“Green” your meetings
Well-executed meetings can be tough to plan – and tough on the planet, too. Wasted paper and plastic, leftover food and the impact of jet travel leave large environmental footprints. Over the past year, green-conscious meeting and event planning has grown from a fringe trend into a new ethic that forward-thinking associations and corporations are embracing to help save the planet as well as save costs. Fortunately, it’s getting easier being green, and media technology can help. According to the corporate event planning experts at Mills James, here are a few simple tips for making your meetings more environmentally friendly:
- When planning an event, consider inviting a smaller audience to the host site, then videoconferencing to remaining groups via satellite or broadband Internet. Live streaming video WebCasting can include more participants – from where they are – while significantly reducing travel, lodging and hospitality needs.
- Before the meeting, consider sending well-designed “e-vites” rather than printing and mailing paper invitations.
- Instead of issuing bags of collateral materials at registration, save paper by loading print files onto a pre-event Web site or flash drives for attendees.
- Offer pitchers of water and glasses instead of giving away branded bottled water for attendees.
- Serve plated entrees instead of buffets. Buffets can lead to lots of leftovers and wasted food.
- Provide recycling containers for paper, cans and plastic in the meeting rooms.
- Use lighting and projection effects rather than physical hard sets to create compelling ambiance and decor, wireless audience response systems instead of paper ballots for voting and surveys and digital display screens to replace cardboard and foam-cor signs that typically end up in the dumpster.
- After the event, provide participants with session recordings as MP3 and video files (rather than CDs) that can be downloaded from a Web site for playback on a computer or iPod.
Overall, the best way to ensure that your event is “green” is to pass the knowledge along. Make sure that your attendees, vendors, staff, and presenters all know the simple steps they can take to make events more environmentally friendly. Chances are, your “green” efforts will save them some “green,” as many environmentally friendly efforts can save money in the long run.
