The Clean and Green Club

Would you believe…a household paper products company that switched to recycled raw materials in 1950, and has been producing recycled paper towels, napkins, toilet paper, and tissues ever since? A company that was so dedicated to creating “paper made from paper, not from trees”(TM) that it actually set up its own paper collection service (and currently collects paper for recycling from a 300mile radius)? A company that saw no reason to jack up prices and has remained a consistent player in the lower price points? And a company that did this with such humility that it didn’t bother telling the public for decades, and didn’t make a big deal about it until this spring?

Yes, this company exists. Marcal, founded in 1932, went to manufacturing its paper products from recycled paper nearly 60 years ago. Small mentions had crept into the packing by the early 1990s—but only when turnaround CEO Tim Spring and several other executives were hired to bring the company back from bankruptcy in 2008 did the company realize it was sitting on a marketing goldmine. This spring (2009), Marcal launched its Small Steps(TM) consumer brand, aimed squarely at environmentally conscious consumers. Not only is it 100% recycled, but the manufacturing process does not use chlorine bleach, the products are hypoallergenic and nearly lint-free

We could save a full million trees if every American household bought just a single roll of recycled paper towels, box of recycled tissues, or package of napkins, the company says.

What does that mean specifically? Every year, saving a million trees would:

• Keep 250 million pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air while adding 260 million pounds of oxygen (enough to supply 520 million people)
• Absorb the much carbon produced by a million cars each driving 26,000 miles
• Substantially reduce methane emissions (potentially a bigger problem than CO2) from landfills, compared to using virgin paper

As a consumer, I became aware of recycled paper in the early 1970s, and started looking for suppliers. At that time it was very hard to find any paper identified as recycled, and even harder to find recycled paper that was high enough quality and low enough price to make the switch worth it.

In the past ten or fifteen years, it’s gotten much easier. I now buy exclusively recycled paper not only for household products (where prices are comparable to standard brands) but also for my office printers (where I have to pay substantially more). When I think of how much Marcal recycled paper I would have bought in the decades starting from when I became aware until the market finally caught up, I have to wonder what took them so long.

And now that in the few months since its introduction, Small Steps, which is in about 50 percent of US markets, has become the top-selling recycled brand, Marcal executives must be wondering the same thing. (It just proves the case I make in my forthcoming book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet that it’s not enough to be a Green company, you also have to tell the world.)

Marcal is even beginning to gather signatures on this nice little eco-pledge:

I am only one person.
But what I do impacts the whole world.

I have decided that the health of the earth is important to me.
I have decided to honor this priority in small ways.

If I can share a ride or take public transportation to help save the air, I will.

If I can make everyday choices that help save energy, I will.

If I can choose recycled paper that help save the forests and wildlife habitats, I will.

The company is promoting the pledge through social media, appearances by its spokesperson, and through a link on its community page. I signed, and I hope you will too. Meanwhile, I’ve been buying Small Steps, and can report that the quality is fine.

Incidentally, in the new book, I discuss ways companies can protect themselves from accusations of greenwashing. One of those is to state honestly that you’ve been using recycled materials for 30 years. Next year, Marcal will be able to double that claim.

(Special thanks to Lindsay Jacob of Marcal for supplying a lot of raw material I used in researching this article.)

Dealing with the Tough Stuff: Practical Wisdom for Running a Values-Driven Business, by Margot Fraser and Lisa Lorimer (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2009)

Every business faces challenge like revenue crunches, supplier issues, personnel problems, and of coure, stress. For socially conscious businesses, the challenges re multiplied by the need to address these problems in ways consistent with the company’s social and environmental commitment, even if that’s not the easiest path.

In this latest entry in B-K’s excellent Social Ventue Network series, Fraser and Lorimer, past CEOs of Birkenstock USA and Vermont Bread Company, resectively (with substantial help from Carol Berry of Putney Pasta, Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Yogurt, Joe O’Connell of Creative Machines, Marie Wilson of the Ms. Foundation and White House Project, and Tom Raffio of Northeast Delta Dental) show solutions that worked, and solutions that failed.

The book will be very useful to companies with at least a few employees and revenues in the seven to nine figures, and particularly those facing rapid changes in their market or corporate identity (from products going out of fashion to challenges in getting financing without onerous strings attached, to dealing with rapid growth). One section that will apply just as clearly to much smaller and perhaps larger companies is the last chapter, on how to exit from the business while still maintaining not only the viability of the company but also its core values. Even social entrepreneurship pioneer Ben & Jerry’s got burned on that one.

Learning from Ben & Jerry’s mistakes, Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg describes how he held out for the right buyer, one who would take the ownership burden while leaving him with decision-making power. It was a long search, but he did find his buyer. Birkenstock’s Fraser was not as fortunate; transfer of ownership to her employees was a disaster, and the company had to be regrouped and sold off to its German parent, even as the German company was gong through management transition of its own.

Some advice comes though consistently in chapter after chapter:

• Understand the numbers and what they mean
• Use a board of outside advisors (including ten great tips on how to set up and work with your board)
• Heart, head, and gut all play important roles—but you also need a reality check
• Don’t undersell yourself, don’t overcommit yourself, and yet don’t be afraid to take on big challenges
• Avoid getting trapped by your own “socially responsible mindset arrogance” (as Lorimer puts it)—but don’t let the nay-sayers stop you from bringing those values into every aspect of your business; as Fraser says, you don’t have to give your vision away to make quotas
• Hire people who know more than you—but don’t let them push you into decisions you’ll regret

While the book spends a fair bit of time on the grim realities, it also offers hope that companies who maintain their high standards of ethics and social/environmental responsibilities are often well-placed to survive the challenges of the corporate world and the marketplace, and come out stronger as a result.

Reminder: This is the LAST free issue of this newsletter. Starting January, it will be by subscription only, and the archives will be available only to members of the Clean and Green Club or those who subscribe to both the newsletters and the archives. Sign up here for a subscription or a club membership: https://www.thecleanandgreenclub.com

Should You Use a Blog to Host Your Non-Blog Website?

Blogs have several advantages over traditional websites. To name a few:

• They get into the search engines almost instantly (I once did a Google search for something I’d blogged about ten minutes earlier, and my blog post was there, on the first page of the results)
• It’s easy to increase the reach of a blog by feeding it to your social networking profiles
• You can set your blog to automatically ping Technorati and other blog content aggragators, as well as pretty much all of the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn, Plaxo, and I believe MySpace) so people will find you quickly if you blog about something topical and hot
• Blogs are incredibly easy to update; you don’t need to wait around for your webmaster to post content, just hit the “Publish” button
• Most blogs include a comment feature, which can create interactive discussion and a much greagter profile for your blog (unfortunately, the spammers figured this one out–so you always have to moderate the comments, approving the relevant ones and ditching the junk–plug-ins such as Akismet make this much easier, though they’re far from foolproof)

With all these advantages, why not use a blog to put up an ordinary non-blog website? WordPress, my favorite of the blog platforms, is available for free, updated regularly, and supported by a plethora of third-party add-ons. And you can host your WordPress site on your own domain, which I stongly recommend.

For the last several sites I’ve put up, I’ve had my webmaster install WordPress on my domain’s server (from what I understand, a matter of only a couple of clicks anyway), select and customize one of the myriad “themes” (templates) available, and then, depending on the site, either I put up content or she does. Here are some examples of sites we’ve done in WordPress:

• https://www.principledprofit.com
• https://www.business-ethics-pledge.org
• https://ddinafriedman.com
• https://painlessgreenbook.com

In short, the WordPress blogging platform offers a great deal of flexibility in design, ease of use, interactivity, and good search engine “juice,” and is appropriate for lots of websites, not just blogs. Something to think about as you put up more sites (I think I have 14 right now).

I was just beginning to think about what I’d write about this month when Jim Cox’s column crossed my desk. Jim has tons of good resources for authors and publishers on his https://www.midwestbookreview.com website and cheerfully gave me permission to reprint here.

Guest Column: Why Covers Matter
By Jim Cox, Editor, Midwest Book Review

I’ve had the pleasure of being one of the annual Audies Award judges for a good number of years now. But this year there was a new twist — most of the award categories were being offered to we judges as computer downloads instead of our assigned category audio book CDs arriving in the mails.

I don’t have a laptop computer that I can sit back in an easy chair with to listen to hours upon hours of audio book recordings. Neither am I familiar with iPods or whatever it is that is sticking out of the ears of so many young people these days. What I usually do is listen to the audio books I review (including those that I once-a-year annually rank and pass judgement upon) while I’m working at my desk, driving around in my car, taking long walks, or retiring to bed in the evening.

So this year I passed upon most of the categories and volunteered for one that I’d never had before: Package Design. Ranking and judging audio book submissions entirely upon how they looked.

I took an hour to go over the entries carefully and make preliminary notes on the pros & cons of their respective packaging. Quite a change from assessing their contents!

But it did prompt me to reflect on how important packaging is when it comes to the commercial viability of a book — any book, any genre, any category, any format — and any author!

Simply stated, people judge books by their covers. And by people, I mean far more than the general reading public browsing through a bookstore or a library trying to decide what they’d like to choose from all that is being offered them. I also mean book reviewers, wholesalers, distributers, retailers, and librarians who are faced with the same decision.

How very often I’ve seen a lot of an author’s labor go into the writing of a book only to have a poorly chosen cover or badly executed packaging design crush any chance at commercial success.

Authors getting published by the major conglomerates have very little say in what the art departments of a Random House or a Simon & Schuster determine the ‘packaging’ of their book will look like. Self-published authors have the sole say for what their book will look like. Between those two extreme points on the decision making scale are most of the small press published authors. So if you as an author are being published by a small or independent press, get involved in the decision making process to assure that your book will not be handicapped in the market place by flawed artistic concepts, inferior execution of design, or slip-shod attention to the thematic relevance of what the artwork will be with respect to the content of the book being packaged with it.

When it comes to books, the two reasons for a badly designed or poorly executed packing I most often encounter is that the author and/or publisher didn’t have the capital to invest to produce a professionally competitive cover, or that they had some friend or relative that dabbled in art and they felt obligated to oblige.

Please believe me — if you as an author or a publisher find the book packaging to be distasteful, or substandard the chances are that your otherwise prospective buyers will too.

Bottom line — Spend as much time an energy on the outside of your book as you did on the inside.

As a long time “Green evangelist,” I’ve always been a big fan of clearinghouses that reduce waste and let people share resources. It’s better for the planet, better for the pocketbook, and better for building community.

This month, I’m going to share two such initiatives from opposite ends of the country.

Neighborhood Fruit

A single tree can sometimes produce hundreds of fruits or nuts. It’s overwhelming for a homeowner with multiple trees (especially if a whole bunch ripens at once), and much of the fruit goes to waste (making an unsightly and smelly mess in the process). California-based Neighborhood Fruit lets homeowners who are buried in the bounty from their fruit trees share the harvest with those who’d love more fresh, local produce. Scavengers pay a small fee; farmers earn credits that they can redeem for fruit, and can decide if they’ll pick and bag, or let their “customers” do it.

So far, 10,000 trees around the US are registered with the program. Oh yeah, you can also share zucchinis and other produce.

(My thanks to Steve Puma of Triple Pundit  for his article about this company)

Ride Buzz

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Jeff Brown formed Ride Buzz to do something similar with empty seats in cars: a clearinghouse of rides offered and needed, both ongoing and one-time. Jeff is quite the go-getter and not only went out and got 501(c)3 nonprofit tax exemption, he’s also formed numerous partnerships with area organizations (something I advocate very strongly in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First).

Among the many partnerships:

• Working with an area human service agency, Highland Valley Elder Services, to create more transportation opportunities for elderly people who can no longer drive but are able to remain at home if they can get around
• Obtaining endorsements for setting up internal ride sharing networks for three municipalities, several colleges and universities, and a number of private businesses
• Partnering with event organizers to promote ride sharing to events from folk festivals to conferences to retreats (including events as far away as Guam and as close as its hometown of Amherst
• RideBuzz coffee, roasted by the organic fairtrade coffee company Dean’s Beans and promoted to reduce greenhouse gases and build sustainability, with all profits donated to RideBuzz
• Organized a five-band concert to thank the town of Amherst, MA, the Amherst-Area Chamber of Commerce, and the University of Massachusetts Isenberg School of Management for their promotion of ridesharing (One UMass professor even integrated ride sharing into the curriculum, as a case study for students to communicate the social, environmental, and economic benefits of ridesharing to area residents.

Launched three years ago, the organization became a nonprofit corporation in September 2008, and received 501(c)3 status in June 2009.

While still heavily tilted toward its native region (the Connecticut River Valley in New England), the site is beginning to attract out-of-area users too. Brown says the infrastructure is able to be supported in 63 countries.

And how are you getting to your Thanksgiving dinner? Use RideBuzz and you may be able to share the cost and lower our collective carbon footprint by carpooling.

Another Recommended Book: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Of the dozen or so books I’ve read on Internet-based communities (and their application for marketing), Trust Agents stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. Normally when I review a book, I take a page of notes, maybe two. In the smallest handwriting I can still read, I had more than half a page by the time I got to the end of Chapter 1! By the time I was done, I had four full pages.

A generation younger than me and a generation older than those who grew up with computers from the womb on, Brogan and Smith bring insights from Read the rest of this entry »

Postal direct mail isn’t cheap, and if you only have a two percent response (considered pretty good, believe it or not), that means a mailing that costs you one dollar per envelope costs you fifty dollars per sale! A one percent response costs $100 per sale. Big ouch!

Here are a few ideas to bring down the costs of those mailings:

• Organize your own Val-Pak-style co-op—get a few other businesses to share the cost, and postage drops dramatically (hint: Your response rate will be much higher if the offers are related in some way, and the list is targeted—so, for instance, a florist, caterer, and DJ could mail together to a list of couples that registered for an upcoming bridal show)
• Use postcards instead of envelope-mailings, and give your URL prominently on the postcard (with a reason to visit)
• Let your own computer do some of the postal processing (sorting, bar-coding, etc.) and take advantage of postal discounts
• Enclose a flier when you’re mailing something else already (such as filling an order)
• Partner with others to enclose your fliers when they mail, and vice versa
• Trade lists with others who reach a similar customer profile

By the way, I have an extensive section on how to implement these and other postal mailing cost-savers in my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (which was a Finalist for Foreword magazine’s Book of the Year Award)

About the timing of this article

In October, 2008, I devoted this newsletter to thinking strategically about when to use postal direct mail—and I promised a part 2, on reducing direct-mail costs. And then I guess I forgot to look at my notes the following month. I never lack for ideas, so I went on and wrote about a bunch of other things. Today, I went to the archives and saw that Part 1 staring at me, with no Part 2. But I try to keep my promises, so here, a year later, is the long-awaited article.

Last month, we talked about the mindset to craft an effective pitch. Now, how to actually get in front of the journalists you want to cover you.

1. Use media query services that aggregate reporters’ requests for sources. There is no better way to get publicity than to hit a reporter who’s desperately looking for someone exactly like you in order to finish an article. I use HARO, PitchRate, ReportersSource and some others I can’t remember, none of which cost anything. In the past, I’ve also used ProfNet, which has a significant cost. I’ve had far and away the best success with HARO and ProfNet. Several of the media lead sources also post leads on Twitter. You’ll want to follow (in  alphabetical order) @helpareporter, @pitchrate, @ProfNet, and @reporterssource
2. Use social media sites to follow reporters on your beat, and build relationships (gently and without pressure); pitch only when you’ve established yourself as credible and your pitch is directly relevant to what they’re working on
3. Send a press release that’s NOT “I’ve written a book” but that focuses on the attitudes we discussed last month. Some sample headlines I’ve actually used for my clients:

• Pro-Anorexia Sites “Danger to Children,” Says Expert

• Moveable Historic Action Figures Awarded BEST CLASSIC TOY of 2009: Industry Newcomer’s First Release Joins Yo-Yo, Crayons, Other Long-time Favorites
• Teenage Partisan Who Fought the Nazis Lives to See Her Story Told—On Film and In Print
• Ethics Expert: As an Ethics Warrior, Spitzer Must Meet a Higher Standard (this was not for a client but a news tie-in for my own book, Principled Profit)

Of course, I go into much more detail in my seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers,and in several of my other marketing books too. Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First has a particularly nice section on building relationships with reporters.

Several months ago, I had Dee Boyle-Clapp, co-owner of Starlight Llama Bed & Breakfast in Florence, MA, as a guest on my radio show. Prior to the show, she sent me a marvelous list of the Green steps she and her husband have taken with the inn, and the list so inspired me that I put it in my Future Positive Power Spotlight file. Having just read Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (all about eating locally and minimizing environmental impact), I feel this is the perfect time to share it with you–in part as a tribute to Barbara, whose book doesn’t quite fit the criteria for reviewing in my column, but is extremely worth reading, and in part because it shows how much each of us can actually do to improve our environment, even here in cloudy, cold New England. I have both photovoltaic and hot water solar systems on my own roof, but unike Starlight Llama, we do remain connected to (and dependent on) the grid.

Here’s Dee:

We are Massachusetts’ first solar-powered, off the grid B&B.  Our house has never been grid-tied.

We serve gourmet vegetarian breakfasts using organic or locally grown products.  We feature vegetables, fruit and herbs grown in our own organic gardens and we serve eggs from our own free-range hens.

Wherever possible we use green and scent-free laundry and cleaning products.  We never use a dryer, which we feel wastes energy.

The house was built with wood taken from our own land and many found or recycled products including our large  4 x 8 ft windows in the greenhouse and diningroom.

We are commited to preservation and put 55 acres of our property into a conservation restriction, to help serve as a wildlife corridor for the region’s deer, bobcat, coyotes, moose, bear, fox and other animals.

Much of our heat is from our passive solar greenhouse (in the winter on sunny days we don’t need to turn on other heat sources).  Our home is also heated by wood cut, split, stacked by family members from our own land.

We heat our hot water via 3 systems: on-demand for the B&B rooms, and a blend of wood heated or solar heated water for the kitchen and the rest of the house

The B&B is located on a llama farm that uses integrated pest management to control ticks and bugs harmful to llamas.  Our guinea fowl and peacocks wander our property freely and together have reduced deer and dog ticks.

Our product choices are as low impact as possible.  Many of our bed sheets are made from bamboo.  We use cloth napkins at breakfast, and reusable cups in the rooms.

I knew bamboo could be used as a sustainable, regrowble building material, but didn’t know you could make bedsheets out of it!