Going paperless
Promotional materials, registration and confirmation all can be put on the web, reducing the amount of paper needed to run a conference. “We’ll send postcards with information instead of sending everybody big brochures,” Mebane says. “We still send those, but only to a select few, in a more targeted way.”
Other associations, including the Washington D.C.-based Solar Energy Industries Association, also view printed materials as a source of waste. “We don’t print out speakers’ presentations,” notes Noah Kaye, an SEIA spokesperson. “Instead, we keep them available for downloading off our conference website, and we print the programs on recycled paper.” The association is considering moving to an entirely paperless conference, Kaye adds, following the example set by Janee M. Pelletier, CMP, who engineered a paperless conference last year as director of meeting and convention logistics for the Rockville, Md.-based Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society.
Pelletier, now senior account manager for Annapolis, Md.-based Conference & Logistics Consultants, gave a presentation on paperless conferences at ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership’s Great Ideas Conference in Coronado, Calif., in February. “Our decision to go paperless was driven by the desire to give members access to the most current information in a format they could easily save, file and reference later,” she explains.
Reducing the conference’s environmental impact was a bonus. There were other unexpected benefits as well: Pelletier found that putting handouts up on the web drove traffic to the association’s website and helped attendees choose and prepare for sessions. Web-based evaluation kiosks replaced pen-and-paper evaluations, and Pelletier received responses from 30 percent of the 1,712 attendees, up from 5 percent the year before.
Pelletier was astounded by how much money she saved -- nearly $48,000, or approximately 8 percent of her annual conference budget. “We saved $25,000 in printing costs alone and more than $8,000 in freight,” she notes.
Transportation and energy
A popular way for associations to offset their greenhouse gas emissions is to purchase green tags (see box at right), which support renewable-energy projects such as wind farms that produce electricity with far fewer emissions than power plants that burn fossil-based fuels. The tags are an extra expense, but some planners convince clean energy producers to donate them.
Lakeland Electric, a utility based in Lakeland, Fla., donated green tags to offset emissions from tours and shuttle buses used at the American Solar Energy Society’s annual meeting, Solar 2006, held in July at the Adam’s Mark Denver.
All told, ASES bought or received donations for nearly $4,000 worth of green tags to offset the estimated 470,400 pounds of carbon dioxide released into the air as a result of attendee transportation or power used for the conference.
ASES and other associations, including Ceres, a Boston-based network of environmental organizations, investment funds and public interest groups, offer individual attendees the chance to buy discounted tags to offset their own travel, at little or no cost to the association. About 1,500 people voluntarily bought tags for last year’s ASES conference, reports Becky Campbell-Howe, earning a special sticker on their name tags and a mention in the conference program.
As an additional measure, ASES requests that its members carpool, coordinate flights and share cabs from the airport, or even share hotel rooms. Those suggestions not only encourage attendees to book within the block, but they also foster community, if for just a few attendees at a time. Between 50 and 60 people made such arrangements last year, Campbell-Howe says.