual Greener Gadgets Design Competition was held on Saturday in New York. Designers from around the world submitted products in several categories including energy, materials/lifecycle/recycling, social impact, and educational development.

Click here to see all Greener Gadget entries. Here you can see the competition winners.

Here are 10 of the top 50 that I found intriguing.

1. Fastronauts: Combating child obesity and batteries in landfills, these toys are powered by play.
   

   The Fastronauts idea is designed to combat child obesity.

2. BugPlugs: Turns off a connected device when not in use to avoid energy drain.
3. Bware Water Meter: Allows you to monitor your water usage by simply attaching to showerheads, faucets, etc.
4. ubicycle Public Bicycle Service System: Providing commuters with easy access to bicycles to promote non-polluting and healthier transportation.
5. Tweet-a-Watt Twittering Power Meter: The “Kill a Watt” monitors your daily energy usage and Tweets your results as a reminder to reduce your use, as well as for friendly competition among your followers.
6. VE09 Blister Radio: Made from PLA, a biodegradable, thermoplastic, aliphatic polyester derived from renewable resources such as cornstarch (in the U.S.) or sugarcanes.
7. CompostAll: a replacement for the home in-sink garbage disposal, which allows food waste to be composted instead of sent down the drain.
   

   The Solar Pot charges batteries in the same way that plants receive nutrition from the sun.

8. Recompute: Sustainable desktop computer housed in cardboard.
9. Solar Pot: Plants get nutritive elements from the sun. Solar Pot charges batteries through this same solar energy: It recycles batteries by use of natural energy.
10. Move Your Energy: A rocking shell chair with an LED lamp specially designed for reading that is powered by your motion.