Gone are the days of gas guzzling muscle cars, record players and TV antennas as it was in 1970, when Earth Day started. This year, 39 years later, a lot has changed. We have turned the corner as a generation. Today fuel efficient cars, Ipods and the Internet are a normal part of our life. But yet, some of our most basic forms of advertising and marketing are still stuck in the 1970s.
How may pieces of junk mail do you receive a day? A month or a year? According to Keene State College, “Every year, there are 2.65 billion holiday cards sold in the U.S. That’s enough to fill a football stadium field 10 stories high!”[1] More than 80% of Americans now have a computer in their homes, and of those, almost 92% have Internet access.[2] My question is, why do we continue to print brochures, books, marketing materials and greeting cards with this amazing technology we have access to?
InnoGage, a progressive startup company, is solving the problem of outdated methods and embracing the technological advances of today to reduce cost, reduce environmental waste and promote sustainable connectivity.Consider the old way Colleges and Universities promoted themselves. High School students would go to college fairs and absently put their name down on each and every school’s list, requesting more information. The school prints thousands of books with pictures and reasons why you shouldattend written by a marketing person. These books kill numerous trees, use vast amounts of untold chemicals to process and print and most will end up in a landfill, many never even opened. Plus the carbon footprint of producing and shipping these books all over the world does damage that we can never recoup.
Join us for a free webinar on April 22. Dave Zielski, Director of Earth Day for New York City, will be presenting on the advancements of web 2.0 and on how tapping into the Green Power of social media can make your organization better for our planet!
Now, welcome to InnoGage and Web 2.0. These same high school students now friend a college’s Facebook page and put their name on the colleges email list. Before going to sleep, an email awaits them with a beautiful brochure attachment plus a link to the admissions blog (powered by InnoGage). Here students have written about their school, programs, campus life and the surrounding area. Vibrant videos and images of classrooms, sporting events and student functions replace stale images in a book or pamphlet. Prospective students write comments on the Facebook wall or on blog entries which are then answered by the authors in hours. Relationships are built and trust increases. All this, with InnoGage’s servers migrating to a 100% solar powered hosting provider, and there has not been any paper wasted, toxic printing materials used, fossil fuels consumed for shipping or waste contributed to the landfills.
Now how cool and “Green”, is that!
References:
[1] http://www.keene.edu/sustain/gg_holiday.cfm
[2] http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/home-internet-access-in-us-still-room-for-growth-8280/
