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Brief
The 2009 budget made a commitment to cut carbon emissions by 34% by 2020. According to the Energy Savings Trust £8 billion of energy is wasted each year in the UK and that the average home could save £300 per year, which translates to £125 for every man, woman, and child; or a total of 1.5 tonnes of CO2.
In order to decrease energy consumption, mass education is needed across the country. The most efficient way to do this is through teachers. Teachers have a high through put of children each year and these children can help to educate the parents.
Generation Green is a an online schools programme, providing educational content and support linked to the curriculum which encourages Schools and individual pupils to undertake environmentally beneficial activities and changes in behaviour in exchange for leaves which can then be redeemed against a range of environmental incentives from seeds to windturbines. The programme was originally launched in 2008 and Crayon was appointed in 2009 to drive the programme forward into new areas.
Despite being the greenest energy supplier in the UK this was not yet being recognised by consumers with British Gas ranking only 3rd amongst energy providers in the UK. [Source: British Gas own research.] British Gas wanted a long-term strategy to encourage greener behaviour amongst customers and non customers and to be recognised for its role at the forefront of sustainable energy promotion in the UK.
Four key objectives for the programme include:
• To enhance British Gas’ green credentials
• To help schools and consumers become more energy efficient
• To improve customer retention
• To build overall affinity with the British Gas brand
How do you change consumer’s habits towards energy, increase greener behaviour and in turn encourage people to become more energy efficient? Secondly, how do you increase retention, as well as enhance green credentials? The answer was that the programme needed to be:
1. Cost effective (we wanted to communicate with the whole of the UK)
2. Provide a test bed for ATL communications
3. Allow for speed of delivery (When we say want an action to happen we wanted to generate a rapid response)
4. We wanted to ‘act’ on our green attributes by minimising the use of paper
5. Wanted a programme that was scalable (we want to be able to talk to different audiences, adding more as the programme grows)
Strategy
Insight
Teachers are more aware of environmental issues than other adults, and in turn they encourage learners to be more aware. However, 80% of teachers say they struggle to decide which sustainable initiative to choose. The Generation Green programme is a direct response to this. [Source: Schooolzone Study 2009; Dubit/British Gas poll October 2009.]
Teachers have the ability to influence a continual stream of eager minds every year and these children in turn can influence the home as well as become green brand advocates in the future. British Gas is the brand of choice for the 16-24 yr old market (Mintel 2009).
We found that 13% of lessons currently address green issues, and children want this to double. Meanwhile 74% of children think being taught simple ways to stop damaging the environment is the best way to reach targets set at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. [Source: Schoolzone study, 2009; Dubit/British Gas poll October 2009)
Execution
Generation Green is a green hub where teachers and children can interact digitally; to also allows for scalability in the future to include parents. The Generation Green website has two core components:
1. A Teacher’s Area: Where teachers select and download items from a bank of specially produced free lesson plan resources for primary and secondary schools. These plans have been produced for British Gas by educational experts and integrate within the National Curriculum. Within this teachers area there is a reward programme, whereby registered schools earn “Leaves” for participating in Generation Green. For example, a school can earn 100 Leaves for recycling old plastics and glass, or 20 Leaves for recycling a print cartridge. Leaves are also earned for downloading and using the lesson plans.
Once the school has earned sufficient “Leaves” it can redeem them for sustainable rewards.
All of this is supported by triggered and campaign based e-CRM communications, starting from double opt-in communications to ensure deliverability and data correctness, through to getting teachers on the ladder of performing green tasks. Example tasks include, assigning a light monitor in schools through to tasks in the children’s homes by getting parents to complete an Energy Savers Report, which gives parents a tailored breakdown of how they could save money as well as CO2 emissions (based on their answers). There are also multiple event triggers, for instance, teachers that have hit their leaf target are sent an email encouraging the redemption of rewards from the online catalogue. The program is constantly talking about new activities and communicating to teachers about new content.
2. A Kids Zone Area: Where kids can engage with green activity’s and games as well as win prizes. To cater for different age groups, the game zone content and game score leader boards are split between the ages of 7-10, 11-16 and 17.
Together these elements promote environmental awareness, incentivise green behaviour, and bring together schools, children, their families and their community for the greater good.
An example of how well the teacher content and the full programme works has been through the implementation of ‘Our Planet Our Say’, which is a Think Tank of 22 enthusiastic green-minded children who were brought together to set out and green-up the UK and their communities.
Our Think Tankers throughout 2009 put their heads together for three workshops to learn green stuff and bring their own eco-ideas to the table. With help from eco-experts like Julia Hailes, they’ve recently created a Green Manifesto to form the green voice of the youth. They have even taken these ideas in their Manifesto to Downing Street!
The 6 key Green Manifesto ideas taken to parliament:
• All UK schools to set clear goals to cut their carbon and to be able to see how much energy they are using, so they can work with their teachers to find ways to cut down
• Green issues to become a part of every lesson on the school timetable and for teachers to be given more training and support to help them do this
• All schools to be given Government funding for green energy, in the same way as schools are given funding for books and other essentials
• A ban on the standby button – stopping manufacturers from making electrical items with standby buttons
• Government to make it easier for people to recycle by putting more recycling bins in public places like parks, city centres and restaurants
• Government to make it easier for local businesses to recycle their waste
To gain more momentum of these ideas and gather pledges of support from other children and schools across the UK, we emailed 8.5k teachers , where we asked them to download the pledge form, complete it and then submit their pledges of support (via email, fax or post). We also ran a competition for the children to design the front cover of the ‘pledge’ booklet that we were taking to Parliament.
Within 2 weeks we had outstanding 1,700 signatures and 30 designs for the Pledge booklet. This is a response rate of 20%, which way outshines any e-CRM benchmark %!
Results
• So far 28,252 schools have earned leaves, this has a potential to impact 3,925,179 children with the programme benefits and educational materials.
• In total over 47 million leaves have been awarded
• And, over 5.5 million leaves have been redeemed against rewards (almost .5 million by special needs schools that have benefited with rewards)
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