When we were setting up our Green Impact Google Community, we got together to think about ways to promote and raise awareness in the department. One of the reasons we decided to use the Google community was to keep the communication informal and fun and we wanted our messages and initiatives to reflect this. Steven was really helpful in doing memes to go along with the posts on our Google Community.
So we identified a couple of key themes that we would introduce each week leading up to Christmas. In the first week we decided to focus on energy saving and the department had an unexpected visit from the ‘Energy Fairy’. We kept the visit quiet and at the end of the day, the ‘Energy Fairy’ went round the office to see where monitors were turned off, chargers were unplugged etc. The ‘Energy Fairy’ left a chocolate treat for those energy conscious colleagues who had ensured that equipment was turned off. The chocolate treats were popular and got people talking about Green Impact. The ‘Energy Fairy’ has visited the department since December – again with chocolate! Although they visited again at the end of the day, we wanted to reinforce the message for people to remember to turn off their monitors if they were aware from their desk for 5 minutes or more. To do this in our Google Community posts we implied that the fairy might be visiting again, but not necessarily at the end of the day.
A further initiative that we wanted to get underway at the very start was to set up ‘Green Impact zones’ on each floor (our department is split over level 5 and level 6 of the Arts Tower). People can leave scrap paper and envelopes to re-use and we are now collecting stamps for the Sheffield Royal Society for the Blind. We also used the ‘Green Impact zones’ as the location for our collection for the Jubilee food bank. After a couple of days of the collection we noticed that people on one of the floors had started leaving more donations than the other and thought this would give us the opportunity to start a bit of healthy competition between the two floors! In the end we were really pleased with the response.
This has covered the initial launch period of our Green Impact Google community and how we promoted Green Impact in our department. We tried to make the initiatives fun and informal and communicate them in a variety of ways.