Vancouver Carrotmob Makes a Splash!

The Carrotmob Crew (left to right) - Omar, Ronda, Robbyn, Mickey, Josh, Banks, Charles, and Emily. Photo Credit: Jason Vanderhill (jmv on Flickr)

The results are in! Carrotmob Vancouver was a big success!

TOTAL REVENUE = $1632.78 + 10% = $1796.06

That is about a 60% increase in revenue compared to an average Sunday!

Not only did the Carrotmob generate a great bundle of capital for Salt Spring Coffee to use to improve their energy efficiency, the event also generated substantial news and social media coverage for Salt Spring Coffee. Carrotmob organizers recently wrote on their blog,

“Leading up to the Carrotmob we got some great coverage from The Courier, CTV, CBC Radio, the Epoch Times, and some awesome local blogs including Granville Online, East of Main, and Darren Barefoot. Two of our lovely sponsors, Kiwano Marketing and TheChange poured their hearts into getting the Carrotmob word out through their blogs and tweets. Of course, we can’t forget all our Facebook Group members who came out to join in the fun!” … read more.

Photo Credit: Jason Vanderhill (jmv on Flickr)

We were really pleased to work with the Carrotmob group as their sustainability partner, and we look forward to working with them again in the future! Our role was to work with business during the bidding process to propose ideas on how they could improve their environmental footprint with the money they could generate through the Carrotmob. Recently I spoke with Granville Online blogger, Kristen Gladiuk.

Photo credit: Charles Tremewen

“It was great to see how positive and enthusisastic the response from the owners was—even from those who hadn’t previously thought a lot about the changes their business could make,” said Jubenvill of the Vancouver Carrotmob candidates…. read more.

We will continue to work with Vancouver Carrotmob as they wrap up their first “mob” by helping them determine what carbon emissions savings Salt Spring Coffee will be achieving with their upgrades and retrofits.

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Carrotmob Vancouver is a consumer collective that works with and rewards businesses that take active steps to reduce their environmental impact and increase their social capital within their communities. Find them at www.vancouver.carrotmob.org, on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter.

Drink Coffee! Save The World!

Carrotmob Vancouver Lines Up Awesome Prizes!

Did you read the article about the Carrotmob in the Vancouver Courier today? Jeremy Shepard wrote a great article about the group and what they’ve been up to, including an interview with Carrotmob Vancouver founder, Omar Mutashar.

“Omar Mutashar, the founder of the Vancouver branch of Carrotmob, hopes the first swarming of a local store May 16 will attract at least 200 extra customers to Salt Spring Coffee on Main Street. The Carrotmobbers plan to patronize the store near Main and 27th Avenue between 11 a.m. to 2 p.m”….read more.

Omar also made it clear that this may be the first Vancouver Carrotmob, but it won’t be the last! Judging by the response that they’ve received from community members and other green-minded businesses and organizations, there is a lot of support for this event.

With an AMAZING line-up of PRIZES, the Carrotmob is sure to please everyone that shows up to participate in the Carrotmob between 11:00am – 2:00pm! Here’s a sneak peak of some of the prizes you could win:

Designer Reusable Bags from Lavish&Lime

Envirosax designer reusable bags from Lavish&Lime - selling eco-friendly, natural/non-toxic, and Canadian made products!

3 Pairs of Tickets to EPIC !

The Vancouver Sun Sustainable Living Expo is Western Canada's largest sustainable consumer tradeshow and eco-marketplace!

Eco-homewares from Dream Designs

Hemp napkin & placemat set, organic flxseed eye pillows, and lavender dryer bags to add some eco-luxury to your life.

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The Carrotmob is just eleven days away! How exciting!

Do you want to help?

1) Email, tweet, and Facebook message, phone, or even TALK to your friends to invite them to the Carrotmob at Salt Spring Coffee on Sunday, May 16th!

2) If you haven’t already, join the Facebook Group and RSVP to the event!

3) Get ready – make signs, and carrot costumes! An event for this will be posted to Facebook soon!

4) Are you a musician, juggler, fire dancer, or other sort of amazing entertainer? Want to show off your skills at the Carrotmob?! Contact carrotmob.bc [at] gmail.com

Carrotmob Date Announced – May 16th

We’re happy to announce that Carrotmob Vancouver will be happening on Sunday May 16th at Salt Spring Coffee located at 4295 Main Street, Vancouver.

This event is going to exciting with live entertainment, tasty beverages, and

110%

of revenues from the day going towards improving the energy efficiency of the Salt Spring Coffee Shop.

Carrotmob Vancouver Winner – Salt Spring Coffee

It’s been a whirlwind week of voting! A big thank-you to all the coffee shops that participated in this Carrotmob! The bids on the table were excellent, and I hope that each of the coffee shops finds new ways to engage and inspire their customers to support their sustainability initiatives.  It would be great to see each of the ideas presented in the video interviews happen!

Thank-you Voters! It was tough choice between so many excellent ideas and bids, so we appreciate the time you took to share your opinion.

The Vancouver Carrotmob Winner is…..

Salt Spring Coffee

For the curious at heart, the votes were distributed as follows:

Stay tuned because we will be releasing the details on WHEN the Carrotmob will be held soon! In the meantime, tell your friends about Vancouver Carrotmob, and get them to join the Facebook group!

Carrotmob & Small Feet Inc in Globe & Mail

A Little Mob Money Can Nudge Business to Help Save the Earth

If you missed it, Carrotmob Victoria and Vancouver and Small Feet Inc were mentioned in an article in The Globe And Mail today on the great success of the Toronto Carrotmob last week!

“Last fall, Discovery Coffee in Victoria was the first to get “carroted” in Canada. It spent the $3,000 it received on improving its waste-disposal system and now recycles 95 per cent of its waste. Victoria’s Wannawafel was mobbed last month, and the entire $2,135 it got was committed to improving waste management. The Vancouver Carrotmob is in the midst of voting for which Main Street coffee shop will get mobbed and there are plans for a mob in Halifax this summer.

Joshua Schmidt of Small Feet Inc., a company that helps businesses go green and is one of the Victoria organizers, sees the attraction in the direct local impact. “It has to have that very strong local focus for a community to take on and to take ownership over… read more.”

It’s really exciting to see the momentum growing around Carrotmobs, and the power that small businesses do have to make a change and reduce their environmental impact. It’s obvious that consumers are on board and happy to get involved and organized to make it happen!

“The benefits of the new mob mentality aren’t lost on business owners. Mr. Gyaltsan of G’s Fine Foods had bid against four other businesses in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood that Mr. Koenig and friends had canvassed. He specifically promised he would commit all of the revenue from 12 to 4 p.m. toward energy-efficiency improvements. But after witnessing the event’s success – it was the largest North American Carrotmob to date – he decided to use the entire day’s earnings for the renovations, which will be determined in the coming weeks with the non-profit consultants Windfall Ecology Centre… read more.“

Congratulations Carrotmob Toronto! We hope to have a turn-out like yours (or better!) in Vancouver next month!

Vote for Carrotmob Vancouver Winner!

Bidding has closed, and voting begins. Carrotmob Vancouver wants to know who YOU think should win “the mob”! All of the participating coffee shops have made excellent bids, but these video clips will help you decide who should be the final winner. We’ve asked each coffee shop representative to tell us about what they already do to be socially and environmentally conscious, and what they would like to do with the money if they win. This is where it gets interesting, and you get the opportunity to support the coffee shop that you think is making the biggest commitment to reducing their environmental impact.

Watch and share the interviews on our YouTube channel or here:

Waves Coffee – Upgrade to Energy Efficient Lighting, Water Efficient Toilets/Faucets, Refrigeration Seals

Java-Licious – Carrotmobber’s Input & Waste Reduction

Gene Coffee Bar – Upgrade to Water Efficient Toilets

Salt Spring Coffee – Upgrade to Energy Efficient Lighting

Re-Entry Espresso – Reusable Cup Exchange

VOTE NOW FOR WHO YOU THINK SHOULD WIN THE CARROTMOB!

Carrotmob Has Come to Vancouver

Carrotmob arrives!

After incredible success in Victoria, Small Feet Inc has joined forces with Carrotmob Vancouver as official Sustainability Partner. Discovery Coffee and Wannawafle won Victoria’s 2009 and 2010 Carrotmobs – generating an increase in revenue of up to 327%, and spurring awesome energy efficiency and waste reduction initiatives in each businesses.  As Sustainability Partner, Small Feet has played a role in helping organize the Carrotmobs, and also provided resources to each participating businesses on what they could do with the Carrotmob winnings to reduce their environmental impact. Small Feet’s expertise in small business solutions to climate change and sustainability has proven to be very helpful for participating businesses.

Not quite sure what a Carrotmob is? This article summed it up well,

“What if consumers could consciously put all their money towards a good cause? What kind of change would we see from a “reverse boycott” where instead of avoiding businesses with bad practices, consumers good choose those with good ones? That’s the goal of Carrotmob, a “method of activism that leverages consumer power to make the most socially-responsible business practices also the most profitable choices.” First held in San Francisco, Carrotmobs have popped up all over the world… read more.“

Small Feet Inc’s third partner, Emily, has recently returned to Vancouver from nearly a year living abroad, and she jumped at the opportunity to get involved with Carrotmob Vancouver. Emily and Carrotmob Vancouver’s founder, Omer, have been hitting the sidewalks of Main Street to enlist coffee shops to join Vancouver’s first offical Carrotmob (Emily organized a very similar event way back in ’08).

We’re excited to announce the overwhelming support and enthusiasm of Main Street coffee shops for the Carrotmob. The quality of the bids is truly inspiring, and we can’t wait for the video interviews with each coffee shop owner to be revealed later this week! We’ve got a sneak peak at what sort of percentages of revenues have been committed already here:

Java-Licious – 110%

Salt Spring Coffee – 110%

Re-Entry Coffee – 110%

Gene Cafe – 100%

Waves Coffee – 90%

Vancouver Carrotmob is not employing the “highest bidder takes all” mentality in this competition. Instead, each cafe will do a video that briefly outlines what they would do with the money if they won the Carrotmob. The idea is that how much money is committed is just as important as WHAT the cafe intends to do with that money! On that train of thought, getting all the Mobbers to VOTE for which coffee shop has the coolest/bestest/biggest impact plan is just as important as recognizing the businesses that are willing to commit the highest percentage of revenue to reducing their footprint.

Later this week, you’ll be given the chance to vote for who you think should win the Carrotmob! In the meantime, you can sign up for email updates, join the Facebook group, or send us some tweet love @CarrotmobBC.

Small Business Sustainability: Still Uncharted Territory

Whenever a business takes that first noble step to “go green,” they invariably enter a world of complex trade-offs that extend far beyond traditional cost-benefit analyses.

• How do we identify the emerging sustainability issues in our business sector and prioritize the wide range of strategies available to address them?
• How do we reduce our environmental impact in a meaningful way; and how is this progress measured?
• If a “silver-bullet” solution is currently unavailable or cost-prohibitive, do we find an interim option or wait it out?
  

These are just a few of the questions that businesses need to take a hard look at when charting their course. What’s clear is that one size does not fit all when it comes to sustainability strategy for small-medium businesses, and this is a big reason behind why we established Small Feet. Having a trained eye on board is, in our experience, critical for navigating the emerging values-based economy in a way that yields positive results for you and your stakeholders.

And this is perhaps the most important point – the realization that sustainability is a journey and not a destination. A strong commitment to continual improvement, tempered with a healthy dose of transparency, is the best way to build long term momentum and avoid greenwashing, perceived or otherwise.

I recently came across an intriguing local example which illustrates this point. Ethical Bean Coffee Company is a progressive Vancouver-based provider of 100% Fair Trade Certified and certified organic shade grown coffees. These guys are the real deal – they walk the walk and offer impressive access to information through their website and social media channels. A few weeks ago I received a tweet stating that you can now drop off empty Ethical Bean coffee bags to be recycled. “Great news!” thought this eco-minded consumer… But alas, a few hours later I received word that these bags are actually being shipped to a waste-to-energy incineration facility… not exactly recycling.

The ensuing onslaught by waste-to-energy critics, largely through comments on a Scout Magazine article, was enthralling to say the least. Some interesting alternatives were suggested, but much of the feedback was both negative and unsubstantiated (common on the web), with some going so far as to suggest they would no longer support the brand. Ethical Bean quickly refined their messaging and addressed all concerns in a prompt, transparent and open-minded fashion. You can never please everyone all the time, but I tip my hat to the folks at Ethical Bean for coming out to constructively discuss their thought process behind offering this new waste disposal option. While time consuming and rarely pleasant, damage control is often necessary when you choose the progressive high-road and I suspect Ethical Bean learned many valuable lessons to help better execute their future green initiatives.

I bring this up not to debate the pros and cons of waste-to-energy (in my opinion the technology is largely proven and much safer than most critics care to understand), but to highlight the very real risks and opportunities for small-medium businesses leading the green movement. The value of due diligence, accurate messaging and corporate transparency when making sustainability choices cannot be stressed enough.

It is similarly important to recognize that corporate sustainability is still in its infancy. There are many lessons to learn and, for most business owners, keeping the lights on and putting out fires already keeps them busy 8 days a week. We truly look forward to the day when all businesses account for their environmental and social impact as a matter of general in-house practice, similar to how financial accounting is currently handled. However, until businesses have built enough capacity to fully understand, optimize and communicate their impact, we’re here to help bridge the gap.

Kyle Taylor is a Principal at Small Feet Inc., a BC-based consultancy providing environmental assessments, custom sustainability solutions, and communication services to small-medium businesses, organizations and non-profits. Visit them at www.smallfeet.ca.

Carrotmob Interview on CBC – On the Island

On the Friday of the Wannawafel Carrotmob, Josh was interviewed on CBC’s On The Island. We’ve got the interview recorded here if you’re interested in hearing what Josh had to say on the morning of Victoria’s most successful Carrotmob ever!

Click Here to Listen!