Green Selling Tip: Spotlight Your Environmental Program by Helping Customers Celebrate Earth Day

• Help them plan and organize their event. Time passes quickly and Earth Day will be here soon. So help them develop a simple plan which includes picking a date and location, and providing some ideas as to the type of event. For example they might have a simple “brown bag” lunch event with a speaker such as yourself, or some local person who can speak about Earth Day. This can be especially good for schools. For other organizations you might suggest a more elaborate event connecting the facilities and HR departments to do small table top displays with people available to talk about environmental, health, safety, nutrition, carpooling, and other issues. Another idea is to do some “greening” of their site and perhaps plant a small nature area or some trees. Or they can partner with another local organization that may already be planning something. But at this point in time, if they haven’t started planning I recommend that you keep it really simple.
• Provide an article for their internal newsletter or intranet about how cleaning and your Green Cleaning program contributes to the reduction of environmental impacts --- you’ll find a number of good resources on our website to help you do this. But you’d better hurry as they are probably completing this soon.
• Provide an update on what your Green Cleaning program has accomplished and you need not be intimidated by this. It can be detailed and quantitative such as the pounds of recyclable materials diverted from the waste stream, number of trees saved by switching to recycled paper, pounds of toxic chemicals compared to what they used in their original program, reduction in injuries or absenteeism, etc. Or it can be more subjective and speak in more general terms about how they converted to green chemicals, recycled paper products, and other improvements made by your program.
• Encourage them (the cleaning or facilities department) if their organization is holding an Earth Day event to have a table and to be participants (cleaning personnel need to be seen making a contribution beyond just cleaning-up after the event is over). Help them communicate to the occupants the huge impacts that the cleaning industry has on the environment so they (the occupants) will better value their Green Cleaning program. For example, collectively institutional and commercial buildings each year in the US consume 6 billion pounds of chemicals most of which are made from nonrenewable natural resources, 4.5 billion pounds of janitorial paper products requiring the cutting of approximately 30 million trees, and contribute 1 billion pounds of old janitorial equipment headed to landfills. These are large impacts and no one will ever know if we don’t tell them.
• Help them decorate or staff their table at their Earth Day event. You can provide some samples of products, especially those that occupants might find interesting such as microfiber cloths which they conceivably can use in their own homes, high-filtration vacuums, green chemicals, recycled paper products, a steam vapor machine, etc.
• Provide them with “green premiums” that they can pass out to the occupants. These can be bookmarks, buttons, pens made from recycled materials, bumper stickers, clipboards made from old computer mother-boards, paper weights made from recycled glass, etc. They should be “fun” and shouldn’t cost much money.
• Provide educational materials such as a simple flyer telling occupants what they can do in their own home to reduce the health and environmental impacts from cleaning, what occupants can do to within their building, information on the buildings recycling program (we need to continually remind occupants about this), info on their pest management program, etc.