Take the Footprint Challenge

Inspiring Sustainability Innovations that Protect the Earth and Reduce Costs

What It Is

The Footprint Challenge is an internal corporate tool managers can use to recognize and reward innovative sustainability initiatives led by individual branches, stores, divisions, or offices. The Ecological Footprint is one of the worlds most ubiquitous and rigorous sustainability indicators, measuring how much nature is required to produce the goods and services we consume. The Footprint Challenge is a friendly competition for the lowest Ecological Footprint per employee. It is a way to encourage state of the art methods to reduce energy, water, and materials consumption and promote green purchasing, recycling, and efficiency. Businesses that accept the Footprint Challenge benefit by cutting costs, demonstrating their commitment to green principles, and reducing their impact on the Earth.

How It Works

Step 1 - Design of the Footprint Challenge

Our Footprint Challenge team works with your corporate leadership to design contest rules, scoring protocols, awards, and communication strategies. We develop promotional materials that will maximize participation by store managers and visibility of the contest to your customer base.

Step 2 - Customized Footprint Calculator

We create an on-line Footprint calculator for use by participating managers. The calculator takes data on energy, water, and materials use, purchasing patterns, recycling, use of chemicals, transportation and other factors and converts it to Footprint scores. Footprint scores are expressed in acres or hectares, and broken into sub-categories such as the carbon footprint of particular interest to your organization. Footprint scores are stored in a database that can be used to track Footprint scores over time and compare results across branches, stores, divisions, or offices. To account for differences in size of operations, the scores are expressed on a per-employee basis. The calculator can also be modified to estimate cost savings associated with environmental improvements. We train sustainability coordinators and other key management staff to gather appropriate data and enter it into the calculator.

Step 3 - The Competition

The Footprint Challenge is a year long-competition. At the beginning of the year, management teams enter their data and receive initial results. With assistance from your sustainability coordinators, we then disseminate information on ways Footprint scores can be improved. At the end of the year, managers use the Footprint calculator again. This time their scores should reflect the benefits of any sustainability initiatives they may have implemented over the past year.

Step 4 - The Winners

Our team reviews all the Footprint scores and verifies the accuracy of data supplied by the management teams. The results are announced in a series of on-line, print, and on site media events. The top three winners have the three lowest Footprint scores per employee. Additional awards are giving to the top three managers who reduced their footprint the most over the course of the year. Winners receive trophies, store displays, cash awards, bragging rights, and front page recognition on the companys website.

Step 5 - Communications

Our marketing and publicity experts will help make the Footprint Challenge the centerpiece of your companys green image. We develop communication strategies targeted both internally to employees, management, owners, and investors and externally to the media and your customer base to explain how the Footprint Challenge works and highlight its effectiveness in spurring action throughout the organization. We also prepare summaries of the results and underlying data for use in your companys annual sustainability reports. Our goal is garner the support you need to make the Footprint Challenge a fun, effective, and highly visible campaign for many years to come.

Contact us now to get started!

To schedule a meeting with our Footprint Challenge team contact Dr. John Talberth

tel: 505.986.1163 | email:jtalberth@sustainable-economy.org