residence hall energy challenges
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Would appreciate suggestions for best practices re: promotion when holding residence hall energy challenges. We are interested in learning how you promoted the challenge to campus residents, specifically, outreach activities and conservation suggestions. What was most successful?
Getting people to participate in big numbers is easy when you understand how to identify and empower the "eco-enthusiasts" that can be found in every dorm, in every classroom and on every campus. They are literally just waiting there for you to give them an excuse, an opportunity and a context within which to go wild advocating environmental responsibility to everyone around them. It's what they want to do, but peer pressure or social norms hold them back. When I was at Duke, we figured out how to find and enable those eco-enthusiasts. It made all the difference in the world. One of the segments on the video website Julian linked to describes our method. Here's the link to get directly to that video:
http://www2.aashe.org/competitions/video-player?video=Advertising.wmv
Good luck with your event!
-Sam Hummel
IT Team
AASHE
Sam, I second your suggestion to find an "eco-enthusiast" or "energy conservation champion" to help encourage his/her peers. One of our clients ran a short energy conservation competition between two floors of his office building, and he also stated that identifying the energy champions and creating a "Green Team" was one of the keys to reducing energy. Other keys included using prompts (email prompts as well as signs in the office), getting some sort of commitment from the participants before they started, trying to make energy saving as convenient as possible through minor improvements to office layout and infrastructure, and making sure the participants were getting feedback on their actions. I think a lot of the lessons he learned in an office environment could transfer to a campus as well; the AASHE bulletin from May 17th has a link to the webinar where he presented the findings of his occupant engagement experiment: http://www2.aashe.org/archives/2010/0517.php#39
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Hi Lindsey,
In case you haven't already come across these resources already, AASHE has a Dorm vs Dorm Sustainability Competitions site and the student research database has a report called Organizing Residence Hall Conservation Competitions: A Guide for Students (pdf).
I hope these are useful!
Julian
Julian Dautremont-Smith
MBA/MS Candidate, Class of 2012
Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise
Stephen M. Ross School of Business | School of Natural Resources & Environment
University of Michigan
http://www.linkedin.com/in/juliands