Showcase & Share Your Digital Forest When You Plant Trees

Regardless of the industry you are in, sustainability is surely a subject that is being discussed constantly. Businesses are looking for ways in which they can be more sustainable, choose sustainable options, and showcase their sustainable credentials.

I do not see myself as an expert in sustainability, so I cannot preach that everything we do as a business is fully eco-friendly.

Impact have always loved a branded promo item, from mouse mats and brochures, to coasters and printed pens. But we made the decision a few years ago that Impact Media would no longer produce anything that could not to recycled, or wasn’t made from sustainable sources or recycled material.

This was just one of several changes we made. Another way was to look at how we could offset the carbon the company uses for the websites we host and support, knowing that the internet contributes heavily to global CO2 emissions.

We decided to do this by planting trees. We plant 1 tree each month for every website we support, and we set ourselves a target to plant 10,000 trees.

Providing Accountability

Our 10k Tree Challenge as we call it kicked off in 2020, and we wanted a way of updating clients on our progress. We initially used a company called One Tree Planted and purchased each tree separately, downloaded a certificate for each tree, and manually updated our web page.

This was as time-consuming as it sounds, so it stalled our progress and heavily delayed our official launch.

When discussing our challenge with one of our SEO partner agencies, they suggested we take a look at Ecologi.

Make It Easy & Visual

Ecologi is the ultimate digital-savvy tree-planting service. They have created a way to be connected with teams around the world to physically plant the trees, but have also understood the need for accountability. Photos are taken and the location of the trees and all of this is fed into their digital platform.

Not Just Trees

Another bonus with Ecologi, is the ability to offset carbon for each of your team members and plant trees in the process. You get awarded an Ecologi Climate Positive Workforce certification badge to showcase on your website.

Content For Social & Extra Badges

There’s a host of badges to display too, which you receive after hitting key milestones. Just more ways of promoting your progress on collateral and social media.

Make It Easy

I bang on about making things easy constantly, and Ecologi is a great example of a company doing this. They provide an easy way for us to buy and plant trees and automatically create a link to share with our clients so they can see the work we’re doing.

The digital forest profile view automatically provides an update of key stats and shows an interactive view of the trees, their age, and their location.

You can even see the digital trees grow over time.

I cannot overstate my love for Ecologi. It ticks all our boxes for customer experience and accountability. We get our own page to share, and this saves our team from having to design and develop our own.

What’s To Swipe & Deploy?

So if you haven’t guessed already, today’s key takeaway is to take a look at Ecologi.

This is not a sales pitch, but many businesses are looking for ways in which they can do their part and deliver a way of sharing their progress with their customers.

Time and cost are always key issues with these projects, and Ecologi provides a low-cost platform to get you started. Everything is designed and produced to save you time and expense. Your boss will find it far harder to say no to an all-inclusive solution like this.

You can share your progress via a link to your forest (here’s our page) and can share links to specific trees or batches of trees. If you want to dedicate trees to customers, you can do this by naming a single tree or a batch for them.

Next Level Integration With Their API

For e-commerce brands or online booking platforms, Ecologi has an API that can be accessed so that every ticket that is sold can be connected with their platform to plant a tree automatically, so once again cutting out the friction that usually holds back projects like this.

Displaying how many trees you’ve planted via a widget on your website and keeping it up-to-date automatically can be easily implemented.

Gamification For Additional Excitement

If that wasn’t enough they provide a business leaderboard, so you can compete with other businesses to appear on their top 100 list. Some CEOs might want to boost their egos by buying a larger number of trees to get started and start creeping up the board.

Summarising

There are many providers that enable businesses to plant trees, but I don’t feel that anyone delivers a digital experience quite like the team at Ecologi do.

So if you’re looking for a solution, certainly take a look at what they can offer.

Oh, and if you want to help support our 10k tree challenge, if you sign up using the link here, we’ll both get 30 trees planted for free and they’ll be ‘sparkly’ ones. Yet another great bit of marketing spin.

We’ve planted 9,152 trees already and have nearly reached our 10,000 target, which is amazing for just under 2 years.

What do you think our next target should be?

That’s a wrap for Swipe & Deploy #28. Join me next week when I’ll share another insight or piece of inspiration from around the web.