Nonprofits help with world in more ways than one

by Julie Cook

February 11th, 2008 in Community, Environment, News & Info

If your company employs environmentally friendly practices, then you know “being green” isn’t always easy. In fact, sometimes it can be downright hard.

Perhaps no one knows this better than environmental nonprofit organizations. They find themselves in an unusually sticky situation: In order to promote their environmentally friendly message, they must attract donors and keep current supporters happy. Yet, to do this, they must employ methods — a la marketing — that hurt the environment. The method most often used, direct mail, requires the use of paper, ink, and energy — which entails the use of petroleum-based goods and nonrenewable resources and cutting down trees.

What’s a company to do? One thing they are not doing is shying away from direct mail. Instead, environmental advocacy groups market in the least-harmful ways possible.

The Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ) reduces the negative impact of its direct mail campaigns by minimizing chemical pollution, which it accomplishes with chlorine-free paper. The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit that protects ecologically important bodies of water, minimizes its environmental effect by employing paper products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. The Council guarantees the wood came from a certified, well-managed forest, which means the company that provided it complied with 10 principles and 57 criteria addressing various factors from legal issues to labor rights.

To do its part, the Center for Resource Solutions (CRS) quit offering paper copies of its annual report; it offers a CD version instead. The company further reduced its impact by employing glue-free CD packaging.

Along with using environmentally friendly paper, environmental advocacy groups like CHEJ — a non-profit that teaches individuals about the downsides of chemicals and supports local chemical cleanup crews — advocate the following techniques in reducing the negative impact of direct marketing:

• Use soy-based ink products
• Print marketing materials on both sides of the paper
• Choose vendors that use renewable energy
• Keeping mailing lists up-to-date
• Offer customers the option of receiving information online instead of in print

Environmental advocacy groups aren’t perfect; they must use direct mail for marketing, even if its means negatively impacting the environment. But these groups have found a delicate balance between conservation and marketing, discovering several ways to minimize that impact. And in doing so, they have enabled other companies to do the same.