Water.org is a non-profit organization that uses innovative solutions inspired by for-profit social enterprises to provide sustainable sources of clean drinking water to poor families and communities in the developing world.
Why Water?
Water.org was co-founded by Gary White and Hollywood star and screenwriter Matt Damon. One of its missions is simply to raise awareness of the severity of the water crisis affecting the world. In much of the Western world, we can simply walk a few feet to a tap and have a seemingly endless supply of clean, safe drinking water pouring into our cup, so it can be hard to imagine an Ethiopian farmer walking two hours a day to fill a jug with muddy water from a well she must share with livestock, wildlife, and thousands of other nearby farm families. Yet that is the situation for many of the world’s people. Nearly 900 million people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, and nearly half of the world lacks access to improved sanitation facilities such as toilets. Of those, about 1.2 billion people don’t have access to any sanitation facilities at all.
Water.org: Bringing Clean Water To the WorldThe effects of this crisis are staggering, and widespread. About half of all hospitalizations around the world are the result of water-related illnesses. 24,000 children under the age of five die every single day from easily preventable water-related diseases such as diarrhea. Many more children, especially girls, are taken out of school to help their mothers gather water, a process that can take up to six hours a day in some regions. Not only does this prevent these children from improving their lives through education, the hard labor of carrying heavy water jugs every day can stunt their growth, causing other health problems such as difficulty giving birth. Younger children are often left home alone for hours every day while their mothers and older siblings collect water and their fathers work. In addition to forcing parents to pull some children from school and leave others home alone without care, time spent fetching water is also time that adult women and men cannot spend on activities such as farming, managing a small business, helping children with homework, and returning to school to improve their own education.
In addition to improving public health and economic opportunities for poor families, improving sanitation and access to clean drinking water also improves local environmental health. In developing countries, more than 80% of raw sewage is typically discharged directly into lakes, streams, and other waterways. This not only encourages the spread of disease, it also contributes to freshwater pollution that is leading to plummeting levels of biodiversity in freshwater ecosystems around the world.
What They Do
Water.org confronts these problems with a variety of innovative solutions.
Water.org’s projects are demand-driven, meaning they work only with individuals and communities that have contacted them (through local partner organizations) for aid first. This ensures that the community is more invested in the project and increases the chances for long-term sustainability and maintenance of the project. (Worldwide, over 50% of water projects fail within the first few years, usually because the local community is not invested in the project or is not given the skills or tools necessary to maintain it.) One of the first things Water.org does when coming into a new community is to set up a water committee. Because women disproportionately bear the burden of collecting water, the committee must always include female members.
Water.org works closely with water committees and the community at large to determine local needs, and emphasizes the use of locally available materials and appropriate technology to build wells and sanitation projects. The local community helps build the project, and is given the training and tools necessary to perform basic maintenance and repairs. Water.org also runs training sessions and other education programs for the local community emphasizing the role of good sanitation in preventing disease.
In addition to these more community-focused programs, Water.org also runs an innovative microcredit program called WaterCredit that offers small loans to individuals and communities to help them improve their access to clean drinking water and sanitation facilities. Since the founding of the WaterCredit program in 2003, borrowers have taken out $2.5 million in loans, with a repayment rate of 96%. More than 12,000 loans have been issued, benefiting more than 158,000 people.
One WaterCredit success story is that of S. Gandhamani in India, who took out a loan to get a new water supply tap installed in her yard as part of a wider effort to improve access to safe drinking water in her entire village. In addition to saving hr much time that was once spent walking back and forth to a communal tap, the wastewater from her tap now drains into her garden. Once dry and neglected, the garden now blooms with food for her family and for sale. Since the addition of the new tap, Gandhamani has planted a number of banana trees in her garden which have increased her income by the equivalent of five weeks of work per year!
Water.org has made especially effective use of Twitter and other social media platforms to spread the word about its programs. In addition to regularly updating their own Twitter account with the latest news and calls to action, Water.org has set up a retweet app that allows users to “donate” their status to tweets from Water.org. Water.org also used Twitter to launch and promote its Haiti Challenge, an effort to provide clean drinking water for 50,000 Haitian citizens.
Water.org also maintains an active presence on Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr.
Garbage has long been regarded as a serious environmental problem. In the United States, 80% of our garbage is recyclable, yet just 28% gets recycled. Most of the rest ends up in massive landfills – the largest the size of 2,000 football fields. More garbage ends up polluting the environment as litter, or contributing to any of seven known trash vortexes in the world’s oceans. The most famous, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is believed to cover an area twice the size of Texas, and may even be as large as the entire continental United States.
Though garbage has long been regarded, rightfully, as an environmental nightmare, a growing number of entrepreneurs are beginning to regard it instead as a goldmine. By recycling, reusing, and repurposing garbage, these entrepreneurs not only help conserve resources, reduce the need for landfills, and prevent or clean up unsightly and harmful litter, they can also save money for businesses!
One example of the new breed of waste management entrepreneurs is RecycleMatch.com. Founded by Brooke Betts Farrell and Chad Farrell, RecycleMatch helps match companies who have waste products with companies who need waste products. One company can make extra money selling waste materials that would otherwise be a liability, the other company can save money purchasing the materials it needs more cheaply than it would find them from traditional sources. Best of all, the exchange conserves resources and reduces waste. It’s a win-win-win situation for both companies and the environment, too!
To date, RecycleMatch has helped keep more than 3 million pounds of waste materials out of landfills. A few examples include a company that sold 180,000 pounds of glass windows removed during a major renovation effort to another company that turned them into beautiful glass tiles and countertops, and a company that sold used vinyl billboards to a company that turned them into reusable shopping bags! Other materials traded on the site have included polyester textile waste, salvaged wood decking materials, waste sodium methylate crystals, and used plastic foam packaging.
If you have (or need) commercial quantities of waste products or raw materials that might find a useful second life in the right hands, RecycleMatch can help!
In order to get started on RecycleMatch, companies need to provide a little upfront information, including:
Description of the waste or materials offered or wanted
Estimated Quantities
Location
Photos
Packaging/Loadout Information
Your company’s name is kept confidential during the matching process in order. Only when a match is made will the two company’s learn each other’s identity in order to complete the transaction.
RecycleMatch is a for-profit social enterprise. Listing materials on the website is free. However, once a successful match is made, RecycleMatch charges a one-time match fee and a small additional fee per ton of materials exchanged. Posting a wanted listing requires an upfront fee. This helps ensure that only serious buyers use the site.
In addition to making use of the service to make money, save money, and go green, you can also show your support for RecycleMatch’s good work by following them on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Consumer habits are responsible for so many of the sustainability issues we face today, which means as consumers, we are extremely powerful. There are thousands of green companies now developing eco-friendly consumer goods that reduce resource consumption, cut toxicity, diminish water and energy consumption, and limit waste. But how, as a consumer, do you find them all?
That’s where green marketing entrepreneurs come in! These smart, savvy individuals are finding ways to promote and inspire a new generation of green consumers with an eye for profitability that doesn’t break the environmental bank.
Green Marketing TV interviewed Sundeep Ahuja, founder of blissmo, a green groupon service for savvy green consumers looking for sustainable products and services that meet quality and organic standards. They feature green businesses through regular deals that provide discounts to consumers while promoting eco-friendly companies seeking a place in the market. (Interested green businesses can connect with blissimo online.) Using social media, this groupon site has become a hub for green business development activity.
blissmo’s mission is to shift demand towards “sustainable consumption” in an effort to fight climate change and prevent environmental degradation. We do this by finding the best sustainable and organic products and services and introducing them to the savvy, conscious shopper at discounts of up to 50%. Changing consumption patterns is no easy task, and discounts are a proven way to get consumers to try new things.
Our business model is similar to Groupon.com’s in that we promote qualified businesses free of cost and take a small commission on any discounted vouchers we sell. Unlike Groupon we’re a mission-driven organization seeking to set these businesses up for long-term success, so our fee is much less and we’re more flexible around terms.
In one way, it took years of experience at eBay and MySpace, helping launch Kiva.org, and co-founding two previous startups (richrelevance and The Extraordinaries). In another way, all it took was a vision, powerful off-the-shelf tools such as WordPress and Google Docs, a strong and growing team of talented individuals who believe in the mission, and friends wanting to help out – plus lots of hard work and hustle.
At the moment blissmo is self-funded. We’re not opposed to taking investment in the future, but because we’re mission driven we’re waiting until we’ve proven the model and our mission-driven approach until we take outside capital.
Through “word-of-mouth” and “word-of-mouse”, social media marketing on Facebook and Twitter, and through blog outreach to communities of green consumers.
It’s a combination of them reaching out to us, our community and friends suggesting businesses and introducing us to them, and our own research. Definitions of “green” vary; we look for values driven, people and planet neutral or positive businesses, products and services. Ideally they are certified by a relevant third party (i.e. San Francisco’s Green Business Program), or if not, they are authentically sustainable in a way that we feel comfortable promoting them to our community.
We’ve been surprised and amazed by the number of passionate and clever entrepreneurs out there creating some great alternatives to “conventional” products. Part of what makes blissmo so fun is that we discover these companies and help them by promoting them to the very consumers who would appreciate them.
The biggest mistake was expecting the revenue to just come pouring in. After hearing stories about how much money Groupon and similar companies were making, we thought even though our commission is much less we should be covering costs in no time. Ha! Most definitely not true. It’s a long road, and “green” entrepreneurs – in both senses of the word – should be ready for that.
Be sure you know what your revenue model is, and how long it will take to scale. Even if you have the best idea or the best intentions, ultimately if you want to build something that will be have broad impact make sure it can be a real, sustainable business.
A decade or so ago, making a single website would cost up to $5000. This is a huge sum of money compared to what webmasters are paying today to create a professional website. If you are just starting in the green online businesses, you need to minimize overhead costs and maximize your profits. The inception of Web 2.0, blogging and open source technologies made it easy for webmasters to create and run a website.
WordPress, the world’s leading blogging software has made the web easy to access; allowing ordinary citizens to start blogging and share their views with the world. All this can be done without relying on a web developer. The easy drag-and-drop design features allow complete novices to start publishing blogs within a few hours. With WordPress, you only need to spend a few bucks for domain and web hosting. After you have set up your website, you need to get the right themes.
Finding an Appropriate Green WordPress Theme
There are so many WordPress themes and getting the right one can be challenging. The easiest way to get a good theme is to open the WordPress themes directory and search for a green theme. This search will list all the themes. It is tedious to choose from the long list of green themes.
Most of the themes are designed for simple blogs and as such, when you have your website, choosing a good theme will be painstaking. If you are an eco-social entrepreneur or you run an environmental non-profit online business, you can choose from free and premium themes online. Most of the paid WordPress themes cost less than $80, one-time fee, which is a great investment when you are having an environmentally conscious business.
This is one of the most popular Green WordPress themes. The premium theme comes in handy for professionals. It offers three visual styles, different fonts to choose from, a variety of page layouts and much more. You can control all the aspects of this theme in the WordPress backend through the control panel of WordPress themes.
Even better, you can tailor the theme using CSS to meet the specific needs of your business. You can shape corners, change fonts and create other effects. It comes with jQuery that lets you embed a video lightbox feature. This allows you to design a clean website, especially if you are focusing on tech.
You get all those features for FREE. Installing and customizing the theme is 100 percent free.
You can use Green Stimulus whether you have a blog or not. You can use it with a small standalone business or a blog. If the control panel of the theme, you can customize how published blogs appear on your homepage. This allows you to stay on the forefront of SEO allowing search engine spiders to find your content.
You can try this theme today and see the difference. The good thing about themes is that you can uninstall and try new ones.
Foursquare is one of the fastest growing social media sites right now, with more than 3,000,000 users already and climbing at a rate of nearly half a million users per month.
Foursquare is a location-based smart phone application that allows users to “check-in” at businesses ranging from restaurants and nightclubs to bed and breakfasts and dry cleaning services. Users can share short also tips and To Do lists with their friends, such as “try the vegan lasagna!” Users earn points and badges for check-ins and for completing certain tasks, and can compete for the position of “Mayor” at a particular location, which means they have more check-ins at that particular spot than anyone else.
Foursquare is not only fun for users, it’s also a great marketing tool for businesses. Foursquare allows business owners to “claim” their businesses and offers a robust selection of features to track the success of your Foursquare marketing efforts, including the most recent visitors, the most frequent visitors, the total number of unique visitors, the number of check-ins per day, and more.
To claim your business on Foursquare, do a search for your business and click the “Claim this” link at the top of the page, then follow the on-screen directions. If your business isn’t listed yet, you can add it.
How To Promote Your Green Business on Foursquare
Once your business is set up on Foursquare, it’s time to start promoting it! Here are some tips for using Foursquare to promote your green business:
Offer specials to regular and first time visitors. Offering specials to Foursquare users is a great idea for several reasons. First, it can be used to reward loyal customers or first-time visitors, increasing the chances that they’ll come back. Second, thanks to its geolocation capabilities, the Foursquare app can notify users who are in the same area as your business – maybe at a business across the road, or down the block – that you offer specials to Foursquare users, increasing the chance that they’ll stop by! the Foursquare app also notifies users what they have to do in order to unlock higher level specials. For example, if one of your customers has checked in eight times and you offer specials every tenth time a customer checks in, they’ll be told that they need to visit twice more before receiving the special offer.
Encourage healthy competition. Since the title of “Mayor” is awarded to users who check in most often at a certain location – patronizing your green business in the process – many businesses are now starting to offer special deals to Mayors via Foursquare, such as discounts on products or services, free drinks, and more.
Monitor To Do lists… and add your own. Foursquare users can create To Do lists for fellow users to suggest fun or interesting things to try at a particular location. It’s a great idea to monitor these lists, because they can suggest ways to improve your customer experience. For example, if users are being told to “check out the horrible bathrooms… if you dare”, it may be time to crack out the Windex and toilet brushes. You can also suggest your own To Dos, and this is an especially good opportunity for green businesses to raise awareness of their eco-friendly products or services. For example, “Try the house burger – it’s made from 100% grass-fed beef!”
Advertise your presence on Foursquare. Create posters or other advertising materials for your storefront encouraging customers to check in on Foursquare and highlighting some of the Foursquare specials you offer. This is a win-win situation both for your green business and for Foursquare, since it can both bring new users to Foursquare and increase your business’s presence on the site. You can also advertise your participation on Foursquare on your official website or green business blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, and more.
What If My Green Business Doesn’t Offer Local Services?
If your green business doesn’t have a physical location where users can check in, you can still use Foursquare to promote your business. A growing number of popular brands, including Zagat, Lucky Magazine, and even the Wall Street Journal are using Foursquare to build brand recognition by offering local tips in cities around the country and even the world. As a green business, you may be in an excellent position to gain a large following by offering green tips, such as the best eco-friendly dry cleaners, the best fair trade coffee shop, or the best place to tune up a Prius.
What is social entrepreneurship?
Social enterprise is all about using market driven mechanisms to address social problems. It has emerged as a powerful tool for addressing some of the most vexing problems facing the society. A social entrepreneur is the ultimate realist. The social entrepreneur understands that societal needs that could not be fulfilled by the long arm of the government need much more than a compelling business model. Above all else social entrepreneurship requires vision, dedication and involvement of the people. Unlike a traditional business, a social enterprise measures its success in terms of its impact on society and the social capital it has created. The Grameen Bank of Bangladesh (for which its founder Mohammad Yunus received the Nobel Prize) has demonstrated how a viable, scalable business model can bring about positive changes in the lives of millions. Micro credit organizations are only one form of social enterprise. There are others geared towards tackling hunger, child labor, illiteracy and other challenges that are the bane of any society.
Blogs for Social Entrepreneurs
Social entrepreneurs often find themselves in need of the right platform to discuss the challenges they are facing or to connect with their brethren across the globe. Social networks and online communities can be a great place both to promote your brand and to learn about consumer preferences. We have compiled a list of some of the best social entrepreneur blogs.
Acumen Fund Blog
Acumen fund Acumen fund is a non profit fund geared towards using the entrepreneurial approach to deal with global challenges. The blog is peppered with tit bits from the Acumen fund community from across the world. Interesting ad campaigns, developments in the social sector in third world countries, activities of the different arms of the fund in varied geographies, etc.
Audeamus
The Ultimate List of Social Enterprise Blogs Audeamus covers the world of social enterprise and corporate social responsibility. The blog includes stories of successful and struggling social entrepreneurs from all over the world, as well as useful business tips on how to manage your social enterprise.
Change.org’s Social Entrepreneurship Blog
social entrepreneurship @ change.orgChange.org’s Social Entrepreneurship blog covers everything a wide range of topics about social enterprise and social innovation, such as social investment, corporate social responsibility, startup life, mobile technology, cause marketing, international development, social media, venture capital, microfinance, impact assessment and more. In addition to fantastic content, readers can also start a petition on issues related to social enterprise, or take action by sending a petition.
Eastside Consulting
Eastside Consulting is trying to facilitate social change through social enterprise. They are focused on providing solutions to ‘Third Sector Organizations’. The Eastside Consulting blog is a veritable treasure trove of brainstorming ideas and practical tips for social entrepreneurs. Whether you are looking for thoughts on social finance, scalability of social business, fair-trade, mergers or partnerships you are likely to find some useful information here.
Envision Good
Envision goodEnvision Good is a multimedia communications company with a focus on marketing strategies for small organizations. Their video interviews and blog posts are valuable for those who want to understand the fine points of establishing and running a social venture. Here you can learn from the experiences of some of the leading organizations working to tackle the most vexing problems facing planet earth.
Future shifters
The Ultimate List of Social Enterprise Blogs Futureshifters is a community of social entrepreneurs. It was founded by a group of young social entrepreneurs from the youth social enterprise initiative. It helps its members stay connected, share news, stories, ideas, podcasts, and announcements about competitions.
Futureshifters has a community blog that enables members to share ideas and experiences. Here you can discuss your ideas with like minded people or find developments across the globe you would like to be a part of.
Mobile Active
Mobile ActiveMobile Active aims to connect people and organizations trying to use mobile phone technology to bring about meaningful technological change. When it comes to the application of mobile technology Mobile Active can help entrepreneurs reduce their learning curve. The Mobile Active blog can help social entrepreneurs streamline their strategy to provide locally relevant content, discuss relevant issues with others using the same platform and connect with service and content providers.
Next Billion
next billionNext Billion is focused on bringing together a range of people including policy makers and social entrepreneurs to solve world’s problems. It has a team of staff writers and editors who work to give their readers insights on how the work of social entrepreneurs is affecting the people at the bottom of the pyramid.
Nubian Cheetah
Nubian CheetahNubian Cheetah talks about social entrepreneurship stories from Africa. The stories include those about companies focused on harnessing traditional knowledge, popularizing technology, biodiesel, purified ice, and off grid lighting among others.
School for Social Entrepreneurs
School for Social Enterpreneurs The School for Social Entrepreneurs was founded by Lord Michael Young, himself a serial social entrepreneur. It works out of 6 centers in UK and is a leading organization working in the field of educating and training budding social entrepreneurs. Nick Temple is the policy and communications director at the SSE. SSE has an excellent blog. The resources at the SSE blog range from measuring the impact of social enterprise, valuable quotes, Stories about social entrepreneurs, slide shows, and tips on the future impact of communication on the social enterprise.
SE Reporter
SE reporter Social Enterprise Reporter was started with the aim of bringing stories from the entrepreneurship world to social entrepreneurs particularly to those from North America. The promoters believe that their tools, stories, news, information will help decision makers at social businesses to improve both their financial performance and their social impact.
Social Earth
Social Earth Social Earth believes strongly in the importance of social enterprise. It is geared towards promoting social businesses. The organizations covered by Social Earth are involved in a wide range of businesses with one thing in common – a profit motive and a desire to bring about meaningful change.
Social Edge
social edge Social Edge is a program of the Skoll Foundation. The blog is a veritable storehouse of experiences of social entrepreneurs all over the world and practical tips and tricks that one can put to good use. The content here is authored by social entrepreneurs and there are valuable interviews with leading social entrepreneurs.
Social Entrepreneurship @ work
SE @ work Social Entrepreneurship @Work is excellent resource for social entrepreneurs of all shades. Whatever you are looking for fundraising, the power of ideas, using technology and social media you will find some quality resources at the blog. Twitter for social enterprise, social entrepreneur pod casts, discussion on source of funds, social capital, and educational documents are some of the salient features of the blog. It also has valuable links to interesting resources.
Social Enterprise Blog
Social enterprise blog from the management library The Ultimate List of Social Enterprise BlogsRolfe Larson hosts the Social Enterprise Blog from the Free Management Library. Free management library has been striving to provide free resources since 1995. Resources at the blog range from venture capital philanthropy, cause related marketing and earned income generation. On average new knowledge articles are added to the blog twice every week. The blog is focused on social enterprise and tries to disseminate practical tips.
Social ROI
Social roi Social ROI is a blog about how social entrepreneurship is making this world a better place. The blog covers a wide range of topics, from iPhone apps that help social entrepreneurs to twitter campaigns for social causes, as well as updates on international programs and social impact investing. Social ROI also invites social entrepreneurs who are facing a unique problems to contact them for advice and help.
Spare Change
Spare change is a social marketing blog by Nedra Weinreich, a consultant who specializes in using social media to promote health and social issues for nonprofits and government agencies. Her blog is a great resource for nonprofits, NGOs, and social entrepreneurs who need marketing tips that will help them maximize the reach and social impact of their message. The author has also done a lot of legwork for social entrepreneurs by searching for and connecting to other good social entrepreneur blogs.
The Stanford Social Innovation Review Blog
SSIR The Ultimate List of Social Enterprise BlogsStanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) is a source of information, case studies and expert analysis for social entrepreneurs and business leaders alike. SSIR aims to help social entrepreneurs do their job better. The SSIR blog is a synthesis of the deepest beliefs and critical observations of people connected with social change.
The Social Business Blog
The Social Business blog The Ultimate List of Social Enterprise BlogsThe Social Business Blog bills itself as “the most influential social business blog” in United Kingdom. Rob Greenland maintains the blog. Rob has been associated with social business since 1997 and has conducted several training sessions and workshops for businesses. His experience with social business is reflected in this excellent blog for social entrepreneurs. The topics on the blog range from social enterprise opportunities in garbage management to the social innovation lab hosted by Danone.
Trailblazers for Good
The Ultimate List of Social Enterprise BlogsTrailblazers for Good is part of Care2′s network of cause blogs, and focuses on the people and ideas making a difference in the world today, with an emphasis on social entrepreneurs and non-profit innovators. In addition to regular posts by featured writers, the blog also offers a Digg-like community powered news feature focusing on social entrepreneur and nonprofit sector news.
What is a BOPreneur?
Who is a BOPreneur The Ultimate List of Social Enterprise BlogsWhat is a BOPreneur? Discusses the opportunities and challenges facing social businesses trying to serve people at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP). Authored by Paul Hudnut a faculty at Colorado State University and a self-confessed educational arsonist, the blog discusses tips for elevator pitches, venture capital investment in BOP business and innovations leading to low cost solutions for the poorest of the poor.
Do you have a favorite social enterprise blog? Please let us know in the comments below and we’ll be happy to add it to this list.
Last week, we discussed 5 web marketing tools that are essential to helping small green businesses establish their web presence on a low-cost budget. This week, we’re going to look at five more online marketing tools that will help you grow your green consumer base, communicate with your customers, and convert your website traffic.
Google Alerts is a great keyword tracking tool that can help you stay on top of your industry and understand what your customers really want. You can set up Google Alerts to be delivered to you by email or RSS, so that time a particular keyword gets indexed by Google, you are notified.
You can use Google Alerts to monitor online mentions of your brand, products, your employees or your competitors; track green business trends; track search keywords, and more.
While Google Alerts is great for industry research, you can also use it to grow your online brand presence and your green customer base. Google Alerts shows you what blogs are publishing content related to your niche, which allows you to head over there and comment, which increases your visibility and drives traffic.
You can even set up specific queries related to the kind of questions your target green consumer would ask, such as “what’s the best residential solar power system” or “what’s the best solar heater”? These questions often show up on Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers, or even on Twitter. You can then reach out to the individual, educate them on your products or services, and even land a sale!
If you’re looking for a way to launch an email marketing campaign, then Campaign Monitor is a very popular choice. Use Campaign Monitor to tie your email campaigns in with your online marketing strategy – send email newsletters, product launch emails, press releases, and more. Then track the results (who opened, demographics, click-through rate, and so on) and manage your email list. One of the best features of this program is that it allows you to test the layout and design of your email marketing campaign in multiple different email providers so you can ensure a consistent, professional appearance. Though Campaign Monitor is not free, it produces a much more flawless, simple method for initiating email campaigns than simply throwing images and text into your email software program and clicking send”.
A standard in the email marketing industry, Aweber is another very common choice for green small businesses in need of help with their online marketing strategies. Though not as user friendly as Campaign Monitor, they do offer plenty of tutorials for navigating your way through the process.
Their pricing is a bit different as well – they charge a flat $19 per month for up to 500 members, and $49 for 2,500-5,000 people. Campaign Monitor, on the other hand, has a flat $5 per email and 1 cent per recipient, bringing the cost for a 500-person email campaign to $10, and one for 2,500 to $30. Great features of Aweber include advanced autoresponder options, integration with things like e-commerce shopping carts, and hundreds of templates you can use for sign-up purposes.
A free online marketing tool from Google, their Website Optimizer puts the power to increase conversion rates from your website into your hands. If you’ve ever wondered what website design and copywriting generates the greatest sales or sign-ups, this is the tool for you. By testing various changes in content – text, images, video, polls – you can quickly learn what works best to attract your green consumers. It’s a very simple system that helps you tweak your green content until you’re achieving the highest conversions possible.
Keeping track of your eco-conscious consumers is a must if you want to gain customer loyalty and build a big following for your green business. For that purpose, you’ll want to look to a customer relationship management (CRM) system like Highrise. While not technically an online marketing tool, a CRM application helps you manage your customer relationships in important ways. And we know that happy customers make great repeat customers. With Highrise, you can pool all of your company’s contacts into an online software tool where you can track current customer information, log communications (including email marketing campaigns), and review conversation histories so that you maintain a personalized approach with your clients. This is an absolute must if you endeavor to create a professional online marketing campaign for your small business.
These 5 awesome online marketing tools are great resources as you set up your small green business and get it going full steam ahead. Useful for small virtual offices for any eco endeavor, they should help you develop your green enterprise on a small budget with limited staff.
With these internet marketing solutions, you’ll find the job of promoting your green business from your virtual office inexpensive and simple, even if you’re your only employee!
Best of luck!
As more and more people discover the delicious flavor and health benefits of fresh juice and smoothies, juice bars are growing in popularity in many parts of the country. And because people who are health conscious also tend to be environmentally conscious, juice bars offer a great opportunity to offer a delicious, popular, and environmentally responsible product to customers!
Juices made from 100% fruit or vegetable are associated with many health benefits because they are an easy way to increase fruit and vegetable consumption, and they contain many of the same nutrients found in whole fruits and vegetables. Smoothies contain dietary fiber in addition to the other benefits of 100% juice. They may also contain healthful additives such as yogurt, soy milk, or filtered water.
Like green coffee shops, one of the most important environmental considerations for a juice bar is the ingredients. A growing number of juice bars are choosing to go organic. Organic juice bars offer delicious juices and smoothies made from certified organic fruits, vegetables, and other ingredients.
Many organic juice bars lower their environmental impact even farther by using as many locally produced ingredients as possible. As the local food movement expands, both the popularity and the availability of high quality local produce and ingredients is expected to expand.
Choosing sustainably grown and harvested ingredients isn’t the only consideration for an organic juice bar wishing to reduce its environmental impact.
A few more green ideas for organic juice bars:
Some organic juice bars encourage customers to make eco-friendly choices by offering discounts to customers who bring their own mugs or glasses, or who bike to the juice bar.
Organic Oasis Restaurant and Juice Bar, located in Anchorage, AK, opened on Earth Day 1998 and was founded by Steve Plante, who was inspired to start the restaurant by his own experience recovering from severe lead poisoning with the help of organic, natural foods. Organic oasis offers a variety of delicious organic salads, soups, sandwiches, and other light fare in addition to their juices and smoothies, which include a mix of delicious traditional and modern flavors from carrot juice to Peanut Butter Conspiracy.
Go Raw Cafe in Las Vegas, NV offers organic, raw vegan cuisine in addition to a juice bar featuring juice mixes such as Popeye’s Favorite (Carrot, Spinach, and Apple), Sweet Greens (a mix of carrot juice and greens), and Body Cleanser (carrot, cucumber, beet, and apple), and a variety of healthy smoothies.
The Juice Bar Collective, based in Berkeley, CA, is a worker-owned collective committed to environmentally responsible business practices, including organic ingredients, compostable packaging, and reducing energy and water footprints for the business. In addition to a variety of fresh juices and smoothies, the Juice Bar Collective offers a variety of baked goods, salads, sandwiches, and other dishes.
Most small green businesses need to operate on a tight budget and use their time as efficiently as possible. After all, those energy efficient light bulbs and eco-friendly sneakers won’t sell themselves!
Good news – we’ve got a great list of web marketing tools will help any green entrepreneur quickly set up shop on the Internet, starting with your logo and your website. Here’s how you do it:
In the Web 1.0 days, getting a professional logo and custom web design easily cost between $2,000-$5,000. Luckily for many small green start-ups, two Web 2.0 companies have now made it possible for companies to affordably crowdsource great design ideas from graphic designers all over the world through online design contests:
If you’re in the market for a new green logo, are looking for a fresh website design for your green blog, or want to have some business cards or brochures designed for your green business, crowdSPRING is a great option.
You set your budget and your deadline, define your green branding goals and design specifications. You can share examples of designs you like and indicate what you don’t want. After you post your project, your job goes out to Crowdspring’s worldwide community of thousands of designers (67,000+ at time of writing). Interested designers enter your design contest and evolve their designs based on your feedback. Typically, the more feedback you provide, the better results you will get. On average, it takes 2-3 weeks to arrive at a quality, winning design. If you are not thrilled with the results, Crowdspring offers a 100% satisfaction money-back guarantee.
Working much the same way as crowdSPRING, 99designs is another web design tool that you can use to crowdsource great designs for almost anything. Some differences between the two design contest platforms are worth noting.
With crowdSPRING, you choose between Economy, Standard, and Pro projects and pay an up-front, non-refundable fee between $39 and $199. You also deposit the funds for the project before it goes live. When you award the project and pay the fees, they also add a 15% fee to the listing (they have a minimum award amount for each category). They offer Facebook and Twitter integration, and they also provide a custom contract if you so desire. 99designs has many similarities and a few differences. Like crowdSPRING, there are minimum rates per project (based on the type of project), and they charge a 15% fee when the prize is offered. However, their listing fee is $39 regardless of project type and you aren’t required to deposit the funds before the project goes live. 99designs also offers a 100% money-back guarantee within 60 days of payment.
While your design is being developed, now is a great time to get your copywriting done. Some of you won’t be interested in spending time word-smithing the company slogan, website content, unique blog posts, and brochure text. If you’re one of these people, then look to something like Textbroker, a low-cost source for all manner of green content development. Depending on your needs, Texbroker provides different levels of content rated by stars, from barely legible content from authors who are still learning English (2 stars) to high quality copy written by native English speaking college graduates and professional writers (5 stars). Just choose a category for your assignment, choose a budget, set a deadline, determine article word count, and explain your content requirements. All articles are proofread by Textbroker’s editorial staff, checked for copyright infringements, and then put in your client account where you review the articles, and then accept, refuse, or ask for revisions. It’s a great way to generate a lot of content, fast.
Nowadays, having a blog is considered to be an indispensable part of any business’s online marketing strategy. And one of the simplest and least expensive ways to get that done is to use WordPress, an open-source content management system. All you need is web hosting, and you can download & install WordPress for free. While WordPress is best known as free blogging software, you can use it just as easily to power a more traditional business website, if you don’t want to commit to blogging. Browse the vast repository of free WordPress themes, purchase an inexpensive premium theme, or upload your custom theme. If you’re looking for green blog post ideas or thoughts on how to create a green blog design, we’ve got those answers, too.
Want to know how much traffic your organic granola bar pages receive, and how much of that traffic converts into sales? Interested in finding out which search engine keywords send the most traffic for to your reusable water bottle website? Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool that will help you understand your website traffic.
Using this simple tool, you can see demographics about your visitors, segment them into various subsets, create custom reports, and watch how they move throughout your website. Google Analytics can also be used to monitor the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts. Though there are other analytics tools available for a fee, this one provides remarkably complex reporting and statistics – more than most small green businesses will need – for no cost at all.
With these 5 web marketing tools, small green business owners can quickly establish a brand identity, launch a website and or blog, get well-written, inexpensive content and start monitoring website traffic and conversions, all within a typical startup budget.
Do you have any favorite web marketing tools we haven’t covered? Please share with us the web marketing tools that are vital to your green business in your comments. Thanks for reading!
Venturing into an eco-friendly laundromat enterprise will not only benefit your bottom line, but it is also an awesome business opportunity to go green while benefiting the environment.
Installation of energy efficient dryers and washers are critical first steps in making a laundromat more energy-efficient and eco-friendly. Energy-efficient dryers and washing machines, once installed, increase profits through operating cost reduction while conserving resources and energy.
A normal front-loading washer currently uses about twenty-five gallons of water for each load, compared to older top-loading versions that need about forty gallons of water. In addition, front-loading washers comparatively reduce the number of times clothing must spend in an energy-sucking dryer because they spin much more efficiently.
Since about ninety percent of energy consumption for a normal washing machine goes into heating the water, numerous eco-friendly laundromats are opting to reduce power bills by installing solar water heaters powered by clean solar energy. This energy is used for heating water for their washers.
Solar panels installed on-site could also generate all or most of the energy required for powering dryers or washers, or entrepreneurs could simply purchase clean energy supplied by the local utility companies in order to operate entirely carbon-free.
Should there be no options for a clean energy connection locally, an entrepreneur may opt to buy carbon offsets in order to reduce a laundromat enterprise’s carbon footprint.
Operating from Toronto in Ontario, Beach Solar Laundromat offers both laundry services and coin-operated machines. The laundromat, located in a building put up in 1939, had to undergo major renovations in 2002 and 2003 in order to enhance its environmental sustainability.
As a result, Beach Solar Laundromat uses eight solar panels for water heating within the laundromat and powering building space heating. As such, natural gas and electricity consumption has gone down thirty percent while the rest of the energy comes from wind and hydropower.
Attracted by the renovation, the refurbished laundromat saw enhanced customer numbers resulting in a 160% revenue increase.
Located in Portland, Maine, Washboard Eco Laundry is a laundromat that practices awesome green procedures. The enterprise puts to use the most water and energy efficient dryers and washers the market has to offer and, like Beach Solar Laundromat, both generate a large amount of their hot water from green solar thermal energy.
They offer eco-friendly bleach and detergent alternatives in bulk containers to conserve resources while reducing waste. Within the laundromat is a remodeled comprehensive recycling program made of low-impact construction materials, several windows to give natural light, and high-efficiency heating and lighting systems.
On offer is also a wet cleaning, safe, eco-friendly dry cleaning alternative offered in conjunction with locally based Washboard Eco Laundry.
In Carnation, Washington is Tolt Laundry, which puts to use high-efficiency dryers and washers consuming sixty percent less water compared to typical commercial machines.
A solar system provides half the energy required to heat water used in the laundromat, despite cloudy Northwest skies. Inside the laundromat, are energy-efficient lint collecting and lighting systems, whose designs improve air quality within the premises and the neighborhood.
A father-daughter team owns this laundromat, and they pride themselves on being a family-friendly enterprise. They provide three flat screen televisions, free wireless internet, children playing area, snack and drink vending machines, and various other family services.