StarSportsBlog

So if you are, say, the president of major league baseball team and the league sends you memo saying “we think it’s time we all get green“, maybe you should think about calling DoRight.

And we don’t mean Dudley.

DoRight Enterprises is scaling-up sustainability consulting firms run by local 12 to 15 year-olds. They go into places like the visitor’s center of the Queens Botanical Garden and develop energy and other sustainability plans. (Did you know that so-called “livng Institutions” like botanical gardens outdraw all U.S. spectator sports combined? You can look it up.) They do the work and are provided with real world opportunities to apply the stuff they are learning.

So should a front office really call the kids? Cha’ yeah.

Squeamish about trusting such work to kids?
Then let them work with local mentoring “adults” (who will surely learn a thing or too.)

Too much ahead of the curve?
Au contraire. Totally locked in. Because what founder Scott Beal has done is combine urgent business CSR necessity (even for privately held companies) with a left-behind notion of “project-based” and “experiential” learning. Something that puts kids into the community to solve “authentic questions” for which neither teachers nor anyone else has the easy answers. Yes, it all harkens back to — dare we say it — progressive education. And guess which way the U.S. education reform pendulum is swinging 20 years after “A Nation At Risk?

Easy? No. And that’s the point.
It would actually involve helping DoRight replicate its innovative program in a team owner’s home town. A baseball front office would have to work with local schools systems, involve their community relations peeps and reach out to strategic partners to lead the establishment of such an effort. (Star•Sports can help, of course.)

Why bother?
Great PR. (Important, perhaps in the Steroids Era?) Part of the comprehensive corporate social engagement winning brands will need to stay in front.

And, oh yeah. The experience might let kids (and society at large) develop the the right dynamic for the new frontier.

Wednesday’s E-Day, a British campaign to raise awareness on energy saving and climate, didn’t go over so well. The campaign asked folks to switch off electrical devises they didn’t need — especially those drawing “phantom power“. It featured a website by which UK residents could see real-time changes in national energy consumption. There was no shortage of “strategic partners”. The campaign was backed by the food giant Tesco with its Greener living campaign, Greenpeace UK, Christian Aid and the RSPB (comparable to the US Audubon Society), the umbrella group Stop Climate Chaos, and from major energy companies such as EDF with its savetodaysavetomorrow.com, E.On with its FA Cup-based “carbon footprinty” campaign and Scottish Power. Several national religious leaders urged congregations to participate on moral grounds.

The final tallies show a one percent increase in energy use.

I am afraid that E-Day did not achieve the scale of public awareness or participation needed to have a measurable effect… I will do my best to learn the relevant lessons for next time.” — E-Day’s organizer Dr Matt Prescott.

BBC coverage of the disappointing day blamed poor publicity (despite all the slick websites cited above), a cold snap and a tangled on-again, off-again development history.

To hazard guesses of our own:

• A special day is just that. First, special: something “out of the ordinary”, not normal. Second, just one day. Cultural shifts take something new and make them ordinary…everyday…commonplace…”like the air“. Such change takes time and sustained effort, and the well documented march from innovators through early adopters and early and late majorities.
• A national effort might be too big. Not in the sense of an end-of-project aggregate, but in the sense of providing individual buy-in, performance and recognition. With a great big national meter, it is easy to believe that one’s individual effort doesn’t really matter. Would things have been different had the efforts of individual households or local businesses , or the neighborhoods of a city (Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire, had high hopes) been measured with a tad more granularity? That kind of performance system doesn’t happen overnight.
• Awareness-raising campaigns don’t change behavior. As previously noted, the best information predictor of behavior change is one person talking to another, backed up with ongoing performance tracking and somebody saying “good work”.

As corporate cause sponsorship investments continue to rise, so too does the importance of sponsor acknowledgments.

Once upon a time sponsor credits on PBS were called “grant cards”. They were literally cards shot with a title camera which provided the opportunity for a voiceover along the lines of “this program made possible by …..“. The rules governing the acknowledgment of content underwriters haven’t changed much — no implied endorsement, no comparisons with competing products or services, no call for the audience to take action — but everything else, including the contemporary media environment, has changed dramatically. And it all looks a lot like PBS from here.

The changes started around 1993. Depending upon whom one talks to, either PBS started getting “commercial” or the sponsor relations people within the broadcasting service got more responsive to sponsor ROI. Step 1 in the evolution was helping corporations differentiate themselves in the marketplace, perhaps even addressing a specific brand reputation challenge along the way: “providing dependable US-made widgets since 1833“.

Now, of course, there is hardly any difference — except perhaps in length — between “enhanced sponsor acknowledgments” seen across PBS and the spots viewers see on Sunday morning talk shows or, more to the point, the Super Bowl. In terms of state-of-the-art corporate image enhancement, PBS wrote the book.

The overall tone and appearance of the announcement must be informational rather than promotional. Both voice-over delivery and video treatment should be developed with the objective of providing a viewer service, not a commercial sales opportunity. (From the current PBS guidelines.)

Hence:

• The Lexus “H” campaign <youtube>
• The Chevron “Human Energy” campaign <youtube>
• And our own spot, from the December 2007 Independence Bowl <youtube>

But the contemporary PBS influence is not limited to spots on television or YouTube. The very PBS idea of foundations or corporations, for reasons of their own, underwriting the development and presentation of issue-oriented content is expanding.

• According to TVWeek, CNN recently signed Johnson & Johnson, Zurich Financial Services, Coors, Citigroup and Honda as key sponsors for its global “CNN Heroes” specials.
• And then there was the CNN Primary Debate Coverage presented by Americans for Balanced Energy Choices.

What isn’t so clearly on display in contemporary examples is the Jedi art of helping a corporation promote its association with the content and the cause to achieve the most possible positive public notice and positive social impact. Working without marketing budgets, PBS folks had to learn to help underwriters blow their own horn about their sponsorship. Without that extra oomph, it is very hard to generate expected buzz and ROI. As a veteran PBS colleague notes, underwriting buys a ticket to the dance. The real payoff comes when sponsors actually show up.

A major part of our current focus here at Star•Sports involves what we hope are transformative approaches for helping citizens be more aware of sustainability challenges and more engaged in solutions.

As we talk up this idea of sports for environmental change — with college and pro sports teams, major sports advertisers, foundations and fellow movement diplomats — two big themes are emerging. (David Gershon of the Empowerment Institute is the genus of this thinking for us.)

The first idea has to do with the evolution from “corporate social responsibility” to “corporate social engagement“. David refers to the first as “do not harm“. The high bar of such “operational greening” was set by the 2006 World Cup’s Green Goal™ — the environmental concept for the 2006 FIFA World Cup™.

The Green Goal vision was both simple and demanding:adverse effects on the environment, which would inevitably be associated with the organization of the World Cup in Germany, should be reduced to the greatest extent possible.

In Germany, the Local Organizing Committee, the UNEP Program for Sport and other partners did an amazing job addressing the economical use of water, the reduction of waste and increases in energy efficiency, sustainable transport and climate neutrality. (A legacy report of these activities — from which the above quote was taken — can be found in .pdf format here.)

The shift we and others see from CSR to CSE (corporate social engagement) is a shift from doing no harm to maximizing the good an organization can do. It brings greening to the next level by adding “inspirational greening” to the prerequisite (for credibility’s sake) operational greening.

The second evolution we are pushing has to do with “public awareness” and “public information campaigns.” In Creating a Climate for Change, contributor Sharon Dunwoody writes about the challenge of trying to make a difference using media messages.

“When social problems erupt, one classic response of governments and organizations is to wage an information campaign. The goals are often noble ones, the dollars spent gargantuan, and the outcomes all to predictable: Messages seem to change the behavior of some people some of the time, but have almost no discernible impact on most people, most of the time. This situation has so discouraged policy-makers in the past that the pattern was given its own dismal label: ‘minimal effects.’ …The best information predictor of behavior change is not seeing a public service announcement but talking to someone…. Thus, while mediated channels such as television and newspapers may reach millions of people and provide a cost effective source of information about global climate change, they may not convince individuals that such changes will influence them personally or that they can do something personally about the problem.”

So both our collegiate and municipal efforts to help sports teams anchor significant, measurable carbon reductions are based on community organizing — people getting together — reinforced by the awesome reach of sports media to present “a positive feedback loop to report drops filling the bucket” (local carbon reductions measured against the carbon reduction goal) by way of  “a web-based, highly graphic, interactive geographic information system” that enables a community and its communications multipliers (like TV weatherpeople or newspaper box scores or celebrity athletes) to know and celebrate its accomplishments.

Katie Kirschner is senior manager of business operations for the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox are doing great things: reducing their carbon emissions, recovering 50 percent of its recyclable drink containers, increasing the percentage of the stadium’s electricity from renewable sources, trying to keep at least 40 percent of stadium waste from entering landfills, powering their scoreboard with conspicuously placed solar panels. “Our hope is that we can influence our fans in their daily lives,” says Ms.Kirschner. Full marks to all Red Sox Nation is doing.

Our hope, however, is to take the chance out of the culture shift and conspicuously apply the power of sport to influence a new cool ordinary — diversified energy sources, commonplace greenhouse gas reductions, environmental justice and a national sustainability industry powering the next great American renaissance.

Twelve leading global corporate brands — signing the Tokyo Declaration — today called for global carbon emissions to be reduced by 50 percent by 2050. (Many of the world’s most concerned scientist call for 80 percent reductions by 2030.)

At Sony, we believe that it is impossible for a business to flourish in a degraded environment,” Sir Howard (Stringer, Sony Chairman and CEO) said. “For this reason we are committed to using our technological ability and know-how to reduce our impact on the planet, and to help our customers reduce their impact at home.”

The 12: Allianz, Catalyst, Collins, Hewlett Packard, Nike, Nokia, Novo Nordisk, Sagawa, Sony, Spitsbergen Travel, Tetra-Pak and Xanterra.

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That the American Bar Association urges the United States government to take a leadership role in addressing the issue of climate change through legal, policy, financial, and educational mechanisms.

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Starting a process of reconciliation, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament in the capital, Canberra, for the laws and polices that inflicted “profound grief, suffering and loss”. The Stolen Generations refer to young Aboriginal children who were taken from their parents in a policy of assimilation which lasted from the 19th Century to the late 1960s.

Story from BBC

“Changing the Climate on Campus“

The 4.2 cents per metric ton of carbon dioxide would affect everything from oil refineries to power plants, and landfills, factories and small businesses like restaurants and bakeries. Large businesses that burn lots of fuel and use large amounts of energy would see costs in the tens of thousands of dollars. The proposal comes from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The proposal is designed to raise $1.1 million a year.

I think this is tremendously gutsy….What the air district is doing is what every economist knows is coming - but somebody has to go first. Dan Kammen, director of renewable energy programs at the University of California-Berkeley.

There are costs associated with emitting carbon dioxide, and the people who emit it should pay the costs,” said Carl Pope, national executive director of the Sierra Club.Pope noted that in April the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act just like other chemicals that cause smog. “That ruling is going to trigger a whole series of regulatory responses like this,” Pope said. “This is the first one that has a fee associated with it. You are going to see fees, and emissions standards, and permits for coal-burning power plants turned down. The country has now decided we are going to clean up carbon dioxide like we clean up other types of air pollution.

Coverage from the San Jose Mercury News

“I believe the American people are prepared to accept our responsibility to lead by example. Our president and Congress must begin to work together in a bipartisan fashion to make such leadership possible.”
In this regard, he said New York city has set an example by committing to emission reduction targets.
“Based on a careful assessment of what existing technology makes feasible, we determined that New York City can shrink our carbon footprint 30 percent from current levels by 2030,” he said.

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